Chief Business Officer, Indiabulls Securities Ltd.
I run a broking business that builds and sells trading technology, so you would expect me to say artificial intelligence has changed everything for the Indian trader.
Walk through any trading conference today and you will hear that promise in a dozen versions. The market has been decoded. The edge is available, and it costs a monthly subscription.
I would rather say something more useful, and less exciting. AI is one of the most valuable things to happen to the Indian retail trader in a decade—but almost none of that value lies where the marketing says it does.
Start with what has genuinely changed. Automated trading in India is no longer a grey market. Retail algorithmic strategies routed through a broker now sit inside a defined framework, with orders traceable and the broker accountable for what runs on its platform.
That quiet shift matters more than any claim about predictive accuracy. A trader handing execution to software is no longer trusting a stranger on the internet. There is a name on the other end of that order.
The second thing that has changed is the trader. SEBI’s studies of 20 August 2026 show that active individual traders in equity derivatives fell by about a fifth in FY26 and aggregate losses moderated—yet nearly nine in ten still lost money.
I choose to read the fall in participation as deliberation rather than retreat. Technology should serve that deliberation, not undo it.
So what is artificial intelligence actually good at?
It is good at compression. A trader who once ran three screens, a spreadsheet and a WhatsApp group to track a handful of setups can now have the scanning done in the background and see only what crossed a threshold you defined.
That is a more reliable advantage than prediction, because it returns the scarcest thing a trader owns: attention.
It is good at consistency. Most of the damage in a trading account is not done by bad analysis. It is done in the four seconds between a stop-loss being hit and a trader deciding to give it a little more room.
Software does not negotiate with itself. When execution is automated, the rule you wrote on a calm Sunday is the rule that runs on a violent Thursday. That is discipline made executable—and it is the single most underrated benefit in this entire category.
“Automate your discipline. Never automate your hope.”
It is good at memory. A machine will tell you, without flattery, that the trades you take after a loss have cost you money for eleven straight months. Most of us do not keep that record, and would not enjoy reading it.
Now the harder half.
Artificial intelligence cannot supply conviction. It can tell you that a pattern has recurred; it cannot tell you whether you can sit through the drawdown that pattern requires. That remains yours.
These systems cannot know the future, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling a different product than the one they are describing. They extrapolate from what has happened. Markets occasionally decline to repeat themselves.
Automation cannot manufacture an edge out of a tool everyone owns. When the same models are available to every participant at similar cost, the model stops being the advantage. What you do with it becomes the advantage.
And it cannot correct a decision that was poor to begin with. According to SEBI’s data, more than half of index options turnover in India now sits in contracts expiring the same day. Automating a same-day-expiry position does not make it a strategy. It makes it a faster one. Speed helps a good decision and multiplies a poor one, and the machine has no opinion about which it is executing.
If you are evaluating an automated or algorithmic product, ask four questions:
- Who is accountable if it misfires?
- Is the strategy approved by the exchange, and does every order carry an exchange-assigned algo ID?
- What exactly does it automate—the analysis or the execution?
- And can you switch it off in one action?
A provider who answers all four plainly is worth your time. Be wary of one who leads with returns: exchanges do not permit brokers to refer to past or expected returns of algorithmic strategies in public communication. If you are shown a back-test, ask what it assumed: which period, which costs, which slippage, and what was left out.
“If an algo is being sold on its returns, it is being sold outside the rules.”
At Indiabulls Securities we have taken a deliberate view on this. Our automated execution product, IB Algo, was built to run a trader’s own rules faithfully, inside the regulatory framework, with the accountability resting with the broker, as the framework intends. We have not built a product that claims to think for you.
I believe the next decade of Indian trading will be won by firms that use technology to make their clients more disciplined rather than more active. That is the standard we build to, and the one I would hold any provider to, including us.
“Technology should not tell a trader what to do next. It should make sure they do what they already decided.”
Investments in securities market are subject to market risks. Read all the related documents carefully before investing.
This article is for investor awareness only and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to trade. Algorithmic trading does not guarantee profits and can amplify losses.
