The short version
Zico has traded Indian derivatives for more than ten years — index options through every expiry regime NSE has tried, stock futures and options, and the arbitrage that sits between them. For three of those years he traded professionally on a proprietary desk and an arbitrage desk, where the job is not to have opinions about direction but to price risk precisely, hedge it, and be paid for the part nobody else wants to carry.
That experience shaped one conviction: the difference between a desk trader and a retail trader is rarely intelligence or discipline. It is that the desk sees the market priced — live greeks, the straddle as an expected move, exact breakevens before entry, alerts that watch levels so a human doesn't have to — while retail sees a chain of numbers and a chart. Finostat exists to close that gap.
“On a desk you never put a trade on without knowing what it costs to be wrong. Retail traders are asked to guess that number. I wanted to give them the desk's answer, on their phone, for the price of a few coffees.”Zico Karmakar
What the desk years taught
Every structure has a fair price. If the market is charging less than the risk is worth, that is the trade — whatever the chart says.
Arbitrage desks survive by assuming the 4% overnight gap happens this week. Most retail losses are position sizes that assumed it never would.
Options are volatility instruments dressed up as directional ones. Know whether you are buying or selling it, and at what percentile.
A desk has eyes on every level all day. A person with a job does not — so the server should carry the alerts, not the trader's attention.
What he built
Finostat is a live options terminal for NSE and BSE — every listed equity and F&O contract streamed in real time, on-demand option chains with Black-Scholes greeks computed on the server, a strategy builder with exact breakevens and payoff, server-side alerts delivered by email, and a tick recorder building the history that backtesting needs. It is written to run lean on a single small machine, because the desk's edge was never the hardware.
Finch is the course he wishes had existed when he started: twelve chapters on derivatives, options, the Greeks, volatility, expiry mechanics, strategies and risk — every example pulled from today's live chain rather than a textbook, and free.
How he trades today
Mostly index options around expiry — defined-risk structures priced against the implied move — with stock options where the volatility skew pays for the risk, and the occasional cash-and-carry or calendar arbitrage when the basis gets lazy. He journals every trade, sizes by worst plausible loss, and still reads the option chain before the news every morning.
Get in touch
Questions about the product, partnerships, desk-side tooling, or a trade you want a second opinion on the pricing of: write to him directly.