If last year was a landmark year, 2023 was a year of many milestones not just for us but for the entire stock market, with equity benchmarks giving 20% returns, individual accounts in the country exceeding 8 crores in total (20% higher than last year) and Indian capital markets achieving $4 Trillion Market capitalization by surpassing Hong Kong Stock Exchange to become the 4th largest equity market in the world! Another wild fact of 2023 is that retail traders and investors accounted for over 1/3rd of the equity market turnover (35%), higher than all the institutional investors (FPIs and DIIs combined). Sounds crazy, right? It's true, but it's also true that the majority of retail investors' turnover is below 10 lakh rupees monthly. So, the high volume currently comes from the few who trade much more than the average Joe. Also, the active equity investors base is 3x compared to the F&O traders in India this year. This indicates that the hype around excessive speculation in derivatives is misplaced. The common practice of using the notional turnover formula to compute options trading volumes highly exaggerates the ground reality. In my view, our markets and the participants have yet to mature, and there's much room for improvement and growth in the coming years.
Our Updates:
We hit a milestone of 500k customers this year. As a home-grown and self-funded startup, we thank you for your support and word-of-mouth referrals, as they really mean a lot to us. While most businesses have laid off employees despite raising capital, our team has grown bigger throughout the year as we continue hiring exuberant people at FYERS. Our commitment to providing the best trading experience in India has helped us deliver many innovations and enhancements this year:
FYERS App: As promised, the new mobile app was rolled out in phases without hiccups or major hindrances. The successful launch marks a new era in our approach to building and launching additional features. Going forward, you will be able to experience the same feature updates on your mobile app and web, delivering consistency across different devices such as your phone, tablet and laptop. You can explore the FYERS App here.
Journal: Ever felt overwhelmed by the never-ending information you need to process while trading? Our virtual diary is designed to help you record your thoughts, feelings, and analysis of your trades throughout your journey. We launched this tool in December as a Christmas present to help you achieve your trading goals! If you're serious about earning money in the markets, our Journal can be your best companion. It's also the first of its kind in India. You can read more about it in this blog post.
Discover: The markets are always brimming with trading opportunities waiting to be discovered. We built this module to help traders like you track global markets and discover trading opportunities across timeframes segregated as intraday, swing and long-term. We help categorize stocks into bullish and bearish buckets based on technical, price and volume screeners. Besides that, you can track the real-time price movements of all the major benchmark and sectoral indices on NSE & BSE. It gives traders a top-down view of the price action on any given day, which regular traders can benefit immensely as it can help strategize much better. You can track global markets, which include the US markets (S&P 500, Dow Jones, Nasdaq), European markets like the UK, Germany, and France (FTSE100, DAX, CAC 40), APAC region with stock indices of Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia (NIKKEI 225, HANG SENG, TAIWAN ASX 200) respectively. Discover also helps you find specific identifiable candlestick patterns. You should really explore this as an active trader. Read our blog post to learn more.
Trade on TradingView: FYERS was the first brokerage in the country to offer a TradingView interface for trading and pioneered the drag-and-drop trading experience. In 2023, we offer a direct integration through our trading API that allows you to trade on TradingView's native app/web. We could've done this a long time ago, but our priority list is often interjected by timebound regulatory implementations or other unforeseen situations. Our tight integration could help ardent TradingView users to trade seamlessly. Please go through this page to learn more.
Big Screen Experience (TV): Trading on your phone can be distracting, isn't it? Recent research shows that the average attention span has dropped to 8 seconds or less. It's not surprising, considering that constant and countless other notifications inhibit your focus on trading. To help resolve this, we launched a TV app that enables you to multi-task by connecting your FYERS App to your television. Yes, you can now cast charts of your favourite symbols on your TV, place orders and manage positions on your phone. Imagine multi-tasking or reading the news while you can track the live price action of your portfolio on the big screen. You can load up to 8 charts on a single screen using a mult-chart template. You could do this across multiple screens if you want your living room to look like a trading room ;). Learn how to connect the app to your TV by reading his blog post.
Smart Exit: Life usually comes in the way of trading. Almost everyone is back to WFO this year; hence, few have the time to track the markets all day. To help create a trade-life balance and also manage positions effectively, we introduced Smart Exit Alerts. Some of you may have heard about Kill Switch. Smart Exit Alert is the evolution of a mere killswitch with risk management functionality that helps you secure your profits or restrict your losses based on pre-defined conditions. Let us know what you think about this. It is available on the web and mobile app.
Multi-Lingual capabilities: We're the first and only trading app in India that is enabled in 7 different languages (English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati and Telugu). If you'd assume that English is the first choice among every educated Indian, you'd be surprised. Today, many customers prefer interacting with the FYERS App in regional languages. You can access this through the settings section of the app. For more info., read this article.
SWOT Analysis & QVT: To help you make well-informed trading decisions, we introduced various qualitative data points, such as a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats) of every listed stock in India in our Symbol Details widget. Additionally, we introduced the QVT score, which stands for Quality, Value & Technicals. It uses technical analysis tools to score every stock's financial strength, valuation, and price trend. You can read more about it in this post. With these features, we've helped make better investing decisions. We hope this also allowed you to earn big in this year's bull run!
Insta Options: Last year, we created a unique options chain that helps you visually compare call and put options, place orders directly, and generate basket orders to enter multi-leg options strategies now. A couple of months ago, we launched a comprehensive options trading module called Insta Options that has many valuable tools like Strategy Builder with pay-off graphs, combined premium charts, multi-strike OI analysis and other useful OI statistics. Start exploring this tool by reading this introductory blog post.
NEXT Terminal: Old habits, die hard! This is especially true of those traders who were the early adopters of trading before the web and mobile apps became mainstream. The good news: In June 2023, we launched a new trading terminal called NEXT, the fastest available trading terminal with a latency of around 20 milliseconds. If you love trading with the hotkeys on your keyboard on ODIN or NEST, you will surely love NEXT. The good part is that you can navigate between this terminal and the web with the same passwordless login credentials, a feature not available with traditional systems. You can also place GTT orders from NEXT. Check out this post to know more.
New trading segments: We added the NSE commodities, which enables our customers to trade in the newly launched Crude and Natural Gas contracts. We will offer more soon as the exchange launches and stabilises the products. Additionally, we added BSE Currency derivatives to our available list of tradable contracts. This segment has a successful legacy and already has sufficient liquidity from a retail trader's perspective. A fun fact about BSE CDS is that the tick size is much smaller at only 5 paise versus NSE's 25 paise. Here's a notice with more details. Stay tuned for our upcoming post about this, explaining the pros & cons of trading in this segment.
SME IPOs: We were eager to make the smaller IPOs available on the designated SME exchanges of NSE & BSE, hopefully contributing to the capital-raising ambitions of Small and medium-sized companies in India that carry the highest potential for growth given their early stage of development. Yes, it is considered more risky to invest in small companies. Still, going by the recent trends, SME IPOs have outperformed by a huge margin. Compared to the larger startup IPOs, there's generally room for growth. The famous startup unicorns are now best known for unloading their inflated stocks on innocent retail investors who faced losses in the post-IPO performances. We hope you invest in the right ones and gain from SME IPOs. You can learn more about it here.
Variety for Debt Investing: In 2023, we added Sovereign Gold Bonds (SGBs), long-term Government bonds, Treasury Bills and State Development Loans (SDLs) to our platform. Similar to IPOs, these debt securities have a limited window of opportunity to invest in the primary market. Currently, they're less liquid than stocks in the secondary market; hence, investing for the long term makes sense. However, here's how to trade these securities on our platform. You could still trade these instruments but incur some impact costs. In 2024, we will launch corporate bonds too. You can get started here.
Enhanced APIs: In 2019, we democratized algo trading by launching the first-ever fee trading APIs. Around 4 years later, our APIs are widely used by very many traders across India. In 2023, we launched API version 3 with substantial enhancements mainly to achieve higher stability, scalability and accuracy. Get more details here.
Verified P&L: At the beginning of the year, we set a new benchmark by becoming the first broker to launch Verified P&L to help combat fake and exaggerated claims of profitability that often deceived the general public. Over the last year, we've helped restore sanity to some extent as people are slowly but surely becoming aware of how easily screenshots can be edited and are choosing for verified P&L links instead of blind faith. At FYERS, we don't entice or induce anyone to share these links; it is solely left to the customers' discretion. Learn more about it here.
Highest Historical Data: This year, we started offering the highest historical price and fundamental data on all stocks in India. FYERS is the only broker providing 15 years of historical fundamental data, over 25+ years of EOD, and 6+ years of historical intraday data up to the 1-minute time frame. We go the extra mile to provide the best access to active traders who may find this helpful.
Platform Stability: Last but not least, I am proud to inform you that we had the least number of outages in 2023! Despite all the feature enhancements mentioned above and scaling up our customer base beyond 500k, the top priority was ensuring the platform was stable and reliable. We aim to continue working on edge cases and refining our platform to give you an ultimate trading experience. If we face issues, rest assured that we will be swift to deal with them and keep you informed so you can take corrective action. As a fintech, we invest heavily in our IT infrastructure and have architected for high scalability and preventing a single point of failure. We're also proactively taking various cybersecurity initiatives to provide a more secure environment for you.
On the Regulatory front:
SEBI's mission to protect retail investors from unscrupulous elements has taken a new phase. In 2023, it introduced many new rules like compulsory quarterly settlements, upstreaming & downstream fund flow, Qualified Stockbrokers (QSBs) list to ensure better governance, and many other regulations which have made investing much safer. Despite all the positive developments, the negative sentiment among many largely concerns the controversial consultation paper on regulating finfluencers. Yet again, we hope that their wisdom prevails and that there's a healthier outcome soon. As a governing board member of the BSE Brokers Forum, a member of the NSE working group for Retail Trading Members, and an advisory committee member of MCX, we do our best to work in the best interests of active traders and investors.
What's Next?
In early 2024, we aim to introduce a margin trading facility (MTF) that allows you to trade stocks with a 4x leverage. Expect us to make more instruments available on the platform. We've also applied for a PMS license to cater to affluent Indians, NRIs, family offices and corporations. Other than that, we have some exciting new features for traders that we will unveil soon. Stay tuned! Refer your friends if you find our progress meaningful and have benefited from our services.
Wishing you happy trading and a happy new year! 🥂