The Death Certificate
- Cause of Death: Trading options like a casino slot machine
- Time of Death: The moment you hit "Buy" without understanding Greeks
- Witnesses: Your broker (who made money), market makers (who made more), and time itself (who made the most)
- Last Words: "This time it's different. I feel it."
- Estate: ₹0. All transferred to Option Sellers.
The Crime Scene: A Letter from the Deceased
"I was supposed to be rich by now."
That's the last thought of every option trading account before it flatlines. Somewhere between the YouTube guru's "easy money" strategy and the cold reality of a zero balance, something went catastrophically wrong.
But here's the twist in this murder mystery: You killed yourself.
Not intentionally. Not knowingly. But with the same precision as a professional assassin — only the target was your own capital.
"In the world of options, there are no victims — only volunteers who don't read the fine print written on their financial tombstones."
— The Market, Every Single Day
This isn't a feel-good article. This is a forensic autopsy. By the end, you'll either stop trading options forever, or you'll finally understand the game well enough to have a fighting chance.
Either outcome saves you money.
The Original Sin: You Brought a Knife to a Nuclear War
Let's start with the most uncomfortable truth in trading:
Options were not designed for retail traders.
Options were created as hedging instruments for institutions managing billions. They're financial weapons of mass precision — and you're trying to use them with a tutorial you watched between Instagram reels.
Imagine entering a Formula 1 race on a bicycle. Now imagine paying an entry fee every single lap (that's your premium). And the race track tilts downward toward a cliff with each passing minute (that's time decay).
That's options trading for retail.
IQ Gap
Market makers employ physicists who left CERN. You're using RSI and MACD from a free screener.
Speed Gap
They execute in 0.00001 seconds. Your order takes 0.5 seconds. In that gap, they've already fleeced you.
Data Gap
They see order flow in real-time. You see what they want you to see, 15 minutes delayed.
Capital Gap
They can survive 1000 losses. You can survive maybe 10. Guess who blinks first?
The Seven Horsemen of Your Portfolio Apocalypse
Every dead trading account has the same autopsy markers. Here are the seven fatal wounds that killed yours:
Horseman #1: Buying OTM Options
"But they're so cheap!" Yes, because they're almost certainly going to die. A ₹5 option isn't a bargain — it's a 95% probability of total loss wrapped in lottery ticket psychology.
Horseman #2: Fighting Time
Every second you hold, Theta eats your premium. You're not trading — you're renting an asset that depreciates faster than a new car driven off the lot. Into a volcano.
Horseman #3: IV Crush Ignorance
You buy before earnings because "big move coming!" The move happens. IV collapses. Your option loses 50% even though you were RIGHT about direction. Welcome to Vega hell.
Horseman #4: Position Sizing from Hell
"It's only ₹3,000." x 10 trades a week x 52 weeks = ₹15.6 lakhs. That "small" gambling habit? It costs more than a luxury car annually.
Horseman #5: Revenge Trading
Lost ₹5K in the morning? Time to make it back by 3:30 PM with an even riskier trade! Spoiler: You lost ₹15K by EOD.
Horseman #6: Hope as a Strategy
"I'll hold through expiry, it might recover." The five most expensive words in options trading. Hope is not a hedge. Hope is how you die broke.
Horseman #7: One-Legged Trades
You buy naked calls and puts like they're stocks. Meanwhile, professionals trade spreads, straddles, and iron condors — defined risk, controlled outcomes.
The Greek Tragedy: Letters That Spell Your Doom
There are four Greek letters that control your fate. Most traders know their names. Almost none understand their power.
This isn't education — this is survival training.
The Murder Weapon: Theta
Every night, while you sleep, Theta takes a bite of your premium. It doesn't care if you're right about direction. It doesn't care about your analysis. It just eats. And eats. Until there's nothing left.
Theta accelerates as expiry approaches. An option loses more value in its last 5 days than in the previous 25 combined.
"Option buyers are paying rent to live in a house that's on fire. The fire is called Theta, and it burns 24/7."
— Nassim Taleb
Here's the brutal math nobody shows you:
You Need
The stock to move in your direction, by enough to cover premium + time decay + bid-ask spread + your profit
They Need
The stock to do literally anything else — move against you, move sideways, or move in your favor but not enough
You need to be right about direction, magnitude, AND timing. They need you to be wrong about any one of those.
Who would you bet on?
The Volatility Trap: When Being Right Still Kills You
This is the cruelest joke in options trading. Pay attention:
You were RIGHT. The stock moved up 5%. But Implied Volatility collapsed from 80% to 25%, and your option lost half its value anyway.
This is called IV Crush, and it's the second-biggest killer of option buyers after Theta.
"Retail traders buy volatility when it's expensive (before events) and sell it when it's cheap (after events). This is the opposite of what makes money. But it FEELS right, which is why they keep doing it."
— Anonymous Market Maker
The market makers KNOW you'll pile into options before events. So they jack up IV to absurd levels. You pay 150% of fair value. Then the event happens, IV normalizes, and you're left holding a bag that's somehow worth less than when you bought it — even though you predicted the move correctly.
High-IV Trap Events
- Earnings Announcements — IV inflates 50-100% before, crushes 60-80% after
- RBI Policy Days — Same pattern, every single time
- Budget Day — The biggest IV feast for sellers, graveyard for buyers
- Monthly Expiry — Gamma spike + IV crush = maximum retail destruction
- Global Events — When everyone expects volatility, volatility is already priced in
The Psychology Autopsy: Your Brain is the Enemy
Your brain evolved to survive on the savanna, not to trade options. Every survival instinct that kept your ancestors alive is now bankrupting you.
Loss Aversion
Savanna: Losing your only spear = death. Hold onto resources at all costs.
Trading: You hold losing positions way too long, hoping for recovery. The loss doubles.
Confirmation Bias
Savanna: That pattern of rustling grass IS a lion. Trust your instincts.
Trading: You only see data that supports your bias. You're blind to warning signs.
Recency Bias
Savanna: The watering hole had predators yesterday, avoid it today.
Trading: "This strategy worked last week!" Ignoring that it failed the previous 10 times.
Overconfidence
Savanna: I killed a mammoth once, I can do it again!
Trading: One lucky 10x winner = "I've cracked the market." Cue 20 losses in a row.
Gambler's Fallacy
Savanna: It hasn't rained in a month, it MUST rain soon.
Trading: "I've lost 7 trades in a row, I'm DUE for a win!" The market doesn't owe you anything.
Sunk Cost Fallacy
Savanna: I've walked 10 miles, I can't turn back now.
Trading: "I've already lost ₹50K on this position, I can't exit now." You lose ₹2L.
"The market is designed to extract the maximum amount of money from the maximum number of people. It does this by exploiting the exact cognitive biases that helped humans survive for 200,000 years."
— Unknown Institutional Trader
The Silent Killers: Death by a Thousand Cuts
Nobody blows up in one trade. They die slowly, bleeding out from invisible wounds.
The Invisible Bleed
You don't see the brokerage adding up. You don't calculate STT on every trade. You don't measure slippage. These "tiny" costs compound into tens of thousands lost annually — before a single bad trade.
Let's quantify the invisible killers:
Brokerage
₹20-40 per order. 10 trades/day = ₹400. Monthly: ₹8,000. Yearly: ₹96,000
STT (Securities Transaction Tax)
0.05% on sell. Sounds tiny until you realize it's 0.05% of TURNOVER, not profit. On ₹5L daily turnover = ₹250/day = ₹62,500/year
Slippage
The difference between your intended price and execution price. On liquid options: 0.1-0.5%. On illiquid: 2-5%. Adds up to ₹30-50K/year for active traders.
Bid-Ask Spread
You buy at ask, sell at bid. That 0.5-2% spread? It's a guaranteed loss the moment you enter. ₹20-50K/year
Total hidden costs for an active trader: ₹2-3 lakhs per year BEFORE making a single bad decision.
The Dealer's Edge: How the House Always Wins
Here's the architecture of your destruction:
"Retail option buyers are the fuel that powers the entire derivatives industry. Without their consistent losses, market makers couldn't exist, prop firms couldn't profit, and brokers couldn't survive. You're not a customer — you're the product."
— Industry Insider
The Broker's Cut
Your broker makes money whether you win or lose. More trades = more commission. That's why they send you alerts, strategies, and "opportunities." They're selling shovels in a gold rush.
The Market Maker's Edge
They quote both bid and ask. They profit from the spread on every trade. They hedge perfectly. They have information you don't. They cannot lose in aggregate.
The Prop Firm's Advantage
Co-located servers. Real-time order flow. Machine learning models trained on petabytes of data. Your entry signal? They saw it 0.001 seconds before you and already took the other side.
The Option Seller's Math
Option sellers have probability on their side. 70-80% of options expire worthless or lose value. They sell overpriced lottery tickets. You buy them.
The entire ecosystem is designed for one thing: transferring money from retail option buyers to everyone else.
The SEBI Autopsy: Official Cause of Death
In 2023, SEBI performed the most comprehensive study of F&O trader performance in India. The results were devastating:
Let that sink in. 91% of people who traded F&O lost money. The average loss was ₹1.81 lakhs per person. In just three years, retail traders lost over ₹75,000 crores.
Where did that money go?
Proprietary Traders
Made ₹33,000 crores in profits. Your losses funded their Ferraris.
FIIs (Foreign Institutional Investors)
Made ₹28,000 crores. Your losses subsidized their bonuses in New York and London.
Brokers
Made ₹12,000+ crores in commissions. Your losses paid for their office buildings.
Government (STT + Taxes)
Collected thousands of crores. Your losses funded infrastructure projects.
"The F&O market is the largest wealth transfer mechanism from the middle class to institutions in India's history. It happens daily, it's legal, and the victims line up voluntarily."
— Market Analyst (Anonymous)
The Autopsy Conclusion: Death Was Preventable
Every trading account death was preventable. Here's the post-mortem prescription:
Become the House
Option SELLERS have the mathematical edge. Sell premium through defined-risk strategies like credit spreads, iron condors, and strangles. Let Theta work FOR you, not against you.
Size Like a Survivor
Never risk more than 2% of capital on a single trade. Never allocate more than 10% to options. If you can't survive 20 consecutive losses, your position size is wrong.
Understand Before You Enter
Before every trade, know: your max loss, your breakeven, your probability of profit, and why the person on the other side is wrong. If you can't answer all four, don't trade.
Track Everything
Maintain a trade journal. After 100 trades, the data will show you patterns your emotions hide. Most traders who journal quit within 3 months — because the truth is brutal.
Avoid High-IV Traps
Don't buy options before events. If you must play events, use spreads to neutralize Vega. Or better: sell IV before events and let others get crushed.
Monthly Over Weekly
Weekly options have maximum Theta decay and maximum gamma risk. Monthly options give you time. Time is money — literally.
Accept the Math
Markets are a negative-sum game after costs. For you to make money, someone must lose. If you don't have an edge, you ARE the edge for someone else.
Paper Trade First
Trade with fake money for 6 months. Track results religiously. If you can't make money with no risk, you definitely won't make money with real risk.
The Resurrection: A Second Chance
This article wasn't written to discourage you. It was written to save you.
The 9% who profit in options aren't luckier than you. They're not smarter than you. They simply understand the game better than you.
They know:
- Options are a tool, not a lottery ticket
- Time is the enemy of buyers, the friend of sellers
- Volatility is priced in before events, not after
- Position sizing matters more than entry timing
- The market is designed to exploit your psychology
- Survival is prerequisite to success
You've now seen the autopsy. You know how traders die. The question is: will you use this knowledge to become one of the survivors?
"The goal of a successful trader is to make the best trades. Money is secondary. If you're trading for money, you're already dead — you just don't know it yet."
— Ed Seykota
Close the trading app. Open a spreadsheet. Start tracking. Start learning. Start respecting the game.
Or become another statistic.
The market doesn't care about your hopes.
But it will gladly cash them in.