Nithin�s story

I am son of a Bank Manager and was introduced to trading very early in life through
a friend. I started trading when I was 17 and saved up almost Rs. 5 lakhs trading
the markets actively from 1998 to 2001, but lost it all in one day.
I joined a call center in Bangalore with the idea of putting back the trading
capital. The working hours of call center gave me the opportunity to work during
nights and trade daytime. In 2004, a NRI asked me to manage his portfolio after
seeing my consistent performance for over 3 years. I quit my job and started Kamath
Associate, an advisory business with my younger brother Nikhil. I also became a
sub-broker for Reliance Money when they started off in 2006. During the free fall
in the markets in 2008, I was on the right side of the trade and earned
extraordinary returns, after which I decided to take it easy from trading for a
while since I was feeling the fatigue of actively trading the markets. That is when
Zerodha happened.
The main idea of starting Zerodha, was to be a broker that I personally never had
and also the frustration that most of my earlier brokers had caused, slowly
culminated in starting of Zerodha.

About Zerodha & Challenge faced

Zerodha is a brokerage firm, with memberships on all the stock, commodity, and
currency exchanges in India. We were the first brokers in India to disrupt existing
pricing structure by introducing a flat fee of Rs. 20 per trade model and zero
brokerage on equity investments. Along with this, today we are also ahead of our
competition in terms of technology and initiatives.
As a bootstrapped business, we started the business on a shoestring budget and also
we have to work in a highly regulated environment. The real challenge though was
convincing clients that just because we offer at low costs don�t mean we compromise
on quality but we offer the best platforms at the lowest costs.
Growth of Zerodha
We have been growing at over 100% Year On Year (YOY) and have had a consistent
Quarter on Quarter (QOQ) growth from the start of our business. Currently, we have
more than 150,000 clients across the country with contributing 5% of daily retail
trading volumes in various exchanges.
Rainmatter
To grow the markets in India, there has to be innovation and disruption. To ensure
this happens, we have started Rainmatter with the focus on building a new breed of
highly innovative, user-centric software for personal finance and investments. We
are creating a new wave in the Indian investmentTech space with our products, R&D,
and funding for startups.
Our incubator is based in Bangalore that provides well equipped workspaces,
mentorship, and funding to innovative technology startups. We have allocated a
corpus of Rs. 35 crores for funding and till now we have invested in some
interesting start-ups like smallcase.com, Tradelabs, Digio, with few others working
with us in the stealth mode.
Our products & Initiatives
We are building a whole new world of trading using our next generation technology
products and educational initiatives.
Listed below are few of our unique offerings.
Products
Kite web
A slick, full-fledged HTML5 trading platform with streaming market data, advanced
charts, an elegant UI, and more.
Kite mobile
Enjoy the Kite experience seamlessly on your Android and iOS devices.
Kite Connect API
We are commoditising and democratising investment technology with our �platform as
a service� APIs. Build your own trading experience and trade with your favorite
programming language with super simple, exchange-approved, HTTP/JSON APIs.
Q
Complete trade and reporting console and dashboard.
Quant
A personal trading journal with insights on your best trading periods, most
profitable streaks, optimal position sizes, contracts, and more, all intelligently
compiled from your past trading behaviour.
Mutual Funds
Start investing in mutual funds in demat form with Zerodha. One account for
everything.
Open Trade
Realtime trade updates from profitable traders. Pick and follow traders based on
their trading style and verified profitability report. A great way to improve
trading skills.
Pi
Pi is our desktop trading application built by Tradelab. Trading, charting,
scripting, and analysis, all rolled into a Windows desktop trading platform.
Educational Initiatives
Zerodha runs a very proactive online education initiative. We have three different
offerings through which we actively interact with our audience. Although, the
format of these offerings varies, they all are essentially working towards the same
goal i.e. to enrich the audience�s knowledge on trading, investing, and markets in
general.
Zerodha Varsity � This is a place where we have organized the most popular topics
related to stock markets in one place. We refer to each main topic as a �Module�,
and under each module there are several chapters. So for example �Fundamental
Analysis� is a module which has 16 chapters within it. So if you were to read these
16 chapters sequentially, then at the end of the 16th chapter you will be able to
take insightful long term investment decisions in the markets. At the end of each
chapter you can post queries related to the topic, and someone from our panel of
experts will revert with an answer within 24hrs and thereby clearing your doubt. We
have several modules like Technical Analysis, Option Trading, Futures Trading,
Markets & Taxation, Commodities, Currencies, etc.
Zerodha Varsity is perhaps the most popular stock market education initiative which
is freely available for all. One need not be a Zerodha client to access these
contents. You just visit the site and start educating yourself. We clock close to
about 25,000 page views per day with visitors from around 120 different countries.
Trading Q&A � Trading Q&A is a �question and answer� forum. The forum has many
registered members along with a panel of experts, and moderators constituting the
forum. If you have a specific query related to markets and looking for an answer
from the community then you can visit tradingqna.com and post your question, and
the community in turn will start posting their answers based on their own
experiences. We have over 8000 questions posted which have solicited over 13000
answers. Again this initiative is not restricted to Zerodha clients, it is free for
all.
Z-Connect � Z Connect is Zerodha�s official blog, through which we impart knowledge
and updates related to Zerodha. We even post and discuss important updates from the
regulators and exchanges. If the number of comments for a post is an indicator for
the popularity of the blog, then I won�t be surprised if Z-Connect is the most
popular financial blog in the country, simply because we have over 500 (on average)
comments for each of our posts.