Options

This feature is in beta

The Options screen is in beta and is switched on for a limited number of users while we test it.

If you would like to try it, contact support and ask for it to be enabled on your account. There is no extra charge for it during the beta.

Because it is still being tested, expect it to change. Start with a small size on one account before you use it for real trading.

Where to find it

Open the menu and choose Trading → Options.

If you do not see the Options entry in the menu, it has not been enabled for your account yet. See above.

Pick an underlying and an expiry

At the top of the screen there are two lists:

• Underlying — the index or stock whose option chain you want to see. The list is grouped, and a small tag shows which market the chosen one is listed on.
• Expiry — the expiry date of the contracts, with how far away it is shown beside it.

Changing either one affects the strategy you have built so far:

What you change	What happens to your basket
Expiry, on a structure built from a template	The structure is rebuilt on the new expiry.
Expiry, on a basket you built by hand	The basket is cleared, because those strikes belong to the expiry you left.
Underlying	The basket is always cleared.

Build a strategy

There are two ways to build one, and you can mix them.

Click B or S beside a strike

Beside every strike there is a B button and an S button.

• Press B to buy that contract, or S to sell it. One click either way.
• Press the other button to switch that leg round.
• Press the same button again to remove the leg.

Pick a ready-made template

The Basket panel above the chain offers complete structures in one click, grouped by the view they take on the market:

• Neutral — Straddle, Strangle, Iron Condor, Iron Fly.
• Bullish — Bull Call, Bull Put.
• Bearish — Bear Put, Bear Call.

After you pick one, small controls let you shape it. First choose how the strikes are picked, with Strikes by:

• Steps — a fixed distance from the money, counted in strike steps. It stays where you put it, whatever the market does.
• Delta — strikes are picked by delta instead, so they sit nearer in a calm market and further out in a volatile one.

Then set the distances. There are two, and which ones appear depends on the structure:

Control	In Steps mode	In Delta mode
Width	How far out of the money the main strikes sit, counted in strike steps.	Short Δ — the delta to aim for on the main strikes.
Wing	The extra distance out to the protective wings, again in strike steps. Four-leg structures only.	Wing Δ — the delta to aim for on those wings.

So Width is the distance from the money to the main strikes, not the gap between two legs, and Wing is measured outward from those main strikes rather than from the money.

The basket lists every leg with its side, strike, contract type, lots and price, and shows the net credit or net debit of the whole structure. There is also a button to invert the whole structure and one to clear it.

The panel is headed Basket, so you can see what it is even before you have added a leg to it. Once there are legs, the heading is followed by the name of the structure and how many legs it has.

The payoff table

Under the basket there is a table headed Payoff at expiry. It is always visible — you do not have to open anything to see it.

It answers one question: if the underlying finishes at this price on expiry day, what is this basket worth?

The three figures in the header

Along the top of the table are the three numbers most people want first:

Figure	What it means
Max profit	The most the structure can make at expiry.
Max loss	The most it can lose at expiry.
Breakeven	The underlying price at which it makes neither. Structures with legs on both sides have two, and both are shown.

The rows

Each row is one price of the underlying, with the profit or loss beside it. The rows are not picked at a fixed interval. Instead, the table always includes a row for:

• every strike in your basket,
• every breakeven, labelled Breakeven, and
• the current price, labelled Now.

Strikes and breakevens are the only prices where the result changes direction, so they are never left out. The current price is always there too, because it is where you are reading from. Other rows are filled in around them to give you the range in between.

What the figures include

• They are for one basket at the quantities shown above the table. An account trading at a multiplier of 3 would make or lose three times these figures.
• They are before brokerage and taxes. Your real result will be a little worse than the table shows, and your real breakeven a little further away.
• They are the value at expiry, not the value today. A structure can be showing a loss today and still reach the profit in this table at expiry, and the other way round.

When the table cannot show figures

If a leg has no live price, the table does not print rupee figures. It says it is waiting for a live price on every leg instead. This is deliberate: without the premiums, every number in the table would be a guess, and a table of guesses looks exactly like a table of facts.

If some legs have a price and others do not, the table says so and works with the legs that do.

What “Unlimited” means

Where a max profit or a max loss would normally be, you may see the word Unlimited.

This is a real answer, not a missing number. It means that side of the structure has no cap, so there is no figure to print.

You will see it when a structure can keep gaining or keep losing as the underlying keeps moving in one direction:

• a naked short leg — an option you have sold with nothing bought beyond it to stop the loss,
• a ratio spread — where the legs on one side are bigger than the legs on the other, so the larger side runs away past the last strike.

If you add a leg that caps that side, the word is replaced by a number. A four-leg structure such as an iron condor is capped on both sides, so both figures are numbers.

Unlimited on the max loss is worth reading carefully. It means the structure has no worst case: the loss is not capped by the structure itself.

The full payoff chart

The table gives exact numbers. The chart gives the shape.

Click Full payoff chart under the basket to open it, and Hide full payoff to close it again. Whether you leave it open is remembered for the next time you use the screen.

The chart does not repeat the max profit, max loss and breakeven figures. The table above it already shows them.

The chart is the tallest thing on this screen, and on a phone it has no hover and no readable values. The table works everywhere, which is why the table is the one that is always on.

What the chain shows

Two sets of buttons control the chain, and they do different jobs:

• Strikes chooses how many strikes either side of the money carry live prices. Strikes outside that range show a dash.
• Rows only changes how many rows are drawn on screen. It does not add prices.

So if your legs sit far away from the money, widen Strikes, not Rows.

You can also switch the columns between Prices and Greeks.

The Greeks columns and their units

The Greeks view replaces the price columns with Delta, Gamma, Theta, Vega and IV. The same Greek is printed in different units by different tools, so the units used here are set out below. A number that looks wrong is very often just a different unit.

Column	What it measures	Unit used here
Delta	How much the option price moves when the underlying moves.	With respect to the forward.
Gamma	How much delta itself changes when the underlying moves.	Raw — per one point of the forward. It is not rescaled.
Theta	How much value the option loses as time passes.	Per calendar day.
Vega	How much the option price moves when implied volatility changes.	Per 1% of implied volatility.
IV	Implied volatility.	% annualised.

Gamma is raw, per one point of the forward. On a wide screen the column heading says so when you hover over it, but tooltips are not shown on a phone, so it is written here as well.

The Greeks are calculated values, not prices quoted by the exchange. Option terms explained covers what each one is for.

Review and place

When the structure is ready, click Review & place. A window opens showing every leg once more, and below it the list of accounts to place into.

Choosing accounts

• Every account starts ticked. Untick any you do not want.
• Use None to clear them all and then tick just a few — useful when you want to try the strategy on one or two accounts first.
• Use All to tick everything again.
• A line shows how many of your accounts are currently selected, and the Place button repeats it.
• Click a column heading to sort the list by account name, multiplier or available margin. It is sorted by name to start with.
• If you have saved any allocations, they appear as buttons above this list. Click one to tick exactly those accounts at their saved sizes.

Allocations

An allocation answers two questions at once: which of your accounts trade, and how much each one trades.

You can save as many as you like and give each one a name. Click Allocations on the basket, next to the leg table.

Why more than one. Traders rarely trade the same way every day. A common setup is one allocation for ordinary days and a smaller one for expiry day, when margin is higher. Another is one allocation for the accounts that take your full strategy and another for the accounts that take only part of it. Save each one once, then pick it with a single click on the day.

Creating one:

1. Click Allocations, then Create an allocation.
2. Give it a name you will recognise later, such as Normal day, buys.
3. Tick the accounts it should trade, and type a multiplier for each one.
4. The running total at the bottom shows how many lots one leg will place across the whole allocation. Available margin is shown beside each account so you can size against what it can actually carry.
5. Click Save allocation.

Using one. On the Review & place step, your allocations appear as buttons above the account list. Click one and it ticks exactly those accounts and sets each one’s size. Tick or untick an account by hand afterwards and the button stops being highlighted, because the selection is no longer that allocation.

If you have more than eight, the widest few are shown and the rest sit behind a +N more button.

Editing and deleting. Click Edit beside an allocation to change its name, its accounts or its sizes. Delete asks you to confirm with a second click, so a mis-aimed click cannot remove one.

Size per account

Each account trades a multiple of the basket you built:

• The Multiplier column shows what that account is set to. An account at 3× places three times the size you built.
• The Lots column shows exactly how much that account will trade.
• To change one account for this order only, click Edit quantity and type a number. That one is not saved.
• To change what an account always trades, save it in an allocation. Those numbers are saved and are used every time you pick that allocation.
• An account you tick by hand, that is not in the allocation you picked, trades at 1×.

If an account works out to less than one whole lot, the screen tells you and asks you to raise its multiplier, set its size by hand, or untick it — rather than placing part of a structure into it.

If you already use account groups

The first time you open the Options screen, your existing sizes are copied into an allocation called All accounts. Each account keeps the multiplier its group was set to, so nothing changes about how much you trade.

Two things are worth knowing after that:

• Changing a group in Settings no longer changes what this screen trades. Edit the allocation instead.
• An account that was in two groups of different sizes starts at 1×, because there was no single size to copy. Those accounts already showed 1× here before, so nothing has changed for them — but they are worth setting deliberately.

The reason for the change is that a group carries one multiplier for everybody in it, so sizing each account differently meant creating a group per account. An allocation holds a size against each account, so one allocation does the work of many groups.

Product type

Choose NRML to carry the position past today, or MIS for intraday, which your broker squares off before the close.

Directly under that choice, the screen writes out what you have picked in plain words — that NRML carries the position forward past today, or that MIS is intraday and your broker squares it off before the close, and that all legs go at market. It is ordinary text on the screen, not a tooltip, so it is there on a phone as well as on a desktop.

All legs are sent as market orders. This is deliberate — a limit order can rest unfilled, which would leave you holding only part of a structure.

The order the legs are sent in

Buy legs are always placed before sell legs, no matter what order you added them in.

This puts your protective long leg on before the short leg that increases your margin requirement, so a defined-risk structure is never briefly left as an unhedged short position. You do not need to be careful about the order you build in — the screen handles it.

Accounts are placed independently of each other, so a problem on one account does not stop the others.

After you place

The window then shows the outcome for each account, so you can see exactly what happened where. Keep this window open until you have read it — it is the only place that per-account result is shown.

The accounts are shown in two groups, and the ones that fell short come first.

• If anything did not go through, a red notice at the top says how many accounts were affected. Directly under it, each of those accounts is listed on its own, naming the exact leg that was refused — for example SELL PE 24000 failed — how many later orders in that account were never sent, and the message your broker sent back.
• Then a single green line lists every account that placed in full, with the order count, for example Placed in full — 8 accounts, 16 of 16 orders.

So you do not have to read through twenty rows to find the one that fell short, and you do not have to open your order book to work out which leg is missing.

The notice covers orders your broker refused while we were placing. An order your broker accepts and then rejects a few seconds later will not appear there, so the order-book check below still matters.

From there, Open Portfolio opens the Portfolio screen in a new tab, so you can watch the position while keeping the result in front of you. Check the Orders tab to confirm what actually reached your broker, and Positions to follow the structure once it is on.

Always check your order book. An order that is accepted by your broker can still be rejected by the exchange a moment later, for example for margin. The result shown here is what your broker accepted at that instant, so confirm on the Orders tab before you rely on it.

If something fails part way through

A basket can succeed everywhere, fail everywhere, or land somewhere in between. The result tells you which.

Outcome	What it means
Placed	Every leg went on in every account you chose.
Only partly placed	At least one account has some legs on and some not. You are holding an incomplete structure in that account.
Nothing was placed	No order reached a broker in any account. There is nothing open to undo.

How a partial result happens:

• Accounts are independent. Each chosen account runs its own legs. If one account is refused — most often for margin — that account stops there, and every other account carries on to completion. One account’s problem never takes the others down with it.
• Legs inside an account are in order, buys first. So an account that stops part way is more likely to be left holding the protective bought legs than a bare sold one.
• A leg has to go through in full. A very large leg is sent as more than one order, because there is a limit on how much can go in a single order. If any one of those orders is refused, that leg counts as not placed and the account stops there. This is deliberate: a bought leg that only half went through only half protects the sold leg that follows it, so the screen stops rather than sending a sold leg that is bigger than the protection you have.

Only partly placed is a warning, not a success. It means at least one account is holding part of a structure, which does not behave like the structure you built. The result window names the accounts that fell short and the leg that was refused in each, so you can see exactly where. Check that account’s order book at your broker, then either complete it or close what is open, by hand.

The screen does not cancel anything for you. If one leg of a pair was refused, the other leg stays live and the decision to keep it or close it is yours — whatever caused the rejection, usually not enough margin, would often defeat an automatic retry anyway.

Because each account runs on its own, accounts can also fill at slightly different prices, and a fast account may be a leg or two ahead of a slower one.

Commodity contracts

On commodity options — Gold, Silver and Crude Oil, including the mini contracts — the number you type is the exact quantity sent to your broker. It is not multiplied by a lot size, and the box says Qty instead of Lots to make that clear.

After the market closes

Once a market closes, the screen keeps showing the last traded price for every strike that traded while it was open, so you can still read the chain and compose a structure ready for the next session.

A strike we did not price during trading hours is different. We only learn a price when the strike trades, so if you widen Strikes or change the expiry after the close, those new strikes have never sent us a price and show a dash. This is not a fault, and nothing is missing — the line under the toolbar counts how many are waiting, and they fill in within seconds of the market opening.

Placing needs a live price on every leg, so the Place button waits for the market to open. Two separate things depend on those prices:

• The strikes. A template centres itself on the current price of the underlying. With no live price there is nothing to centre on, so the strikes it picks would be arbitrary rather than at the money.
• The figures. The net credit or debit, and every number in the payoff table, are worked out from the premiums of the legs. Without live premiums those figures would be guesses.

The screen tells you which of the two is holding it up. If there is no live price for the underlying it says the strikes are not at the money yet; otherwise it says how many of your legs have a live price and that every leg needs one.

Building a structure before the open is deliberately allowed, because that is exactly when people plan one. Only the placing waits.

The notice at the foot of the screen

At the bottom of the Options screen there are three short lines. They are always there.

• The risk. This screen sends real orders to your live accounts, often to several accounts at once, and an order cannot be taken back once it is sent.
• The beta state, and the one thing to do about it: check your order book at your broker after every basket you place.
• An invitation to tell us what you think, with a Send feedback button beside it.

Send feedback opens WhatsApp with a message already started, addressed to the same support number you use for everything else. It goes to a person, not to the support assistant — feedback is not a question, and it should reach someone who can act on it. Nothing about your account is put into the message; you write it yourself and you can see it before you send it.

Your feedback decides what gets built next on this screen, so it is worth sending both when something works well and when it does not.

What this screen does not do

• It does not decide what to trade. You choose the strategy, the strikes and the size.
• It does not tell you whether a structure is a good idea, or suggest a strike, an expiry or a size. The templates are shapes you can pick from, not recommendations.
• It does not place anything on its own. Nothing is sent until you click Place.
• It does not work out your margin requirement. It shows the available margin your broker reports for each account, so you can see which accounts have room. What a structure will actually need is decided by your broker and the exchange.
• It does not close the structure for you. Use Positions to square off when you want to.

New to options? Option terms explained covers call and put, strike, expiry, lot size, premium, breakeven and the common multi-leg shapes in plain English.