Last updated 10 September 2026
What wide, very wide, not traded and no quote mean on an option basket leg
- Nothing is wrong and nothing is blocked. The tag is information, and you can still place the basket.
- All legs go at market, so the gap between the buying and selling price is a real cost. The tag is an estimate of it.
- wide and very wide show a rupee figure — roughly what that leg's gap costs at the size it will send.
- not traded means nothing has ever traded on that contract, so its prices are only offers nobody has accepted, and a figure would be a guess.
- no quote means only one side of the contract is quoted, so the cost cannot be worked out at all.
- No tag is the normal case. The screen stays quiet on an ordinary, well-traded leg.
When this happens
- 1 A leg sits on a contract that is thinly traded — usually a strike far away from the money, or a far-out expiry — so the gap between its buying and selling price is large compared with its premium.
- 2 A leg sits on a contract that has quotes but no trades at all, so there is no traded price behind those quotes.
- 3 A leg sits on a contract where only one side is quoted, so there is no pair of prices to measure a gap between.
You built an option basket on the Options screen, and one of the legs has a small tag beside its value — a rupee figure, or the words not traded or no quote.
Nothing has gone wrong. The tag is telling you what placing that leg is likely to cost you, before you place it.
Why there is a cost at all
Every leg of a basket is sent as a market order. That is on purpose: a limit order can rest unfilled, and a half-filled structure does not behave like the structure you built.
The price of that certainty is the gap between the two prices quoted on a contract. You buy at the price sellers are asking, and you sell at the price buyers are bidding. On a heavily traded contract that gap is small. On a contract almost nobody trades it can be larger than the premium itself.
The tag exists because that cost is created by the screen’s own design, so the screen owes you the figure.
How the figure is worked out
For one leg:
(asking price minus bidding price) divided by 2, times the number of lots, times the lot size.
Here is an example with made-up round numbers. Say a contract is bid at 100 and asked at 102, you are taking 1 lot, and the lot size is 50.
- The gap between the two prices is 102 minus 100, which is 2.
- Half of that gap is 1.
- For 1 lot of 50 that is 1 times 1 times 50, which is 50 rupees.
The basket figure is every leg worked out this way and added up.
A leg we cannot work out is not counted as zero. It is left out of the total, and a short line tells you how many legs were left out. So when you see that line, the real cost is higher than the figure shown.
Why half the gap and not all of it
This is the most asked question about the figure, and the answer is simpler than it looks.
With a bid of 100 and an ask of 102, the fair price sits in the middle, at 101.
- You buy at 102. You now hold something worth 101. You are 1 worse off, not 2.
- You are 2 worse off only if you buy at 102 and then sell it back at 100. That is two trades, not one.
So going in costs you half the gap. Coming out again later costs you about the same again.
There is a second way to see the same thing. The trader on the other side of both deals buys at 100 and sells at 102. They earn 2, once. If we charged the buyer 2 and also charged the seller 2, that would be 4 rupees of cost, and 4 rupees was never paid to anybody. One gap is collected once and shared by the two sides who traded. Half each.
What each tag means
| Tag | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| wide (a rupee figure) | The gap is a noticeable share of what this leg costs. | Nothing, usually. Read it and decide. |
| very wide (a rupee figure) | The gap is a large share of what this leg costs. You will lose a real amount of money on the fill. | Consider a nearer strike or a nearer expiry, if that still suits your structure. |
| not traded | The contract is quoted, but nothing has ever traded on it, so those prices have never been tested. | Treat the fill as unknown. Start small if you go ahead. |
| no quote | Only one side of the contract is quoted, so there is nothing to work the cost out from. | The cost cannot be estimated. Treat it as unknown. |
On a desktop, hover the tag to read the full sentence. An untraded leg also gives its estimated cost there, where it reads as the guess it is. A no quote leg has no figure at all, because there is nothing to work one out from.
Why two of them show words instead of a number
not traded and no quote are the states we know the least about, so they deliberately do not print a rupee figure beside them.
A confident number next to an untraded contract would look more reliable than the plain “wide” leg beside it — when the untraded one is the leg whose prices have never been tested and whose fill is a guess. The number we trust least must not be the one we print largest.
Where the whole-basket figure is
On the Review & place window, above the account list, a line reads Spread already included. That is every leg added together. The leg table on the build screen carries the same total, under the legs.
It is stated against the rupee credit or debit of the basket, so you can see whether it is a lot. This cost is already inside the prices on your legs, so do not subtract it again. If a leg is wide, untraded or half-quoted, a short line under it says so, and says how many legs could not be worked out at all.
Most legs show nothing, and that is correct
A tag on every row would be a tag nobody reads. On an ordinary, well-traded leg the screen stays quiet.
So an untagged basket is not one the screen failed to check. It is one where there was nothing worth telling you.
It never stops you placing
The screen will not refuse a basket because a leg is wide.
A far out-of-the-money leg is legitimately wide — that is what those contracts are like — and refusing them would rule out structures that are perfectly reasonable to trade. The figure is there so the decision is yours and not a surprise.
It is an estimate, not a quote
The figure is worked out from the two prices showing at that moment. Your real fill depends on what is actually available when the order reaches your broker, and both prices move.
It also uses the best price on each side, and only that. If your order is larger than the quantity on offer there, the rest of it fills at the next price along, and your real cost is higher than this figure.
Read it as a rough size — is this a few rupees or a few thousand — rather than as the exact amount you will pay.
