Now that Kite APIs are free, how are you using them with AI agents? What have you built? AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex have made it much easier for traders and investors to build their own tools, even without much coding experience. We're also seeing more people use Kite APIs because of these coding agents. zerodha.com/products/api/

The ED just froze trading accounts holding about ₹200 crore in an alleged WhatsApp-driven pump and dump involving two listed companies. It's crazy that even in 2026, people still fall for stock tips on WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS, and social media. This is probably the silliest way to lose money. Given how late in the cycle we are, these instances are only going to increase. We're already seeing more pump and dumps, whether through WhatsApp groups or influencers peddling IPOs and stocks. This won't end well. So the next time you get a message promising easy money, just ask Claude or ChatGPT whether it's a good idea. It could save you a lot of money. It's become a cliché, but nowhere is "if it's too good to be true, it probably is" truer than in the stock market.

Our youngest customer is just 28 days old. The parents opened a Zerodha minor account, and a week later, they made the first investment.

One lesser-known thing about @zerodha is that almost everyone in leadership today has grown from within the organisation. We have rarely hired anyone from outside for leadership roles. For most people here, Zerodha was their first or second job, and we don't really have anyone with a pedigree education either. Shoaib is a good example. He started as a support agent, went on to head account opening, and eventually became our head of HR. Having leaders who come from within the organisation is valuable because they understand the culture instinctively. You don't have to put in effort to explain how we think, what we value, or how we make decisions. Ultimately, the people at the top end up shaping an organisation's culture to a large degree. So having people who have imbibed that culture for years makes running the business so much easier. Full link in comments.

Coming soon: Nudge v2 will do more than just warnings, allowing you to set hard limits to stay disciplined.

People need to be able to close an account as easily as they open one, if not easier. Making it easy to open an account but impossible to close one is the oldest dark pattern in the book. I think we are one of the few apps where the account closure option is clearly visible. We (@zerodha) close around 15,000 to 20,000 accounts every month for reasons ranging from company policies and trading losses to moving to another broker. It might sound counterintuitive, but allowing customers to close their accounts easily is the mark of a good business.

I think MDR on UPI was probably inevitable at some point, especially given how widespread UPI adoption has become. It could also lead to more competition, instead of just three apps accounting for more than 95% of the market. That being said, there are some use cases, like investing and broking, where the proposed MDR structure doesn’t really make sense. The problem with broking is that there is no guarantee that money transferred to a broker will actually result in a transaction. As brokers, we can’t force a customer to trade after transferring money. And if we can’t pass the UPI charge on to the customer, there is essentially no limit to the cost a customer can impose on a broker without generating any revenue. Just as an example, 10,000 customers could each make 50 UPI transfers of ₹2 lakh in a month without executing a single trade. At the proposed MDR, this could potentially cost the broker around ₹2 crore, without generating any business. What makes this even more challenging is quarterly settlement (QS). This is a SEBI regulation that requires brokers to send unused funds back to clients every month or quarter. Most customers then transfer these funds back to their broking accounts, with more than half of these transfers happening through UPI. So regulation essentially forces this movement of money every month or quarter, and the broker could end up bearing the cost when the money comes back, without any incremental benefit or revenue. By the way, we currently don’t charge brokerage on equity delivery trades because the economics allow us to offer them for free. But if every UPI transfer starts carrying an additional cost, irrespective of whether the customer actually trades, I don’t see how we can absorb this indefinitely. I think having an MDR is okay. It still doesn’t solve the problem of customers transferring money without transacting, but something like 0.02% with a cap of ₹5 or ₹10 per transaction seems much more reasonable for broking, instead of a cap as high as ₹300.

Back in 2010, one of the reasons we even considered becoming a brokerage firm was because of NSE NOW. It was a free trading platform provided by the @NSEIndia that brokers could offer to their clients. While we were starting out, I had heard a lot of scary stories about the exchanges, but our experience was the total opposite. When we went to Chennai to inquire about a membership, they were incredibly welcoming. When they realised we didn't have a lot of money, they even waived our membership fee of ~₹5 lakh. This is just one of many instances where the NSE was more than gracious throughout our journey. In many ways, we are around only because of the NSE. When we started, we didn't have the money to build our own trading platform. If there is one company I personally feel a sense of obligation towards, it is the NSE. 😀 Given that it is NSE, I have no doubt that it will be a successful IPO (PS: this is not a recommendation). By the way, India's market infrastructure and regulations are probably way ahead of most markets in the West. Exchanges here also act as the first-level regulators, which means a lot of what brokers traditionally do elsewhere is handled directly at the exchange and depository level. If it weren't for that, I sometimes wonder what the point of brokers like us would even be. 😀

Around 80% of our orders come from mobile. Personally, I still don’t understand how people manage to trade intraday from a phone. 🙂 That said, Trade from Charts (TFC) on mobile has been one of the most requested features. It’s now available on TradingView charts on Kite. With TFC, you can place orders, drag to modify pending orders, and track open positions directly on the chart.

Our tech team has formed a nice collective that builds and maintains open-source software for public good. The "collective" is just the latest avatar of what we've been doing from day one. Over the years, we've built and open-sourced tools that are today used by everyone from governments to large companies. I don't think there's another company with such a small tech team (~35 people) that has shipped so many side projects that are now world-class, enterprise-grade open-source products. JP Nagar is the official FOSS capital of India 😛 Link in comments to check out all the projects.

I met @karthikrangappa sometime around 2005. I was trying to sell him an international investing account. I remember going to his office, and we hit it off almost instantly. Later, he helped us build our first website through a friend. This was back when we were called Kamath Associates. He then came to work with us for a bit before going to France to pursue his master's in finance. He came back and was working on financial education when, in 2013, I reached out and asked him to come build that piece for us. The fact that @zerodha is known and respected for all our financial education wouldn't have been possible without Karthik and @ZerodhaVarsity. What's crazy is that even after 13 years, he still responds to all the queries on Varsity. Over the last three years, he has found a way to step it up a notch and make Varsity much more impactful, with help from everyone on the team, through text, video, live sessions, and all the other offline initiatives. By the way, we were both in the last batch at Bangalore University with the "all-carry" system. This meant you could keep carrying first-semester subjects without clearing them, all the way until the 8th semester and even later. I basically had 45-odd subjects to write by the 8th semester, and I never wrote them. Karthik had something like 36 left, but unlike me, he went back and cleared all of them after the 8th semester. 🥶 Full respect for that. You don't find many people who can do that. Not once in all these years have our discussions been about how Zerodha benefits from Varsity. For example, we have millions of people whose email IDs are registered on Varsity, and we haven't even bothered to check whether they are Zerodha customers. I guess that fact that we have no agenda has been the secret to Varsity's success. Watch the full conversation on the Zerodha YouTube channel, link in comments.

The first time we appeared in the press was 15 years ago, on September 5th. I first spoke to @nikhilmw as Sachin, my pseudonym for speaking to clients during sales calls. You didn’t want the CEO making sales calls. 😬 By the way, I’ve even met customers pretending to be Sachin in the early days of Zerodha. Anyway, one day I got a call and picked it up as Sachin. Turns out it was a journalist from @EconomicTimes, and I was shocked. I had to suddenly switch from Sachin to Nithin. I faked a weird accent so that I wouldn't be recognised. 😬 When this story came out, our account openings suddenly went from a few hundred accounts a month to almost 500. I was convinced I had discovered a growth hack. Over the next 5–6 years, I spoke to countless journalists, until 2017–18 when the popularity of traditional financial media started declining due to social media and other factors. That’s when I started posting on Twitter and LinkedIn. Until then, I wasn't that active. If you look at what's been more beneficial for us between traditional media and social media, there's no comparison at all. The ability to tell your own story directly to the people is powerful. Of course, you need to know how to tell your story well. 😬 If not, you become a meme.