Why I Stopped Watching My Uncle’s F&O Screenshots

Every Friday my uncle posts a winning options trade in the family WhatsApp group. It took me a year to notice he never posts Monday to Thursday.

The screenshot problem

My uncle trades options on the Nifty, mostly on expiry days, and when a trade goes well he shares the profit screen with the family. ₹14,000 in an afternoon looks impressive to a Class 11 student. For a while I wanted to learn how to do it, and I started reading about derivatives to understand what he was buying.

The reading changed my mind. An option is a contract that gains or loses value depending on where the market goes before a fixed date. Most options bought by small traders expire worthless. The person on the other side of the trade is often a large firm with faster systems, better data and a mathematical edge that compounds over thousands of trades a day.

What SEBI found

The Securities and Exchange Board of India has studied this repeatedly. Its research found that around nine in ten individual traders in futures and options lose money over a year, and that the losses are not small. Younger traders and those with lower incomes were well represented among the losers. Meanwhile, the firms on the other side, and the brokers collecting fees on every trade, did very well.

This is why SEBI has been raising the cost of entry, increasing contract sizes and limiting the number of weekly expiries. These rules annoyed traders like my uncle, but their purpose is to slow down a pattern where ordinary people transfer money to professionals while believing they are about to get rich.

The other four days

When I asked my uncle, carefully, how he had done over the whole year, he went quiet and then said he was “roughly even.” I believe he believes that. But he has never added up the losing trades, the brokerage, the taxes and the hours spent watching a screen during work. Nobody shares those screenshots, so nobody sees them, and the family group thinks trading is a skill he has.

I have nothing against my uncle, and options are not a scam. They are useful tools for businesses that need to protect themselves against price swings. The problem is selection. We see the winning trade, we do not see the losing ones, and our sense of the odds gets distorted. The most useful thing I learned from his screenshots is to always ask what the picture leaves out.