nithin kamath 36 started online broking firm zerodha in 2010 today his firm accounts for about 4 of the retail volumes on the bse and nse last year it made rs 65 crore in profits on revenue of rs 115 crore all in just six yearstell us about your background and how you got into online brokingi am the only business person in my extended family my mom is a veena teacher and dad was with canara bank they regretted sending me to engineering college as i did not enjoy it they stood by whatever i did and let me make those mistakes i started trading when i was 1718 years in 20002001 futures and options were introduced and i started trading online in 2002 i went bust i joined a call centre i worked at night and traded during the day it was an addiction in 2005 i met an acquaintance in a gym who was impressed by my trading summary he gave me a cheque for rs 25 lakh and the next day i quit my job in 2006 reliance money started and i became a subbroker for them so that it gave me a single terminal access to my accounts reliance money had 1000 subbrokers then but we used to generate more revenue than the other 999 put together in 2008 i was short on the market which means you make money when the market falls the market fell and i made serious money 800900 returns i then took a break and i suggested to my younger brother nikhil to take a shot at trading and later while he traded i worked to build a completelyonline brokerage business zerodha went live in august 2010whats the volume of trade you do on the bse and nsewe have 12 lakh clients and 4050 of our clients are active executing a trade once a quarter we are adding 800010000 accounts a month we do a turnover of close to rs 10000 crore a day which is 45 of the exchanges retail volumesto achieve those kind of numbers in such a short period you must have done something really different was it your lower chargeswhen we started the business we differentiated by being transparent the business till then was opaque so we started a blog which was the first in the financial services sector the blog which puts out posts giving investment advice and explaining financial terms is the most active financial blog in india a great stock market education programme theres a qa forum and i still spend two hours every day responding to people online a lot of people give us credit for lowering the prices in the industry zerodha charges a flat rs 20 for futures options and intraday trade and nothing for other trades that are longer term as against the industry norm of charging a percentage of the trade but whats more important for the business is transparency people keep coming back to