The Hindu Business Line : Trading activity drops in F&O segment

WITH the markets turning extremely bearish, trading activity in futures and options segment on the National Stock Exchange has been falling of late. Thursday was no exception as the NSE's S&P CNX Nifty plummeted by 1.90 per cent. About Rs 10,509-crore worth transactions took place on Thursday against Wednesday's turnover of Rs 10,247 crore. The figure is sharply lower when compared to the average daily turnover of 12,780 crore during March.

FII position: Cumulative FII positions, as percentage of total gross market position in the derivative segment as on March 17 was 21.92 per cent. While FIIs were net sellers on index futures on Wednesday, they were net buyers on individual stock futures.

Index futures: The spot Nifty closed the day at 1716.65 as against Wednesday's close of 1749.85. The near month Nifty March futures closed with a marginal premium of 0.65 points at 1717.30. Open interest position just improved to 50,663 contracts. The unmatched order book on the NSE suggests negative sentiment with the sell side quantity was overwhelmed by the buy side quantity by 2.30 times.

However, the April contracts closed at 1723.10 with a premium of 6.45 points to the spot close. Open interest positions also improved by over 61 per cent to 3,821 contracts.

CNX-IT: The CNX-IT witnessed the steepest fall of 2.44 per cent to 19810.90 points; the March CNX-IT futures also closed sharply lower at 19851.15 but with a premium of 40.25 points to the spot close. Open interest positions slipped marginally to 1,354 contracts.

Stock futures: Reliance was the most active among individual stock futures. Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Satyam Computer and SBI were also actively traded