New Delhi, Aug. 25 -- Sebi's Department of Economic and Policy Analysis has published a series of studies on individual traders in the equity derivatives segment since January 2023, with the latest pair released in August 2026.

It is unusual for a regulator anywhere to publish so candidly on the losses of the investors it supervises. The August 2026 study of trading behaviour is the most valuable of the lot because it does not stop at how much individuals lost; it starts asking how they traded. In other words, it is less a statistics report than a behavioural report.

Almost every headline number lines up with a bias that behavioural finance has documented for decades. The data does not merely tell us that individuals lose money in deriv...