Because of the constant booming stock market, the lot size in futures and options market desperately need revision.
eg: Essar Oil is quoting close to 350 and has a lot size of 5650 shares which makes a single contract worth about 1.9 Million INR (worth more than the entire portfolio of majority of the investors)
Similarly NIFTY (the most popular contract) has a lot size of 50. Being trading at 6218, it makes a single contract size of 310k INR.
This huge lot size has introduced illiquidity in the market. Because very few traders have the nerves to trade in such big lots.
Because of low volumes and huge margin requirements, nearly all the trade happen in the near month contract (i.e. ones that end on last thursday of the same month)
Also the spreads are very large. Which leaves a lot of room for arbitrage.
The solution would be to chop down the lot size to reflect the recent surge in the price. But NO, NSE had to introduce a new contract MINIFTY… (basically NIFTY with a lot size of 20)
I would have welcomed this change had it been a new index with a different basket of shares/weights, but it is no different than ordinary NIFTY.
I have no idea why the stock market has to complicate things so much?
Why should the same scrip/index trade under 2 different names?
Reducing the lot size from 50 to 20 is a welcome move, but is it that revolutionary that you need to rebrand it?
Also one more question… BSE sensitive index is the most widely recognized index to measure the market sentiments. But why doesn’t BSE’s index trade in the futures market like NIFTY and other sector index?
