Honestly, most beginners earn nothing or lose money in their first year of trading. Nobody can give you a typical return, and anyone who quotes a fixed monthly figure is selling something. A realistic first-year goal is to protect your capital while you build a tested process.
The official numbers back this up. In FY26, about 90% of individual F&O traders in India lost money, with an average loss of about ₹1.16 lakh per person, and 88.5% of traders under 30 lost money. In FY25, individual traders together lost ₹1,05,603 crore. These are not small sample surveys; they come from exchange data.
Why does it go this way? Beginners usually trade too often, use too much size, skip stop-losses and underestimate costs. Take a trader with ₹1 lakh who takes six intraday trades a day. Even if wins and losses roughly balance, brokerage, STT and slippage slowly drain the account.
A better way to measure progress in year one: are you following your written rules on at least nine out of ten trades? Is your average loss smaller than your average win? Has your maximum drawdown stayed within what you planned? If yes, you are building something. Income comes later, if at all.
Our Intraday & Swing Trading course is built around that kind of measurable discipline rather than profit promises. Our classes are educational; we don’t give tips.