Online brokerage platform Zerodha’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Nithin Kamath, in a social media post, spoke about the discussions over rising retail investors from India’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities may be a “little misleading.”
“There’s a lot of talk about a huge influx of traders from Tier 2 and 3 towns. This data may be a little misleading. Let me explain,” said Kamath in his social media post on X.
Explaining the issue, Nithin Kamath said that if people look at Kite by Zerodha’s trading activity, according to the KYC (Know Your Customer) addresses of the users, people can determine that there are several retail investors who are investing in the capital markets from the nation’s Tier 2 and 3 cities.
“If one looks at trading activity by looking at the addresses of users as per their KYC, you’ll see a lot of users from Tier 2 and 3 towns,” he said.
But if people track the IP addresses of the application’s users, then the bulk of the trading activity comes from the top 20 cities in India. Kamath cited that people do not change their addresses once they move to a new city, which accounts for the high number from smaller cities in India.
“However, if you look at user activity by the IP addresses they use to log in, then the bulk of the activity comes from the top 20 cities. This is because most people don’t update their address once they move to a different city,” said the Zerodha CEO.
Pune & Bengaluru
Cities like Pune and Bengaluru are witnessing a lot more trading activities as they are amongst those “go-to destinations” for people to relocate in search of work.
“This is why, for example, you see a lot of activity from Pune and Bangalore because they are among the go-to destinations for people relocating for work,” Kamath said.
The Zerodha CEO also emphasised that people should keep this factor in mind when “drawing conclusions” about the influx of investors into the market, the depth of the stock market from Tier 2 and 3 cities.
However, he also said that this data is only based on the customers from the Kite application, which is the in-house trading and brokerage platform developed by Zerodha. “It may or may not be true when compared to others,” Kamath said in his post.
Revamped Kite’s screener
Nithin Kamath, on Monday, 19 May 2025, launched a newly revamped version of Kite’s screener dashboard, which he claimed to be “much cooler” than the version before.
“We just revamped the Kite MarketWatch and made it much cooler,” said Kamath in his earlier post on X.
Custom groups, pre-built watchlist, more space, are among some of the changes which were made to the existing trading platform for the benefit and the ease of retail investors.
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