For nearly three years, an Army officer measured his days not by drills or field exercises, but by candlestick charts.
It began in 2022, when a college friend persuaded him to try futures and options (F&O) trading. The officer, who wished to remain anonymous, opened a trading account with ₹10,000. YouTube videos turned chart patterns into seemingly simple rules. His first few trades earned him close to ₹80,000 in profits.
Three years later, he was sitting on ₹48 lakh in losses.
The losses accumulated slowly. A government salary of over ₹1 lakh arrived every month, giving him the liquidity to keep trading. And every loss came with the belief that the next trade would recover what the previous one had wiped out.
“There would be consecutive five or six days when I gained ₹10,000 or ₹15,000 every day. Then one trade would wipe out everything,” the 30-year-old recalled. “Every loss felt like I'd figured out my mistake. Every big gain gave me the confidence to continue. It was a loop.”
He finally stopped last year after a demanding field posting left him with neither the time nor reliable internet to trade. A three-month break from constantly tracking the markets was enough to break the cycle.
“My savings are exhausted and it will take at least another two years to repay debt and start saving again,” he said.
His story is familiar to financial advisers working with serving and retired defence personnel. They say interest in direct stocks, intraday trading and F&O has risen since the pandemic, when online activity surged and a powerful market rally followed.
Easy money enters the barracks
The derivatives market has exploded in recent years, aided by smartphone trading apps, low-fee brokerages and social media content promising financial freedom.
Defence personnel have not been insulated from that wave, said Sanjeev Govila, an army veteran and chief executive of Hum Fauji Initiatives, a corporate registered investment advisor (RIA) with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) dealing exclusively with the armed forces.
““We have seen a noticeable rise in interest in direct stocks, intraday trading and F&O over the past four to five years among defence personnel. The increased interest roughly coincided with the pandemic, when online activity rose sharply and trading apps made market access almost effortless,” said Govila.
Experts say younger officers and soldiers are driving much of the interest. High starting salaries, which have risen substantially after successive pay commissions, large disposable savings early in service and social media exposure have created fertile ground for speculative trading.
Abraham Cherian, a retired army officer who is now an RIA, has noticed the same shift.
“Accommodation, rations, medical facilities and transport mean that a significant portion of income remains unspent for young officers, especially during field postings where opportunities to spend are limited," Cherian said. Finfluencers and civilian peers who claim to be making money through derivatives only reinforce the belief that trading is another skill waiting to be mastered, he added.
T.S. Anand, an army veteran who now runs a mutual fund distribution business, says social media has changed expectations. “Selectively displayed profits and glamorous lifestyles create unrealistic expectations, making many believe trading is an easy way to generate income.”
The numbers tell a different story. According to a Sebi FY25 study , about 91% of individual traders lost money in derivatives, with combined losses at ₹1.05 lakh crore. Net losses rose from ₹74,812 crore a year earlier.
As per a Mint report, losses are likely to have remained high in FY26, underscoring how the odds continue to be stacked against retail derivatives traders.
Yet participation continues to rise. The first few profitable trades can also reinforce the wrong lesson.
Another army veteran who took early retirement experimented with derivatives after leaving the service and remembers making substantial profits early on. At one stage, he had accumulated nearly ₹15 lakh in gains on ₹5 lakh of capital. The confidence lasted until a series of losing trades erased all the profits and left him with an additional ₹8 lakh loss. “Trading in F&O was two years of arduous mental agony. I bowed out after that.”
He now invests only in fundamentally strong companies.
A retired officer of the Indian Navy followed a similar trajectory. Armed with an MBA in finance and years of tracking global commodity markets as part of his job in the Navy, he believed he understood crude oil and bullion well enough to trade futures.
That conviction evaporated when global events overturned assumptions that had looked perfectly logical on paper. “I underestimated the risks,” he said. “I realized that understanding markets conceptually and trading them successfully are two very different things.”
He exited within two years with marginal losses and now sticks to mutual funds for long-term investing.
Why the next trade is so hard to resist
The behaviour cannot be explained through financial literacy alone, said Biju Dominic, chief evangelist at Fractal Analytics. For defence personnel, he said, life after retirement—and greater exposure to social media while serving—can fundamentally alter the reference points shaping financial behaviour.
“Military life is structured with the people around you having similar careers, similar incomes and similar lifestyles. Retirement or social media changes that reference point. You move into a completely different context where people discuss wealth, higher salaries and financial success,” Dominic explained. “Context has a huge influence on behaviour.”
Dominic also points to what behavioural scientists call reactance—the tendency to gravitate towards activities that were previously restricted or discouraged. Once people leave a highly structured environment, they may embrace behaviours that symbolise freedom, including speculative investing.
Then there is risk compensation. “The safer people feel, the more risk they tend to take. Research has shown that people drive faster wearing seat belts because they feel protected. A similar mechanism may operate when someone has the security of a regular salary or a pension,” Dominic said.
The army officer who lost ₹48 lakh said his salary gave him the liquidity to keep taking bigger positions after every setback.
Anand said defence personnel's profile as government employees with stable incomes also makes them easily eligible for personal loans, keeping the capital flowing. But he cautions against blaming government salaries alone.
“Financial security may provide the capacity to take higher risk, but it’s not the primary behaviour.”
Govila agreed.
“The stronger drivers are overconfidence, ego and the addictive nature of leveraged trading. The salary often sustains the behaviour rather than creating it.”
He recalled the case of a serving officer who has accumulated nearly ₹6.5 crore in trading losses over 3-4 years.
“Academically brilliant and analytically gifted, he began with self-funded trades that generated impressive returns. As profits increased, so did his conviction that he had mastered the markets and he started margin trading. When markets turned, he began borrowing from banks, relatives, course-mates and acquaintances to recover earlier losses. As of today, his provident fund, investments and savings are all used up and he has started getting court orders from the court,” Govila said.
The stories differ in scale. The pattern does not.
Everyone Mint spoke to had learnt the same lesson: F&O trading is no shortcut to wealth. It requires experience, discipline and continuous learning.
As the navy veteran aptly described it: “The skills of a fauji and those required in trading are poles apart. Armed forces are trained to make instinctive decisions. Whether it's in combat or at sea, situations change rapidly and you don't always have time to analyse everything. You react based on training and instinct. In trading, however, instinct has to be set aside. Decisions need to be analytical and unemotional. That requires completely rewiring your mindset.”