BSE, NSE turnover jumps ahead of F&O March series

Chennai, Feb. 10 The Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange on Tuesday witnessed a surge in turnover, with stocks such as Unitech, GVK Power & Infrastructure, IFCI, DLF and Suzlon, Educomp Solutions attracting punters’ interest.

The BSE’s turnover jumped to Rs 3,726.87 crore from Monday’s turnover of Rs 2,836.19 crore and the number of trades went up to 23.15 lakh (18.99 lakh). The NSE saw its turnover jumping to Rs 9,723.82 crore (Rs 7,871.16 crore).

A lot of bulk deals have happened in these counters on the bourses. Ambit Securities Broking Pvt Ltd bought and sold over one crore shares of Unitech, while Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank were active in Educomp Solutions.

In most of these counters, Tuesday’s trading volume was much higher than their two-week average volumes.

Active counter

According to brokers, counters such as Unitech, GVK Power, IFCI, DLF, JP Associates, Suzlon, RNRL and HDIL generally traded actively in the F&O segment.

The NSE had increased the market lot for 243 stocks in the derivative segment. The upward revision ranges from two to 14 times.

Puravankara Projects saw its market lot zooming ahead 14 times to 7,000 from the current 500.

The stocks whose market lot rose 10 times are Brigade Enterprises, Development Credit Bank, IVR Prime Urban Developers, Kingfisher Airlines, Parsvanath Developers and Unitech.

IFCI’s market lot was revised upwards by eight times, while Suzlon and JP Associates lot sizes have increased six times.

“Players who built a short position in these contracts are now squaring up their positions, as from next series, they have to fork out higher margin for these contracts because of higher lot size,” said a Mumbai-based broker.

According to market participants, cross margining facility, which was available from Monday for all players on the NSE, also boosted trading volumes.

In December, SEBI allowed stock exchanges to introduce cross margining across market participants between cash and derivative markets. The facility was available only for institutional investors till recently.

Cross margining allows a market participant to reduce the margin payment required. Positions of clients in cash and derivatives segments to the extent they offset each other would be considered for cross margining.