Shoutout
This post is a remix of The Professional Trader, written in 2013 by NBBO2OBBN on the hacking NASDAQ @ 500 FPS blog. Same question, same kind of arithmetic, new country and a new decade.
A professional trader is someone who pays their bills from the market. A good month doesn't count. The rent, the groceries and the EMI have to come out of it every month, including the bad ones.
That sounds like a fair definition until you try to price it. How many trades does it take to replace a salary? The 2013 post ran that sum for a US computer science graduate. I wanted the Indian version, with a benchmark closer to home: the average IIT Roorkee placement. Same division, different numbers.
Short version. The salary turns out to be a tiny amount per share and a huge number of trades, and the charges eat most of what those trades earn.
§ 1 The Benchmark
Start with the salary. The latest reported average CTC for IIT Roorkee B.Tech graduates, from the 2024-25 season, is ₹24.96 LPA. I'll round it to ₹25 LPA. Divide by the number of trading days in a year, about 250, and you get what one day of that salary is worth:
T is the profit you need to keep on each trading day and D is the number of trading days. It also works out to about ₹2.08 lakh a month and ₹50,000 a week.
Two caveats. CTC is not what lands in your account, and I have not touched tax anywhere in this post. And an average gets dragged up by a handful of very large offers. The NIRF 2026 median for the 4-year UG batch is ₹18 LPA, so treat ₹25 LPA as the generous benchmark. Every trade count below scales in proportion to the target, so you can swap in your own number.
§ 2 One Day, Spread Over Shares
If you trade q shares in a day, the net profit you need on each one is
Here is that for a few values of q.
| Shares traded a day | Net profit needed per share |
|---|---|
| 1 | ₹10,000 |
| 10 | ₹1,000 |
| 100 | ₹100 |
| 1,000 | ₹10 |
| 10,000 | ₹1 |
| 1 lakh | 10 paise |
I'll stay on the 10,000 share row. A rupee a share sounds very doable on paper. Then the charges show up.
§ 3 The Charges
Say the stock costs ₹500. On the NSE a stock in that price range moves in steps of 5 paise. You buy 200 shares (₹1 lakh) and sell them the same day. I ran that trade through Zerodha's brokerage calculator to get the actual charges rather than guess at them. It's a good free tool if you want to try your own price and quantity. Here is the round trip:
| Charge | Rate | Rupees |
|---|---|---|
| Brokerage | ₹20 an order, two orders | 40.00 |
| STT | 0.025% of the sell side | 25.00 |
| Exchange transaction charge | NSE, 0.00307% of turnover | 6.14 |
| SEBI charges | ₹10 per crore of turnover | 0.20 |
| Stamp duty | 0.003% of the buy side | 3.00 |
| GST | 18% of brokerage, SEBI and transaction charges | 8.34 |
| Total per round trip | 82.68 | |
| Per share | ₹82.68 / 200 shares | 0.413 |
One tick on this stock is 5 paise, so c is a little over eight ticks.
Charges shift a little between brokers, but the size is what matters. Eight ticks are gone before you earn a rupee.
§ 4 A Realistic Hit Rate
The 2013 post gave its trader a 60% hit rate, so I'll do the same. Sixty percent of trades win, 40% lose, and each one moves w rupees a share either way. Take w = ₹3, which is a 0.6% move on a ₹500 stock. Averaging over winners and losers, the expected gross profit per share is
g is the gross profit per share and h is the hit rate. A 60% hit rate with equal sized wins and losses leaves you a fifth of one move.
Now take out the charges:
You keep about 19 paise a share. To keep ₹10,000 a day at that rate, you need far more than 10,000 shares:
That is 53,476 shares, not 10,000. In trades of 200 shares it comes to 267 round trips a day.
§ 5 How Often You Would Have to Trade
The cash market runs 9:15 to 3:30, which is 6 hours 15 minutes, or 22,500 seconds. Spread 267 round trips across that and you get a round trip every 84 seconds. Each round trip is an entry and an exit, so the gap that matters is between orders:
S is the length of the session in seconds.
An order about every 42 seconds, all session, at a 60% hit rate, for 250 days. Here is one day on a single sheet.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Shares traded | 53,476 |
| Round trips of 200 shares | 267 |
| Gross profit at ₹0.60 a share | ₹32,086 |
| Charges at ₹82.68 a round trip | (₹22,076) |
| Net for the day | ≈ ₹10,000 |
Charges take 69% of what you earn. The job pays that ₹10,000 for a normal day of work. The market wants 267 round trips for it, and I haven't even touched tax.
The ₹3 move is doing a lot of the work here. Shrink it and the picture turns ugly quickly. Net per share is (2h − 1)w − c, which hits zero at a break-even move w*, and the trades you need blow up as w gets close to it:
200 is the number of shares per trade. Below w*, the edge does not cover the charges and no amount of volume fixes it.
Figure 1. Round trips a day needed to net ₹10,000 at a 60% hit rate, by the size of each win and loss. The curve blows up at the break-even move of ₹2.07.
Worth a pause
A 60% hit rate sounds like a real edge. On a ₹500 stock with these charges it only pays once each win and loss is bigger than ₹2.07, which is about 0.41% of the price. Below that line you are paying for the privilege of being right most of the time.
§ 6 What SEBI Found
That was cash stocks and a tidy hit rate. Derivatives are rougher, and SEBI has counted. Its FY26 study of individual traders in equity F&O found:
| Measure | FY26 |
|---|---|
| Individual F&O traders who lost money | 87.7% |
| Traders under 30 who lost money | 88.5% |
| Net loss of individual traders, in total | ₹91,685 crore |
| Average loss per trader | ₹1.17 lakh |
The average loss is about twelve days of the ₹10,000 target we started with. On top of that, since 1 April 2026 STT on futures has gone from 0.02% to 0.05%, and STT on option premium from 0.10% to 0.15%. That pushes the break-even move up for anyone scalping derivatives. The game got pricier.