I Lost 2 Crore 38 Lakh Before I Found the One Number That Was Never on My Screen

For ten years I thought I had a strategy problem. I did not. I had a problem I could not see, and it was hiding in plain sight in the regulator's own data.

By Shamique HussainFounder, MarketScore

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9 minutes

There is a particular kind of silence in a room after you have lost money you cannot afford to lose. Not the loss itself. The quiet afterward, when you sit and try to explain to yourself why you did what you did, and you find that you cannot.

I had that silence more times than I want to admit. Between 2011 and the year I finally stopped, I gave the market two crore thirty-eight lakh rupees. Not in one spectacular blow-up, which at least would have been a story. I lost it the boring way. A good month, handed back in a single bad week. A position I opened because the chart felt right, closed because it suddenly felt wrong. Then again. Then again.

For most of those years I was certain I had a strategy problem. So I did what everyone with a strategy problem does. I bought another course. I added another indicator. I followed another person on Twitter who posted green screenshots and never the red ones. I collected setups the way some people collect regret.

None of it worked, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand why. The problem was never the strategy. The problem was that I was making a decision, with real money, that I could not have explained to you the next morning if you had asked. And I never once asked myself.

The number the regulator published, and nobody read

In September 2024, the Securities and Exchange Board of India published a study that should have been on every front page and instead sank without a ripple. They had gone through the actual accounts of millions of individual traders in the equity derivatives segment. Not a survey. The real ledgers.

The findings were brutal in the way only real numbers can be. Ninety-three percent of individual traders lost money. Among people who had been trading regularly for three straight years, eighty-eight percent still lost. The average loss ran to lakhs. And the profits, what few there were, pooled almost entirely with the algorithms and the institutions, not the person at home with a laptop and a hunch.

The following year they published an update. The picture had not improved. In FY 2024-25 the average individual trader in that segment lost around one lakh ten thousand rupees, and the aggregate losses crossed one lakh crore, up more than forty percent on the year before. Roughly ninety-six lakh people. Ninety-one percent of them, underwater.

I read those studies the way you read a diagnosis you already suspected. Because here is the part that stopped me cold. That is not a picture of people being bad at picking direction. If it were only direction, the law of averages alone would rescue far more than nine percent of them. A coin flip does better than these traders do.

It is a picture of people entering trades they cannot justify, sizing them in a way the account cannot survive, and doing it again after every loss because the loss taught them nothing they could name. It is not a knowledge problem. It is a process problem. There was no step, before the money went in, where the trade had to earn its place.

I did not have that step either. For ten years, I did not have it.

What changed was not a strategy. It was a rule.

The thing that finally moved the needle was almost insultingly simple, and I resisted it for years precisely because it was simple. The rule was this: no trade gets taken until it has a score. A number, out of a hundred, that I have to see before I am allowed to click. If it does not score, I do not trade. There is no override for a feeling.

The score is not magic and it is not a prediction. It is discipline made visible. It forces four separate questions to be answered before the money moves: what the technicals say, what the fundamentals say, what the wider sentiment is doing, and where the institutions are actually positioned. Four inputs, one number. If they do not line up, the number is low, and a low number is a closed door.

I built the tool because I needed it to exist and it did not. Now other people use it, and the thing I hear back most often is not about winning. It is about the trades they did not take. The Tuesday they sat on their hands. The setup that looked perfect until it had to produce a number and could not.

That screen matters more than any testimonial I could write, because it contains the losses. Every other page in this corner of the internet shows you a wall of green and quietly deletes the red. The whole point of scoring a trade is that sometimes the honest answer is no, and sometimes even a good score loses. If a tool cannot show you that, it is selling you a feeling, which is the exact thing that cost me two crore thirty-eight lakh.

The calculators that made the losses stop being abstract

Two tools inside it did more for me than any signal ever has, and neither one tells you what to buy. Risk of Ruin takes your real win rate and your real risk per trade and returns the probability that your current approach ends the account entirely. Most traders have never run it once. When I finally ran mine, honestly, the number was so high it was almost funny, and then it was not funny at all. Drawdown Recovery makes the other uncomfortable truth explicit: losses are not symmetric. Lose half the account and you do not need a fifty percent gain to get back, you need a hundred, just to stand where you started. Seeing that on a screen changes how large you are willing to be wrong.

Left: how much you must win back just to reach flat after a loss. Right: expected moves around scheduled news, before you sit in front of one.

None of this is exciting. That is the point. Exciting is what got me a decade of losses and a two crore hole. The quiet, boring, repeatable act of scoring a trade before taking it is the least thrilling thing I do, and it is the only thing that ever changed the outcome.

What the ninety minutes actually are

Once a week I sit down with a live, moving market and score it in front of whoever is in the room. Not a recording of a good day. Not a highlight reel. The market as it is that morning, including the instruments where the honest score is low and the honest move is to do nothing.

I run Risk of Ruin on real numbers. I show the setups I am skipping and say why. I answer questions until they stop coming, which is the reason the room is capped and not open to the entire internet. And you leave with the four-factor checklist on a single page, so that the next morning you can do it yourself without me.

There is a workshop I mention at the end, and I am telling you that now so it is not a surprise later. But the ninety minutes stand on their own. If you never buy another thing from me, you will still walk out with the one step I did not have for ten years.

What they say is never about a number

I have kept these the way they came, from the chat during the live rooms. Notice what is missing from all of them. Not one talks about how much they made. Every one talks about what they stopped doing.