Nithin Kamath & Nikhil Kamath on Crisis Management

In a fifteen-year retrospective, Kamath reports that risks he had been flagging since 2021 finally materialised: an increase in securities transaction tax on options, the removal of exchange transaction-charge rebates, a reduction in weekly expiries, and a broad decline in market activity hit the firm together, contributing to an approximately forty-percent drop in broking revenues for the year.

The regulatory tightening he describes — STT on options, fewer weekly expiries, the end of exchange rebates — represents a coordinated policy push to cool speculative retail derivatives trading in India, and Zerodha's disclosure that it absorbed a material revenue drop is itself a window into how exposed discount brokers are to incremental changes in the market microstructure regime.

The post's tone is reflective rather than defensive: he closes with the Chinese curse about living in interesting times, signalling that the firm intends to treat the regulatory shift as a permanent new environment to operate in, not a transient shock to be waited out.