FOMO: IPOs, Tips and Sure Things

It is 9:40 on a Tuesday night, and Rohan is lying on his mattress in the Wakad flat, half-watching cricket highlights, when his phone starts buzzing and doesn't stop. The office group is having one of its evenings. Someone renamed it “Hinjewadi Hustlers” during a team outing last year, and nobody ever renamed it back. Forty-three unread messages. Then sixty. Then he stops counting.

It starts with a screenshot from Neha in QA: a big IPO opening on Thursday, and next to it, in bold green, its grey-market premium. “GMP dekho! Listing pe seedha profit.” A minute later someone posts the same figure from a different app, as if two screenshots made it twice as true. Then a voice note from Kunal: “Bhai, sab apply kar rahe hain. Meri wife, mera saala, poori society. Form bharo, kya jaata hai?”

Then Akash, the one with the car from the Lonavala trip, posts the message that ends every argument. A screenshot from his trading app: an options trade from that afternoon, with a profit next to it that is a little more than Rohan's whole month's in-hand salary. Underneath, one line and a sunglasses emoji: “Aaj ka kaam ho gaya.” The group explodes. “Party kab?” “Sir, humein bhi sikha do.” Someone asks which app. Someone else asks if Akash sells a course.

Rohan's thumb hovers over the screen. He thinks of the festive bonus he parked in a separate account in Chapter 4, and of the rule he gave himself: nothing big leaves that account for two weeks. Six days are left on that rule. Tonight, six days feels like a very long time to sit on money while everyone else, it seems, is making it.

That feeling deserves a name, because it has made more money decisions than any spreadsheet ever has. The office group calls it FOMO, the fear of missing out. It isn't really greed. Rohan doesn't want to be rich tonight. He just doesn't want to be the only one left out: the one who hears in the cafeteria next week that everybody made money on the IPO except him.

This chapter is about that fear: the IPO everyone is applying for, the screenshot of someone's profit, the “sure-shot” tip. As always, there is no arithmetic for you to do. And this book will never tell you which IPO to apply for, which one to skip, or which stock to buy. It is only about what happens inside your head when the group lights up, and what to do before your thumb moves.

In Lucknow, the same evening finds Shalini on the family WhatsApp group. Her cousin Vinod bhaiya from Kanpur has forwarded a message from a Telegram channel he follows, one with “over a lakh members”, as he likes to point out. The message has a small company's name, a buying price, a “target” for three days later, and a line in capital letters: “SURE SHOT. 100% SAFE. SIRF AAJ TAK.” Under it Vinod has added his own words: “Pichhle teen tip sahi nikle. Tumhara arrear aane wala hai na, thoda isme daal do.”

Anil reads it twice. The DA arrear from Chapter 4 hasn't reached their account yet, but its four jobs are already written in Shalini's notebook, and none of them says “Vinod bhaiya's tip”. Still, Anil looks up from his phone. “Teen baar sahi nikla hai, Shalini.” Notice what pulls him. Not the company, which he has never heard of. Not the price. The three times it was right.

Shalini has spent twenty years in a government office reading the pages of files that nobody else reads. She types one question into the group: “Bhaiya, yeh channel chalata kaun hai? SEBI mein registered hai?” Vinod replies with a laughing emoji, and then: “Arre, sab log isse kama rahe hain.” That is not an answer, and both of them know it.

Rohan's evening and Shalini's are really the same evening in different clothes. In both, the proof on offer is other people: everyone is applying, everyone is earning, the last three tips worked. Nobody in either group has shown a single fact about what usually happens to people who do this. So let's go and find one.

Think about when people post a trading screenshot. You post one on the day you make money. On the day you lose, you close the app, put the phone face down and tell nobody. So a group chat is not a fair picture of what happens to traders. It is a highlight reel: everyone's best day, and nobody's worst.

Akash's screenshot is real. What the group can't see is the rest of his year. For the kind of trading he was showing off, futures and options, or F&O, there is one place where almost everybody's full year is visible at once: the market regulator's own data.

In September 2024, SEBI published a study of more than one crore individual traders in equity F&O across three years, from 2021-22 to 2023-24. It found that 93 out of every 100 of them lost money, on average around ₹2 lakh each over the three years, costs included. Only about one trader in a hundred made a profit of more than ₹1 lakh. And more than three out of four of those who lost money went on trading anyway.¹

The next year looked much the same. SEBI's follow-up study, published in July 2025, found that about 91% of individual F&O traders made a net loss in 2024-25, and that their combined losses had grown sharply over the year before.²

In its latest study, released in August 2026, SEBI found that fewer people traded F&O in 2025-26, and the share who lost money dipped a little, to 87.7%. That is still close to nine in ten. And young traders are not the exception: among those under 30, 89% ended that year with a loss.³

Don't read those as maths. Picture them instead. Imagine ten colleagues around one cafeteria table, all of them trading F&O. In a typical year, about nine of them end the year down. The one who ended up, or the one who had a great Tuesday, is the only one you ever hear from. Akash's screenshot may be completely true. It is just one day, from one person, chosen by that person.

A group chat shows you everyone's best day. The regulator's data shows you everyone's whole year.

Later that week, over chai near the office gate, Akash tells Rohan something he never posted. That Tuesday was his best day in three months. The month before, he had lost more than his salary and borrowed from his elder brother to cover it. He says it quietly, the way people talk about a hospital bill. “Group mein yeh thodi daalta hoon, yaar.”

If the data is that clear, why does the group still feel more convincing? Because our minds were never built to read a regulator's study. They were built to watch the people around us. Here are the pulls at work on that Tuesday night. Every one of them is normal, and every one of them can be caught once you know its face.

The crowd as proof. “Sab apply kar rahe hain” is the strongest sentence in the group, and it says nothing at all about the IPO. When lots of people do something, the brain takes it as a sign that it must be safe, or smart, or both. Long ago that habit kept people alive: if everyone in the village ran, you ran too. In a WhatsApp group, it means a money decision gets made by a voice note from Kunal's brother-in-law.

Only the winners are visible. This is the screenshot problem again. The people who lost are silent, so the crowd we can actually see is made up mostly of winners, and our sense of “what usually happens” gets built from them. A tip that worked gets forwarded. A tip that failed quietly disappears. Vinod remembers three right calls, and nobody in the family is counting the wrong ones.

Recent feels certain. If the last few IPOs everyone talked about listed above their price, the next one feels sure to do the same. The mind quietly treats the last few weeks as a forecast for the next few days. But markets have moods, and moods change without asking anyone first.

Fast money makes salary feel slow. This one is quiet and strong. Rohan works a whole month for his salary. Akash's screenshot shows about that much made in one afternoon. Placed next to it, the monthly salary, the small savings transfer on the 1st, the future bucket from Chapter 1, all begin to look embarrassingly slow. That comparison has never made anyone rich. It only makes patience feel foolish.

Missing out stings more than losing. Oddly, many of us would rather lose money along with our friends than miss a gain our friends made. A loss in company feels like bad luck. A missed gain, alone, feels like stupidity, and nobody wants to be the stupid one in the cafeteria. FOMO runs on that second feeling.

And you are far from alone in listening to the group. SEBI's Investor Survey 2025 found that about 59% of investors rely on friends, family and colleagues for information about market products, and 56% turn to financial influencers on social media. About a third use online groups such as Telegram and WhatsApp. And 62% said they make some of their investment decisions based on what finfluencers recommend.⁴

Listening to people you trust isn't foolish. It is how most of us learnt to cook, to drive and to file a tax return. The trouble starts when the crowd stops being a place to learn and becomes the reason to act.

For the curious: researchers call the crowd-as-proof effect “social proof”. The screenshot problem is “survivorship bias”. Giving the latest events too much weight is “recency bias”. And the extra sting of missing out is close to what they call “regret aversion”. You don't need the names. Spotting the feeling as it arrives is enough.

Sometimes the crowd isn't even real. On 22 October 2026, SEBI issued a caution about stock tips offered in invitation-only WhatsApp groups. It described unregistered people posing as market experts, mostly using overseas numbers, sharing buy and sell calls in the name of free investor education. To make the calls look believable, some members, acting together with the operators, post false claims of profit and praise the “expert”. SEBI's name for this is astroturfing: fake support dressed up as the real thing.⁵

The same caution describes what happens when such a group is shut down: members get a message, usually from a new number, saying the old group was banned and inviting them to join a new one. SEBI asks investors to treat that message as a red flag and leave, never to open an account on or send money to an app suggested in such a group, and to deal only with SEBI-registered intermediaries.

An earlier caution, from April 2025, listed the “exclusive” offers that scamsters use on social media and in private groups to reel people in. Two of them are worth remembering in an IPO week: IPOs at a discounted price, and “sure shot allocation of IPO”. Nobody can sell you a guaranteed IPO allotment on a Telegram channel. The offer itself is the warning.⁶

And in August 2026, SEBI cautioned investors about “live trading strategies” streamed on social media: people who present themselves as experts, give real-time calls on when to enter and when to exit, and run chat boxes beside the stream where unregistered advice changes hands. Its advice was plain: don't trust such claims, and don't base investment decisions on those sessions.⁷

None of this makes Vinod bhaiya a fraud. He is almost certainly a sincere man who saw three tips come good and wants his cousin to share the luck. But the channel he follows has the shape SEBI keeps warning about: an expert nobody has checked, a promise of certainty, a deadline, and a crowd of happy replies that nobody can verify. That shape is worth recognising, no matter who forwards it to you.

The following week, as it happens, Vinod's channel vanishes. The next morning a new link lands in the family group from a number nobody recognises: the old group was “banned due to platform risk controls”, please join the new one. Shalini recognises the line almost word for word from the SEBI notice she read on her lunch break. She sends the notice to Vinod bhaiya privately, with no comment, and gets on with her day.

Now back to the IPO in the office group, because an IPO is not a tip. It is a regulated event, with documents. An IPO, or initial public offering, is when a company sells its shares to the public for the first time, before they start trading on a stock exchange. You apply during the few days the issue is open, at a price within a range the company has announced, in fixed bundles called lots. When you apply through UPI, the money is only blocked in your account, not taken. That small detail matters here: blocked money doesn't feel spent, which makes applying feel almost free.

Every IPO comes with a long document called the Red Herring Prospectus, or RHP. It is the company's own account of what it does, why it wants the money, how it has been doing, and what could go wrong. Almost nobody in the office group has opened it. You don't need to read hundreds of pages. Just the early sections tell you what the company sells, where the money will go, and the list of risks the company itself has to put in writing.

Then there is GMP, the grey-market premium: the green number in Neha's screenshot. GMP is unofficial. It comes from an informal, unregulated market outside the stock exchanges, it has no official source, and it can swing sharply within a single day. Two apps can show two different GMPs for the same IPO at the same hour, which is exactly what happened in the group. Treat it as a mood reading, not a promise. Sometimes the listing lands close to it, and sometimes far from it, in either direction.

Then allotment. When an IPO gets many more retail applications than it has lots to hand out, not everyone who applies gets shares. So “sab apply kar rahe hain” cuts both ways: an IPO that everyone is crowding into is also one where a single application is less likely to be allotted. A free tool shows how this works from an IPO's live retail subscription, and why applying for more lots doesn't improve your chances in the retail category.

And listing day is only one day. SEBI's monthly bulletin for July 2026 looked at the IPOs of June. For the bigger, mainboard IPOs, listing-day gains moved in step with how heavily each issue was subscribed. In the smaller SME segment, 12 of the 19 IPOs listed at or above their issue price, and two gained 90% on their first day. Which also means seven didn't. You can guess which ones made it into the office groups.⁸

None of this tells you whether to apply for any IPO, and this book never will. That decision is yours to make after the facts, not after the screenshots. The live IPO list on PaisaTools shows what is open, the price band, the lot size and the live subscription, with GMP clearly marked as unofficial.

Chapter 4 ended with a rule for lump sums: park the money, and wait two weeks before anything big. FOMO needs a cousin of that rule, because FOMO always arrives with a deadline. “Sirf aaj tak.” “Kal band ho jayega.” The deadline is the trick. Here are four habits small enough to use while the phone is still buzzing.

Habit one: the overnight rule. A money decision that began in a group chat never gets made on the same day. Sleep on it. An IPO usually stays open for a few working days, so one night costs you nothing but the rush. A tip that can't wait one night was never meant to be checked. Mute the group if you have to. The messages will still be there in the morning. The urgency, usually, won't.

Habit two: read before you apply. Before any IPO application, spend twenty minutes with the basics in its RHP: what the company does, why it is raising money, and the risks it lists about itself. If you can't explain the business to a friend in two sentences, you are buying the group's excitement, not the company. For a tip, the check is even shorter: is the person giving it registered with SEBI, and what do they gain if you act on it?

Habit three: decide the amount before the excitement. On a calm evening, pick the most you are willing to put into anything this risky: an amount whose loss would sting but would never touch rent, EMIs, family money or your cushion. Write it down. Then, when the group lights up, the only question left is whether this one is worth part of that amount. The amount itself is not up for debate. It is the same idea as Chapter 1's no-guilt fun money: a fixed limit makes you choose, an open one makes you chase.

Habit four: never borrow for it. Not a personal loan, not a credit card, not a pay-later app, not money a relative lent you, and not the arrear lines already written in Shalini's notebook. Borrowed money turns a disappointment into a debt, with an EMI that keeps arriving long after the excitement has gone. Chapter 3 of this book is about what those EMIs do to a month. Akash learnt it from his elder brother, one awkward phone call at a time.

Decide the amount when you are calm. Decide the IPO when you are informed. Never let the group decide either.

Rohan's Tuesday ended the slow way. At 10:15 he muted the group, which felt rude and also wonderful. The next evening he opened the IPO's RHP, read the business section and the first pages of risks, and wrote one figure in his notes app: the most he would ever put into anything this jumpy, taken from his fun money and not from the parked bonus. Whether he applied for that IPO isn't the point of this chapter, and this book won't tell you. What changed was the order. The amount came first, and the excitement second.

Shalini's version was even shorter. On Sunday, at the dining table, she showed Anil the SEBI notice about WhatsApp groups, then opened her notebook to the four lines for the arrear. “Inme se kaunsi line Vinod bhaiya ki tip ko de doon?” Anil laughed and let it go. When the arrear finally comes, the four lines will still be four.

Three small steps. The first two need a screen, the third only a pen.

Step 3 needs only a pen. Write two lines where you will see them: the most you can afford to lose on anything risky this year, and your own cooling-off rule, something like “no money decision from a group chat on the same day”. Then, the next time the group lights up, the hard part will already be decided.

Next, in Chapter 6, “Log Kya Kahenge”: a cousin's wedding in Surat, and the questions start weeks before the first haldi. How big should the gift be? Which outfit for which function? Could a small loan cover it, “just this once”? Meanwhile in Lucknow, Anil's niece is getting engaged, and the gift has to be “proper.” How much of what we spend is really for us, and how much is for the people watching?

This chapter is for education only. It is not investment, tax or legal advice, and it does not recommend applying for or avoiding any IPO, or buying or selling any stock, derivative, fund, app or service. GMP is an unofficial, unregulated figure with no official source, not a forecast. SEBI's own studies show that most individuals who trade futures and options lose money. Before any decision, read the company's offer documents and the exchange's notices, check that anyone advising you is registered with SEBI, and for decisions about your own money, speak to a SEBI-registered adviser. The facts above come from the SEBI documents linked beside them. Rohan, Shalini, their families, colleagues, the office group and the Telegram channel are made up, though you may well recognise the group chat.