Top Indian Brokers Groww, Zerodha, Angel One, Upstox See Client Exodus in August
The fall in investors comes amid SEBI tightening the rules around margin requirements, curtailing weekly expiries, making capital thresholds steeper and imposing higher taxation.
Active investors continued to decline at discount broking firms in August, with Groww, Zerodha, Angel One and Upstox — India's four bigshot discount broking firms seeing a downtrend in their investors. Combined, they lost around 7 lakh clients, and nearly 20 lakh clients in the first half of 2025.
The August downtick fever had spread to other prominent brokers such as — Mirae Asset Capital, PhonePe Wealth, Sharekhan, Kotak Securities and Motilal Oswal Financial.
The fall in investors was noted amid the Securities and Exchange Board of India or SEBI tightening the rules around margin requirements, curtailing weekly expiries, making capital thresholds steeper, and imposing higher taxation. This was followed by a sharp contraction in futures and options activity.
However, players like ICICI Securities, SBICAP Securities, and Paytm Money got exempted from the decline, while ICICI added about 6,512 active clients in August, SBICAP Securities added 7,400 and Paytm gained approximately 11,983 in the month of August.
Others who showed resilience in the face of an active downward trend include smaller brokers like — Aaritya Broking, Moneywise Finvest, Choice Equity Broking, Religare Broking, Jainam Broking, Yes Securities, IDBI Capital, and Bajaj Financial Securities. These players noted an increase in their clients over the last month.
