Meet the growing tribe of female intraday traders

Trading, especially intraday trading, is not a woman’s cup of tea, I was told,” recalls Bengaluru-based Jayashree BS, 66, as she clocks a profit of Rs 18,000 for the day, in between a few sips of her favourite filter coffee. She is not particularly fond of tea, she says. “The biggest profit I’ve earned in a single day’s trade, on an initial investment of Rs 50,000, is Rs 25,000,” she adds, gently crushing the stereotype that number-crunching is the domain of math men alone.

Like Jayashree, more and more women are entering a field that has been a male preserve for a long time: day trading.

It was just seven months ago that Jayashree’s nephew, who works at the online brokerage Zerodha, suggested that she take up day trading.

She was no longer involved in running her family’s chemical industry business and he thought she could utilise her free time and number-savviness on the bourses.

Jayashree brushed it aside, associating trading with “speculation” and “gambling”. He told her it was anything but, given that intraday trading requires one to analyse realtime market fluctuations to buy and sell securities (like stock, commodities, currencies, bonds) on the same trading day.

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The technical details intrigued her. “I told my friend Mythila about it and she proposed that we learn the trading principles together. When someone in our social circle called it a manly pursuit, Mythila said: ‘Jayu, let’s take it up as a challenge.’”

Jayashree and her friend Mythila Aware, 58, are now full-time day traders dealing in stocks for now, with plans to get into commodities and currencies soon. They watch multiple screens to track several stock positions, gauge a trading opportunity via technical analysis and act on it on the spot. They do this for multiple stocks, many times a day, five days a week. “It allows you to stay active and learn something new every day. At my age, it also keeps you from getting Alzheimer’s,” says Jayashree, rather matter-of-factly.

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“Women form approximately 20% of active traders in India,” says Shankar Vailaya, director of the brokerage firm Sharekhan. The needle hasn’t moved much over a period of time, adds Vailaya, who has spent close to three decades in this space. When it comes to intraday trading, the number goes further down. “Less than 10% of intraday traders are women,” says Prashant Shah, CEO of Definedge, a financial advisory, training and software platform.

However, over the past three years or so, the overall number of women day traders has been on the rise. At ICICI Securities, it has gone up by almost 20%. “The number of active intraday women trading members for FY20 is 14,551, as against 11,711 in FY17,” says Vishal Gulecha, head of equity product group at the brokerage. In 2014, global trader education firm Online Trading Academy launched an introductory trading course in India that saw 10% of female enrolment. “In five years, this number has gone up to 20%,” says Rajesh Vora, business head of the academy’s India office.

Binny Sharma, 51, was among the few women eager to learn the ropes of day trading at the Online Trading Academy’s Delhi branch in 2016. A former banker, Sharma had left her job for motherhood about a decade ago. “When I read up on day trading, I found that it suited my personality. I don’t like to sit and wait, therefore having a daily trading routine worked for me.” What she liked the most about day trading, as opposed to longterm investing, was that she didn’t have to carry forward one day’s stress to the next.

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Every day had new challenges, new learnings, new achievements and new mistakes.

Mumbai’s Mukta Dhamankar, 42, has a similar story. A qualified nutritionist and former research assistant at UNICEF, Dhamankar quit her job three years into her marriage to sail along with her husband, who was then a captain in merchant navy. Then, she had kids. “When the kids grow up, you feel a lacuna in life and an itch to be financially independent again and to share the expenses of the household,” she says. One fine day, nine years ago, Dhamankar came across an investment brochure and decided to give day trading a go. With no background in finance, she enrolled for a technical analysis course. In the years that followed, she consistently earned an annual trading profit of 17-20% on her investment. “We did a family holiday in South Africa last year. It was a 15-day trip costing Rs 12 lakh that was funded entirely from my earnings from trading.”

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The pursuit of money has always been an attractive one. What has brought more women into trading, day trading in particular, is the reach of the internet. In its universe of beauty bloggers, food-and-tech influencers and TikTok stars, there are women uploading their trading success stories that inspire more to join in. They talk about low initial investment — all you need is a laptop, demat account and an internet connection. They emphasise on the freedom to work remotely — on women having the luxury of limiting their daily working hours and affordable training solutions available online and offline.

Shradha Nanchahil, 24, from Ludhiana teaches the basics of intraday trading via video-conference sessions from her home to people of all age groups in India. Every day, her posts on social media tell the world how much profit her trading students have fetched in a day. “Just two days ago, a homemaker in her late 30s made a profit of `30,000 in a single day,” she says. Nanchahil has close to 6,000 followers on Quora where her posts have fetched 1.4 million viewers as of date, with 350,000 in January alone.

A significant percentage of women day traders across several brokerages are homemakers.

They are 47% of women day traders at ICICI Securities, Gulecha tells ET Magazine. Of Nanchahil’s students, about 5% are women, all of them homemakers. Most of them approached her after watching her videos or reading her posts online.

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Yet, there are many who hesitate to share their trading stories. “My family doesn’t know that I trade.

They are strictly against the stock market,” one of them messaged Nanchahil on WhatsApp, on the condition of anonymity.

Even in urban quarters, women traders are not taken seriously, says Bela Bali, 56, a Noidabased day trader. “If a man says he’s trading, people will ask him for advice on investing even if he’s not making any profits. If it’s a woman, they think her husband must be indulging her.”

Social attitudes are stacked against women. “Many don’t appreciate women in their families trading till they start making profits,” says Nanchahil. She tries to break the stereotype through her posts. “I upload my training sessions online, and reveal everyone’s profits in a way that they can be easily verified.” Her online coaching outfit Money Magnet has earned Rs 50 lakh in fees within six months of starting up.

For this young millennial, this is a huge leap from the life she was leading just two years ago. A qualified clinical psychologist at a medical institute 10 km from her home, she earned Rs 20,000 a month. But she was always fascinated by the men in her family talking about stocks and trading. One day, she decided to give it a shot with Rs 5,000 in hand. In the first year, losses outweighed the gains. But things changed in the second year. In November 2019, she netted a profit of Rs 6 lakh in a day during a trading session that she was live-casting for training.

Besides full-timers, homemakers, retired professionals and those wanting to work after a career break, there are women who take to day trading to supplement their income. Three years ago, Mumbai’s Viddhi Dhingra, a nutritionist, enrolled for a course at Online Trading Academy. She was looking for an additional source of income besides her gig as a nutritionist. So far, she has made more losses than gains, but she is in the process of recovering them, one day’s trade at a time.

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“Trading has taught me to be patient.” In turn, she now finds it easier to relate to her clients’ impatience when wearing her nutritionist’s hat. “Asking them to wait for results to follow their hard work gets easier when you are doing it yourself,” she says.

Almost everyone makes losses — Jayashree lost Rs 1 lakh in a day’s trade once— and almost no one exclusively does intraday trading at the bourses. They pair it with long-term trading and investment activities.

While day trading may have its advantages, it also has its downside. Staring at multiple computer screens for hours is one of them, says Anna Yagnik, a Rajasthan-born Mumbaikar, who quit a stable corporate job as a risk advisory at EY two years ago to pursue day trading.

“I may shift from day trading to long-term investing if looking at a computer throughout becomes stressful.

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For now, I’m enjoying the excitement and learning,” says the 27-year-old. It was this excitement of learning something new every day that got Bali, a retired school vice-principal, into day trading late last year. “After retirement, I realised that the house was run by the help and the kids were about to settle down so nobody really needed me and I had a lot of free time.”

Bela’s husband suggested that she could try her hand at day trading, given her penchant for mathematics and analytics. It has been seven months since and Bali hasn’t incurred an overall loss at the end of a day’s trade so far. “They say for the first 22 years of your life, you study to have a good life for the next 25 years. At 56, I’m now getting ready for the next 25 years of my life.”

Although they are a tiny representation, female traders are considered better than male traders by some. Gulecha says, at ICICI Securities, “based on parameters like holdings and trading history, 66% of women traders have been identified as high potential against 50% of men”. Definedge’s Shah attributes it to female traders being relatively more disciplined than their male counterparts, which ensures that they minimise their losses and get overall better returns.

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Dhingra, however, says that being a good trader has to do with one’s personality and not gender. “My husband is better at curbing his losses in day trading,” she says, adding that more women should become traders. “I hope someday I can inspire more women to take up day trading.”

Back in Ludhiana, every time Nanchahil tells her mother, a homemaker, about a woman who has made profits, she asks if she can learn trading, too. Nanchahil says in Punjab, “where women are often not encouraged to work and in her extended family where women younger than me are already married”, this is no mean feat. While she says she has miles to go, she also knows that day trading is indeed her perfect cup of chai.