Internet access onboard has become far more common in recent years, and with it, something new: idle hours that used to mean a book or a movie now just as often mean a trading app open on a phone. Direct stocks vs mutual funds is a fair question to think through either way — but before getting into the trade-offs, it’s worth looking at what SEBI’s own data says about how that idle-hours trading actually tends to go.
The number worth knowing before you open a trading app
SEBI’s own study found that 93% of individual traders in the equity Futures & Options segment lost money between FY22 and FY24, with aggregate losses exceeding ₹1.8 lakh crore over those three years. SEBI’s newest follow-up study, covering FY25-FY26, found the picture is sharpest exactly where a lot of newer traders sit: close to 88.5% of traders under 30 lost money in F&O in FY26 — the highest loss rate of any age group in the study — even as under-30 traders now make up 43% of the entire individual trader base. This isn’t a brokerage’s marketing claim or a finfluencer’s opinion. It’s the regulator’s own data, published to warn people before they start, not after.
Direct stocks vs mutual funds: what you’re actually trading off
Buying a stock directly means picking one company, researching it properly, and tracking it over time — a real, ongoing time commitment, not a one-time decision. A mutual fund does the same job, spread across many companies at once, researched and tracked full-time by a professional fund manager, for a fraction of the effort on your part. Direct stocks vs mutual funds isn’t really a question of which is “better” in the abstract — it’s a question of how much time, research, and single-company risk you’re actually prepared to take on yourself, versus handing that job to someone whose full-time work it is. F&O trading is a different, sharper version of the same trade-off, with leverage added on top — which is exactly why the losses in that segment run as high as they do.
Why idle hours onboard are the wrong place for it
A ship is already a high-stress environment — watchkeeping, isolation from family, responsibility for the vessel and everyone on it. F&O trading specifically demands the opposite of what that environment can spare: constant monitoring, quick decisions under pressure, and a genuine emotional toll when a position moves against you. Adding that stress on top of an already demanding routine isn’t a neutral use of free time — it’s stacking one high-stress load on another, at exactly the point in a career when staying sharp, rested, and focused on the job matters most. The years spent building a sailing career are worth protecting, not putting at risk for the sake of filling idle hours.
The tax filing difference nobody mentions upfront
There’s a compliance side to this too, separate from the stress and the odds. F&O income is treated as business income under the Income Tax Department’s rules, not capital gains — which means it’s reported in the more involved ITR-3, can require maintaining proper books of accounts, and can trigger a mandatory tax audit depending on how turnover and profit work out, regardless of how much capital was actually put in. A mutual fund SIP creates no tax event at all while it’s running — no yearly filing complexity, nothing to report — because gains are only realised, and only taxed, when you actually redeem. For a plan built to run quietly for decades toward retirement, that difference compounds too: one route stays essentially tax-invisible until the day you actually need the money, the other asks for active tax compliance every single year it’s running.
A lower-effort way to still be invested
None of this means staying out of the market altogether — it means choosing a way in that doesn’t demand constant attention. A SIP into mutual funds runs quietly in the background, needs no monitoring during a watch, and still puts the power of compounding to work over a full sailing career. If markets and how they work are genuinely interesting, that curiosity is better spent understanding the building blocks behind a mutual fund than trying to out-trade a market where, by SEBI’s own numbers, close to 9 in 10 people your age are currently losing money.
This post is general education based on publicly published SEBI data, not personalised trading or investment advice. As an AMFI-registered Mutual Fund Distributor (ARN 185676), we help clients build a mutual fund plan that doesn’t demand time you don’t have to spare. See our How We Help Mariners page or get in touch to talk through yours.
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