Introducing In The Money by Zerodha

Trading insights, frameworks, and reality checks

The Indian stock market has never been more mainstream than it is today. The post-pandemic explosion of interest has been nothing short of spectacular, bringing a dramatic influx of new traders into the market. That's a good thing.

However, a lot of newcomers think trading is incredibly easy, and many believe that they can get rich overnight from trading. As Nithin often says:

The stock market is probably the toughest place in the world to make easy money, especially in the long run.

That always holds. Despite endless statistics showing how difficult trading is, people convince themselves they'll be the exceptions until they learn the hard truths the hard way.

Losing a few thousand rupees when you are 25 to learn the reality of trading is better than blowing up your savings at 35 when you’ve got bills to pay. Mistakes are part of the process. Sometimes our hardest lessons come from actually making mistakes rather than just reading about them—that's just fundamental human nature, and we don't think anything will change that.

From the very beginning of Zerodha, educating users has been core to what we do, and we’ve done this through Varsity, Varsity Live, Z-Connect, TradingQ&A, Markets by Zerodha, Zero1, and many collaborations.

The goal has always been not to tell people what to buy and sell, but rather to teach them how to think about the very act of buying and selling. That old line about fishing applies here:

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime

Educating people about the markets is something we take seriously. We've never resorted to cheap gimmicks or shoddy content when it comes to financial education because we're deeply passionate about helping people make better decisions.

But the issue is that from about 2018 onward, and especially in this post-COVID period, there's been a spectacular increase in the number of so-called "finfluencers" in the stock market. A lot of these people aren't just unethical—they're downright frauds who thrive on peddling courses, seminars, books, and all manner of "trading secrets" that supposedly make people rich.

What they're essentially doing is selling greed by setting completely wrong expectations, like making 5% a month. Just as a footnote: not even Jim Simons makes 5% a month consistently, but that's beside the point.

There's a whole industry of shady actors with massive followings who build these courses and set the wrong expectations. Just take a cursory look at SEBI's enforcement orders section, and you can see numerous cautionary tales about these fraudulent influencers.

This has become a huge problem in the Indian markets because these people attract newbies by setting wrong expectations. In some cases, people don't just lose some money; they get taken for a complete ride and lose their entire life savings.

Introducing In The Money by Zerodha

Zerodha Varsity has pretty much everything you need to know about any aspect of the stock market. But there was one area where we hadn't done much: a trading-specific channel where we talk about what's happening in the markets—not just trading concepts, which Varsity has already well covered.

That's why we're starting this new YouTube channel and newsletter called In The Money by Zerodha. The goal is to continuously track the markets, analyze them, and help you make sense of all the madness. In doing so, we also want to educate people about the reality of trading and the complexity involved.

We're launching two main series:

The first is a weekly show called The Long and the Short, where we do two things: one, we bridge the gap between theory and practice in trading; and two, week after week, we break down market developments, share data-driven insights, and provide simple yet powerful frameworks to help you think more clearly about your trades and strategies going forward.

The second series is an educational series where we're trying to debunk all the nonsense being peddled by fraudulent actors in the stock market.

We’ll be clear: the goal with this channel is not to give you tips or tell you what to trade. Rather, it's to help you make sense of the market and, crucially, help you avoid obvious mistakes because losing money is much easier than making money.

For this initiative, we’re collaborating with Sandeep Rao—a market veteran with over two decades of experience, and he's also a SEBI-registered research analyst. He has spent years thinking, writing, and speaking about trading and active investing; he brings deep expertise and a balanced perspective to this space.

We need your help (seriously).

Here's the thing—we still don't have a completely clear idea of what this channel should become or exactly what we should do. Ultimately, this channel is only as good as the value you get out of it.

That means we genuinely want to know your feedback, suggestions, ideas, and thoughts. We need your help in shaping this into something useful that you actually get value from.

Unlike other people who casually say "please leave a comment," we're actually saying it and meaning it. We go and read and reply to each and every comment, whether it's here on Substack or on YouTube.

So please, please, please—give us all your thoughts. This is your chance to help build something that actually serves the trading community the right way.

What topics would you like us to cover? What kind of market analysis would be most helpful? What trading myths need debunking? Let us know in the comments below.