Futures Trading and Retail Investor Contribution

#2
It looks like they want to bring back more dabba-trading. It's like they're not satisfied with the fact that they're killing the cash-market with high taxes that now they want to kill the futures market too.
 
#4
Of course, PRETENDING to care about retail investor is just a cover for doing whatever they want, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the big futures-players are pushing for raising the lot-sizes so that they'd have a bigger edge over the retail traders with respect to their capital; plus, the government is probably greedy for more STT money.

True but there are still contracts that are between 5-10 lacs, which will also go up further if this proposal goes through, & I presume the average price of an F&O contract would be closer to 15 lacs whereas it might be closer to 7-8 lacs right now.

And, it's funny how they talk up "speculation" as the bogeyman, & try to pretend that "investing" somehow doesn't involve speculating about the future of a company, which is inherently uncertain; so, "investing" isn't like Fixed-Deposits or something, & hence it is inherently speculative just like trading, the only difference being that investing involves speculation over a longer term whereas traders "speculate" in the short-term. Moreover, trading & speculating is what brings in the liquidity, which allows investors to enter & exit the markets with lower impact costs due to tighter spreads, so making things unprofitable for short-term traders also hurts the long-term investors.
 
#5
So, I collected yesterday's Cash & Futures volume for all of the F&O stocks, & the total Futures volume for all of the F&O stocks is only twice that of their Cash-market volume (Excel file attached below), which is hardly earth-shattering. So, it's the Options NOTIONAL volume that seems to be making up most of the rise that SEBI is talking about, & therefore, there's not enough justification for raising the Futures lot-sizes; not to mention, futures aren't as complicated instruments for retail traders to handle as options might be, so if SEBI was really honest (which is highly doubtful) about trying to reduce the difference in total volumes between Cash & Derivatives markets in order to "protect" retail traders then they should only be looking to raise Options lot-sizes, NOT Futures lot-sizes, & if anything, they should consider lowering Futures lot-sizes since Futures aren't the issue anyway, & lower Futures lot-sizes might actually HELP retails traders by offering them the opportunity to hedge the risks of their Cash-market positions, as required.
 

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