A broker earns in two ways: handling your trades and/or deploying their own capital in the market.
Think of hiring someone to help you buy a house while they are also bidding with their own money.
It can be done, but suddenly, you start asking a different question: Whose interest comes first when both want the same opportunity?
A similar construct exists in broking.
→ Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) itself classifies stockbrokers based on whether they trade only for clients, only on their proprietary account, or do both.
→ Proprietary trading simply means a financial firm trades its own capital to earn profits for itself.
At Ventura, we made a deliberate choice to stay on the client side of that equation and not run a proprietary trading book.
That choice has survived almost everything else.
Sajid Malik and I started Ventura in 1994. Since then, terminals have become websites, websites have become apps, research has moved onto phones, and trading has become almost instantaneous.
Technology kept changing, but our focus on the client did not.
There is no proprietary trading P&L inside the business competing for attention with the people whose orders we execute.
In financial services, that matters.
Trust is built long before something goes wrong. It starts with how the business makes its money in the first place.
When the strongest business decision is the revenue stream you are willing to leave untouched.
When choosing a broker, do you ask whether it trades its own book?
