Market on-ramp: accounts, screens, instruments, money and tax

Prerequisites none. Time: about 10 hours, spread over the first two weeks. Level: foundation (practical, light on maths). Primary sources: the investor pages of SEBI (https://investor.sebi.gov.in), NSE and BSE, the two depositories (NSDL, CDSL), AMFI and RBI; the Income Tax Department's site for tax; the NISM certification workbooks for structured background.

This module is for a reader who has never opened a trading account. It is deliberately practical. The rest of the course is mathematical; here mathematics appears only where it pays for itself: the future value of a SIP and the XIRR of irregular cash flows (0.4), the odds of an IPO allotment (0.5), the cost of a round trip (0.2) and the tax on a mixed year (0.7). Everything else is plumbing, vocabulary and habits.

Rules, charges and tax rates change often. Every changeable fact carries an as-of date and a source. Facts were checked on or before 6 Nov 2026 and are attributed to the official document that governs them (a SEBI circular, an exchange circular, an RBI direction, the Income-tax Act). Where that document itself could not be read in full and the detail rests on reports of it, the text marks the fact (verify): check it against the official text, or with your broker or the exchange, before acting on it. No broker, platform, fund or security is named or recommended; broker-specific features and fees are described generically, and brokerage enters every calculation as a parameter you set from your own broker's charge sheet.