Mind Over Markets by Zerodha Varsity
We uncover finance topics, make them insightful in unconventional and fun ways, and deliver them straight to your inbox.
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What they write about
Educational finance writing from an Indian brokerage's learning arm. Recurring subjects include how to research and discover stocks, India's GDP and economic statistics, foreign investor flows, taxation, personal decisions such as loan prepayment, and long-running debates about passive investing.
- financial education
- indian markets
- economics
- personal finance
- passive investing
- taxation
Recent examples: Why the market’s best-performing index keeps changing · Added a nominee? That's only half the job.
Written from Mind Over Markets by Zerodha Varsity’s own published post titles and openings in Sep 11, 2026. It describes the subjects the newsletter covers, not its views, and is not investment advice.
Most-mentioned tickers
Symbols named in the headline of a post from the last 30 days, most-covered first. The number is how many of those posts mentioned it.
Read from 1 post headline in the last 30 days. A newsletter that names a company only in the body of a post will not appear here, and a mention is not a recommendation — it only means the symbol came up.
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
67K on Sep 10, 2026 → 71K on Sep 30, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #47 today · #48 a week ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 21 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 9%
- Best rank seen
- #46
- Rank, 7 days
- +1 place
- Subscribers added
- +4.0K
- Followers added
- +4.3K
- Posts
- 12
- Reactions per post
- 116
- Reactions tracked
- 2.3K
- Tickers covered
- 1
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 29, 2026
since tracking began
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 20 posts
in tracked posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: How people are using AI to manage money — 210 reactions on Aug 15, 2026.
Recent posts
- Why the market’s best-performing index keeps changing
Markets are down. Screens are red, and foreign investors are selling. For someone who began investing recently, it can feel as though this is what the market always does. An investor who started at the beginning of 2020 has seen a very different journey. The Nifty 50 fell about 39% during the COVID crash, then climbed to a level roughly 115% above where it began 2020 by September 2024. That investor has seen both a frightening fall and a long rise. But someone who started near the end of 2024 arrived after that long rise. Nearly two years later, waiting for the market to make clear progress…
- Added a nominee? That's only half the job.
In 2019, Stephen Colbert asked Keanu Reeves a question you don’t usually hear on a late-night comedy show: “What do you think happens when we die?” Keanu paused for a moment and said, “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” For a few seconds, the studio went silent. The pain of losing someone can’t be replaced, and no amount of planning changes that. What good planning can do is spare the family a second kind of pain: going from pillar to post, between the bank, the broker, a lawyer, and sometimes a court, just to claim the money legally theirs. Two documents decide whether the…
- The River Below the Market
Liquidity is about flow. It tells us how easily something we own can be converted into the form we need, without losing too much value in the process. Cash in a bank account is already ready to use. A house may be valuable, but selling it can take months. If the owner needs money immediately, they may have to accept a much lower price. The same idea applies at a much larger scale. A company may own factories and machinery but still struggle to pay salaries if it does not have enough cash. A country may own land, gold and natural resources, but it still needs widely accepted currencies such as…
- Why does BRICS exist?
In 2001, a Goldman Sachs economist named Jim O’Neill wrote a research note to describe what he believed would be the economies that could shape global growth over the following decades. The countries he picked were Brazil, Russia, India, and China. In no particular order other than when the first letters were arranged in order, you’d get a nice sounding acronym — BRIC. That’s the whole origin story. It wasn’t a case of the countries coming together and deciding to join hands. It was a report by an investment bank that led to someone sitting in Delhi, Moscow, Beijing, or Brasilia to pick up…
- Managing money in your 20s
When you land your first job and that first payslip hits your account, everyone has something to say. Your parents say buy a home. An insurance uncle shows up and asks you to buy a policy that doubles your money in fifteen years. Meanwhile, you come across a finance video that says start early, invest in the stock market, there’s nothing like it. Your cousin in the US says she goes all in on Bitcoin and asks you to do the same. You hear an inspiring story about a couple of friends who pooled their money, took the risk, and started something on their own. While your colleague might say YOLO…
- India’s Rush to List: IPOs So Far
India’s IPO calendar for 2026 brings together an unusual mix of businesses, from hospitals and dairy products to financial services and logistics. Some have already begun trading, while others are preparing to offer their shares to the public. Many are familiar to investors through everyday life. Others are being discovered as their IPO plans make the news and circulate on social media. Reaching those investors once involved considerably more paper. In 2008, Reliance Power distributed more than four crore printed application forms through banks and collection centres across India. Around 50…
- India’s Debt-to-GDP isn’t telling you the whole truth
Nirmala Sitharaman says India’s Debt-to-GDP ratio will fall to 50% by 2030-31. It’s likely to be at 55.6% in this financial year. A line going down looks good. And finance ministers love this number because it’s a convenient and easy way to convince people that the government is financially disciplined. It’s a great metric in that sense. Except…it’s not. Because as per some economists, the Debt-to-GDP ratio might be flawed. I’ll explain. Let’s start from the very top; with debt. If I tell you that India’s total debt is ₹200 lakh crore, it gives you zero perspective. It is just a number…
- 2 years in equity, zero returns: Is this usual?
There is a line commonly attributed to Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” Meaning, we usually understand things better after they happen. But while they are happening, we still have to deal with them without knowing what comes next. If you have been investing in Indian equities over the last two years, you know what the second half of that quote feels like. For the first time since the COVID crash, two-year returns on the Nifty 50 have gone negative this year. If you put money into a Nifty 50 index fund around…
- The Art of Discovering Stocks
There are thousands of companies listed in the stock market, but most of us tend to follow only a small set of familiar names. Reliance, Infosys, TCS, ONGC, HDFC Bank and a few others keep appearing in the news, on social media and in everyday market conversations. Over time, these become the companies we naturally know and track. But what about the thousands of companies outside this familiar circle? Discovering a stock is harder than it sounds. A company usually needs some reason to first come onto our radar. It could be an IPO, a news article, another company we already follow, a sector we…
- Is India’s GDP growth 7.8%? Or 2.6%?
9 months ago, I wrote an edition of this newsletter titled “Why is India’s GDP being questioned? Again”. India had reported a GDP print of 8.2% for that quarter which was scarcely believable to many people. So I broke down why there were niggling issues with India’s GDP calculations back then. Today, the debate is back. Last week, India reported that the economy grew by 7.8% in the first quarter of FY27 (April-June). Just to be clear, this is when compared to the same period in the previous year. So, if India’s overall real GDP value was ₹100 during April-June 2025 and it is ₹107.8 during…
- GIFT City funds investing outside India: What you need to know
Say you want to invest in companies like Apple, Google, Nvidia, or Tesla. Or maybe you just want to buy foreign ETFs or funds that track global markets. If you are sitting in India, how do you do that? One way is to open an account with a foreign broker, figure out how to transfer money abroad and buy the stocks/ETFs yourself. This route comes with LRS remittance, foreign-asset reporting, dividend withholding tax and capital gains calculations and estate tax planning (that is a tax some countries charge on the assets of an investor who passes away to transfer them over to heirs). The only…
- What drives FII flows into India?
Every few weeks, the same headline comes back. Foreign investors have sold Indian stocks. Then, a few weeks later, foreign investors are buying again. The amounts being bought and sold are often large, running into thousands of crores. And because FII flows are tracked so closely, it is easy to feel like foreign investors have an outsized say in where Indian markets go. They certainly matter, but they are only one part of a much larger market. Think of markets like a city’s transport system. A city has metros, buses, cars, autos and pedestrians. They all use the same network, but for…
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Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: Mind Over Markets by Zerodha Varsity. Subscriber counts are Substack’s own rounded public figures, so week-on-week changes move in steps. beehiiv audience sizes are self-reported by the publisher and are not verified. Last snapshot: Sep 30, 2026.