F&O margin in India: SPAN, exposure, peak margin and what maintenance actually means
Margin is not a down payment on a position. It is a risk deposit the clearing corporation sizes to the position's worst plausible day, collected before the trade and re-tested through it. Understanding how that number is built, and why it moves, is most of what separates a trader who is never surprised by a margin call from one who is surprised by every one.
The short answer
To carry a futures or short-options position in India you post initial margin, built in two layers: SPAN margin, a model that charges the worst single-day loss across a set of price and volatility scenarios, and exposure margin, a flat buffer on top. Both are collected upfront, before the order is accepted. SEBI's peak-margin framework then verifies the money was actually there by taking random intraday snapshots, and any shortfall is penalised. Maintenance is what happens next: as the market moves, daily mark-to-market debits real cash from your account and the required margin itself changes, and your job is to keep what you hold above what is required, or be squared off.
Most retail traders meet this framework the expensive way, one penalty and one forced square-off at a time, and reverse-engineer the rule from the debit. That is a slow and costly teacher. The framework is not arbitrary and it is not secret: it is a small number of mechanisms that fit together cleanly once you see them in the right order. This guide takes them in that order. It explains what the margin number is made of, how and when it is collected, how the exchange checks that it was collected, what the penalty is when it was not, how mark-to-market quietly consumes margin day by day, why an option seller is margined and an option buyer is not, why a hedge earns a margin discount that vanishes the moment you break it, what happens to margin in the expiry week of a stock derivative, and how you can pledge holdings as collateral. It closes with what disciplined maintenance looks like as a daily habit, and with the primary SEBI and exchange sources for every rule cited, so nothing here has to be taken on trust.
What margin is, and the two things maintenance means
Start with the thing itself, because the word carries a misleading intuition from everyday finance. When you put down margin on a house or a car, it is a part-payment: your money plus the lender's money buys the asset, and the margin is your equity in it. Derivatives margin is not that. You have not bought anything. A futures contract is an agreement, and margin is a good-faith deposit against the loss that agreement could inflict on the clearing corporation if you walked away from it. The clearing corporation stands between every buyer and every seller and guarantees the trade, so its exposure is your default risk, and margin is how it makes that risk pre-funded rather than hopeful. This is why the size of the margin tracks the risk of the position, not its price, and why two positions of the same rupee value can carry very different margins if one is far more volatile than the other.
Once you hold the position, the word "maintenance" points at two distinct obligations that people tend to blur together. The first is that the required margin is not a fixed number you clear once at entry. It is recomputed as the underlying moves, as volatility rises or falls, and as your own positions change, so a requirement that was comfortable at nine-thirty can be binding by noon. The second is that the market takes cash from you daily along the way through mark-to-market, so even if the requirement stood perfectly still, your available margin would fall as an adverse position bleeds. Maintenance is the work of keeping the first number, what you hold, above the second, what is required, as both of them move. A margin call is simply the clearing corporation and your broker telling you that you have stopped doing that work, and a forced square-off is them doing the last part of it for you, at a price you did not choose.
Everything below is a closer look at one of the pieces of that picture. The pieces are worth learning as mechanisms rather than as rules to memorise, because rules change with each Finance Act and each SEBI circular, while the mechanisms they express are stable. The operational discipline we teach is built precisely around treating margin as a live constraint you manage, not a threshold you notice only when it is breached.
The initial margin stack: SPAN plus exposure
Initial margin, the amount blocked before you can open a position, is the sum of two components that answer two different questions. The larger and more intelligent component is the SPAN margin, from Standard Portfolio Analysis of Risk, the risk engine the clearing corporation runs on your portfolio. SPAN does not look at your position and apply a flat percentage. It revalues the entire portfolio under a fixed grid of scenarios, each a combination of the underlying moving up or down by graded amounts and its volatility rising or falling, sixteen scenarios in the standard array, and it records the loss your portfolio would take in each. The margin it charges is essentially the worst single-day loss across that grid, calibrated to cover the position over roughly a 99 percent one-day move. Because it works on the portfolio as a whole, SPAN is where the intelligence of the system lives: it can see that two of your positions offset each other and charge you less than the sum of their standalone risks, a point we return to when we reach spreads.
The second component, the exposure margin, is deliberately simpler. It is a flat buffer layered on top of SPAN to cover what a scenario model can miss: the gap between a 99 percent day and a genuinely extreme one, the risk that many positions move together in a stress, the friction of closing a book that has gone wrong. For index futures and options the exposure margin is currently set around 3 percent of the notional contract value; for positions in individual stocks it is higher, set at the greater of a fixed floor and a multiple of the stock's own recent volatility, because a single company can move far more violently than a diversified index. You do not compute either number by hand, and you should not try to: your broker's margin calculator and the exchange's published files carry the live values. What you need to carry in your head is the shape, initial margin equals SPAN plus exposure, and the fact that both are demanded before the trade, not after.
| Layer | What it covers | Indicative size | When it applies |
|---|---|---|---|
| SPAN (initial) | Worst single-day portfolio loss across the scenario grid, about a 99 percent one-day move | Varies by instrument and volatility; the larger part of initial margin | Upfront, before the order is accepted |
| Exposure | Buffer for extreme moves and correlation beyond the SPAN scenarios | Around 3% of notional for index; higher for single stocks | Upfront, with SPAN |
| Premium (options) | Full option premium payable by the buyer to the seller | The quoted premium | Buyer pays upfront; collected upfront since Feb 2025 |
| Mark-to-market | The day's actual loss on a futures position, in cash | The position's daily loss | Debited at daily settlement |
| Assignment | Settlement obligation on an option that is exercised or assigned | Net settlement value | On exercise or assignment |
| Delivery | Physical settlement risk on stock derivatives near expiry | Staggered, rising toward expiry | Last trading days before expiry |
| Additional / ad-hoc | Surveillance or event risk the exchange judges elevated | Exchange discretion | Imposed as and when required |
Upfront collection and the peak-margin framework
Knowing what the margin is worth little unless the system can enforce that it was actually collected, and this is where the framework changed decisively in 2020. For years, brokers reported client margins to the exchange only at the end of the day. That created a large and well-used loophole: a position opened and closed within the session could be run on a small fraction of the true margin, because the end-of-day snapshot found it already flat. Intraday leverage of many multiples of capital was built on exactly this gap. It made positions cheap to carry and losses just as leveraged, and it is the practice SEBI set out to close.
The instrument was the circular of 20 July 2020, the peak-margin framework. Its logic is to stop trusting a single end-of-day photograph and instead take several photographs at moments the trader cannot predict. Through the day the clearing corporations capture random snapshots of every client's margin, currently four for the cash and equity-derivatives segments, and from them derive the peak margin, the highest requirement your positions hit across those snapshots. Your account is then judged against the higher of that peak requirement and the ordinary end-of-day requirement. Because the snapshots are random, there is no longer a safe window in which to be under-margined: to pass, you have to hold the full margin continuously, not just at the close. The requirement was phased in gently, at 25 percent of the peak from December 2020, then 50, then 75, reaching 100 percent from 1 September 2021, so that by then the full margin had to be in place all day, every day.
One consequence deserves emphasis because it trips people constantly: a shortfall at a single snapshot counts, even if you were comfortably margined a minute before and a minute after. The framework does not average your day. It looks for any moment at which the money was not there. That is why maintenance is a continuous obligation and not a target you hit twice a day, and it is why the old intraday products that depended on end-of-day-only checking were quietly withdrawn once the framework reached 100 percent.
The penalty when the margin is short
When a snapshot or the end-of-day check finds that the required client margin was not collected, the exchange levies a margin-shortfall penalty. It is charged to the broker, because the broker is responsible for collecting from clients, and a broker will in turn pass it to the client whose account caused it. The structure is a slab, and the thresholds are worth knowing because they decide whether an occasional slip is a rounding error or a real cost.
Where a client's shortfall on a given day is both less than one lakh rupees and less than 10 percent of the margin that was applicable, the penalty is 0.5 percent of the shortfall for that day. If the shortfall breaches either threshold, one lakh rupees or 10 percent of the applicable margin, the penalty doubles to 1 percent. Those are the ordinary cases. The framework then escalates hard against persistence: if the same shortfall continues for more than three consecutive trading days, the penalty jumps to 5 percent per day for each day beyond the third, and if short-collection occurs on more than five days in any month, 5 percent per day applies for every further instance that month. There is one piece of built-in fairness: where the shortfall is caused by a broad market move, a Nifty 50 change of 3 percent or more on the day, the penalty is held back unless the shortfall is still unresolved a couple of days later, so a genuine gap event is not punished as if it were negligence.
| Condition on a given day | Penalty (per day, on the shortfall) |
|---|---|
| Shortfall < ₹1 lakh and < 10% of applicable margin | 0.5% |
| Shortfall ≥ ₹1 lakh or ≥ 10% of applicable margin | 1.0% |
| Same shortfall continues beyond 3 consecutive trading days | 5% per day beyond the 3rd day |
| Short-collection on more than 5 days in a month | 5% per day beyond the 5th instance |
| Shortfall caused by a Nifty 50 move of 3% or more | Relief: penalty only if unresolved after a couple of days |
The lesson buried in the slab is about buffers, not arithmetic. A trader who runs at the exact edge of the requirement will, sooner or later, be caught a few thousand rupees short at a random snapshot on a volatile morning and pay for it, and a trader who runs a modest cushion almost never will. The penalty is small in percentage terms on a single day, but it is designed to become punishing on repetition, which is precisely the behaviour, chronic under-margining, that it exists to discourage.
Mark-to-market: the daily cash truth
Initial margin gets you into the position. Mark-to-market is what the position does to you while you hold it, and it is the mechanism most responsible for margin calls that seem to arrive from nowhere. A futures contract is settled to market every single day. At the close, the exchange fixes a daily settlement price, your open position is repriced to it, and the difference from the previous day is settled in cash: a loss is debited from your account and a gain credited, that night, in rupees. This is not a paper mark that reverses in your statement. It is money leaving or entering the account.
Follow what that does to maintenance. Suppose you are long a futures contract and the underlying drifts against you for three sessions. Each evening, that session's loss is taken out of your available margin in cash. The required margin has not necessarily changed, but the resource you are meeting it with is shrinking every night. At some point the cash debits have pulled your available margin down to the required level, and the next adverse tick would leave you unable to meet the requirement. That is the moment a margin call is issued: your broker asks you to bring in funds to restore the buffer. If you do, the position lives on. If you do not, the broker is within its rights to square off enough of the position to bring the account back within margin, and it will do so at whatever price the market is quoting when it acts, not at a price you would have chosen. The uncomfortable truth in this is that you can be entirely right about where the position eventually goes and still be removed from it, because mark-to-market settles the running loss daily and does not wait for your thesis to be proven.
Options behave a little differently and it is worth being precise. A long option is not marked to market as a debt against you, because you have already paid your maximum loss as premium; its value simply fluctuates. A short option, by contrast, is margined like a futures position and its mark moves against you as the option gains value, which is why the margin on a sold option is a live, moving number rather than a one-time cost.
Option buyers and sellers: the asymmetry that matters most
No single feature of F&O margin catches beginners out more than the gulf between buying an option and selling one, and it follows directly from the shape of the two payoffs. When you buy an option, the worst that can happen is that it expires worthless and you lose the premium you paid. Your loss is capped, known, and already paid at entry, so the clearing corporation has nothing to protect against beyond the premium itself. A buyer therefore posts no SPAN and no exposure margin: the premium is the entire outlay. Since 1 February 2025 that premium is collected upfront from buyers, closing a smaller loophole in which premium was netted intraday, but the principle is unchanged, a buyer funds the premium and nothing more.
When you sell an option you stand on the other side of that payoff. Your gain is capped at the premium you receive, and your loss is open-ended, potentially far larger than the premium if the market moves hard against the strike. That open-ended risk is exactly what margin exists to pre-fund, so an option seller is margined like a futures trader: SPAN plus exposure, recomputed as the underlying and its volatility move, plus, on the expiry day of index options, an additional extreme loss margin introduced in November 2024 to cover the concentrated risk of that final session. The margin on a sold option can be many times the premium collected, and it grows against you precisely when the trade is going wrong. This is the mechanism behind the standard caution that selling options is a business of small, frequent credits against occasional large debits, and it is why the risk management of a short-option book, covered in our note on options selling and risk in India, is a different discipline from buying.
| Position | What you post | Loss profile |
|---|---|---|
| Long option (buyer) | Full premium, upfront | Capped at the premium |
| Short option (seller) | SPAN + exposure (+ expiry-day ELM on index options) | Open-ended |
| Long or short future | SPAN + exposure, then daily mark-to-market | Open-ended both ways |
The margin benefit of a hedge, and the trap of breaking it
Because SPAN values the portfolio rather than each position in isolation, it can see a hedge, and it charges you for the net risk that remains after the hedge rather than the gross risk of the legs. This is the single most useful thing SPAN does for a trader, and it is also the source of one of the most common and expensive surprises in margin maintenance. Consider a short option that on its own attracts a large SPAN plus exposure requirement. Add a long option that caps the loss on that short, turning the pair into a defined-risk spread, and SPAN recomputes: the scenario in which the short leg loses badly is now the same scenario in which the long leg pays off, the two partly cancel, and the net margin can fall dramatically, often to a small fraction of the standalone requirement. The hedge has bought you not only a defined risk but a much smaller margin, because in this framework those are the same thing.
The trap is symmetrical. That reduced margin belongs to the combination, not to either leg. If you close the protective long leg, whether to book its gain or because you think you no longer need it, the short leg is instantly naked again, SPAN re-prices it at the full standalone requirement, and your margin can leap upward at the exact moment you thought you were reducing the position. Closing what feels like half a trade can more than double its margin. This is why an experienced trader unwinds a spread as a spread, closing the risk-defining leg last or simultaneously, and why the right habit before sending any closing order on a multi-leg position is to check the portfolio margin the close will produce, not to assume that fewer open legs must mean less margin.
Additional margins, and the expiry week of a stock derivative
SPAN and exposure are the standing requirement, but the exchange reserves the right to ask for more when it judges the risk elevated, and two situations account for most of what traders encounter. The first is additional or ad-hoc margin, which includes the surveillance margins the exchange imposes on securities that are unusually volatile or under scrutiny, and event-driven margins around results or corporate actions. These are discretionary and can appear with little notice, which is another argument for a buffer: a position that was fully margined yesterday can require more today because the exchange added a surveillance margin overnight, through no change in your own book.
The second, and the one that turns a routine position into an obligation, is the delivery margin in the expiry week of a stock derivative. All single-stock futures and options in India are physically settled, which means a position still open at expiry does not simply cash-settle to a number: it becomes an obligation to deliver or to take delivery of the actual shares, requiring the full contract value rather than a margin. To make that transition orderly rather than abrupt, the exchange begins levying additional delivery margins on the positions most likely to result in delivery, chiefly in-the-money options and futures, over the last few trading days before expiry, and it raises them in staggered steps as expiry approaches so that by the final day a large fraction of the settlement value is already blocked. The exact percentages by day are set by the clearing corporation and are revised, so they should be read from the current exchange schedule rather than memorised. The mechanism, though, is what matters: if you carry a stock derivative into its expiry week, the margin will climb under you whether or not your view has changed, and an in-the-money option left unclosed becomes a delivery you must fund in full. The discipline is to decide, well before that week, whether you intend to settle physically, and if not, to be out in time. Understanding the lot size of the contract is part of that decision, because it fixes how many shares the delivery obligation actually is.
Collateral: pledging holdings, the haircut, and the cash rule
Margin does not have to be met entirely in cash. You can pledge securities you already hold and have their value counted toward your margin, which is efficient, but the mechanics carry two limits that catch the unwary. Since SEBI's pledge framework of 2020, the process is designed so your securities never leave your control: the shares stay in your own demat account and are pledged in favour of your broker, who re-pledges them to the clearing member and on to the clearing corporation, with the entire trail recorded in your demat statement. This replaced an older practice of transferring shares into the broker's pool, and it is a genuine protection: your collateral cannot be used to fund anyone else's positions.
The first limit is the haircut. The collateral value you receive is not the market value of the pledged securities but the market value less a discount set by the clearing corporation, larger for more volatile securities and smaller for stable ones, and that discounted value falls when the securities fall. Pledged collateral is therefore itself a moving number, and a market correction can shrink your available margin at exactly the moment your positions need it most. The second limit is the cash component: at least half of your total margin must be met with cash or cash-equivalents, so non-cash collateral, however large, can fund no more than half the requirement. A trader who pledges heavily but holds little cash will find that positions cannot open, or that a cash shortfall accrues interest, not because the total collateral is insufficient but because its composition is wrong.
What the October 2024 measures changed
The framework is not static, and the most consequential recent revision is SEBI's circular of 1 October 2024 on the equity index-derivatives segment, phased in over the following months. Several of its measures bear directly on margin and on maintenance. From 20 November 2024 the minimum contract value for index derivatives was raised, weekly expiries were rationalised to one per exchange, and an additional extreme loss margin of 2 percent was applied to short index options on the day they expire, recognising that the final session concentrates risk. From 1 February 2025, option premium is collected upfront from buyers, and the calendar-spread margin benefit no longer applies on expiry day, because a near-leg expiring that day stops being a genuine hedge for the far leg. From 1 April 2025, position limits are monitored intraday rather than only at the day's close, extending to position limits the same "check through the day, not just at the end" logic that peak margin brought to margins.
Read together, these are not a grab-bag. They point in one direction: a larger share of the true risk of a derivatives position is now funded before the trade and verified during it, and less of it is permitted to accumulate unfunded and unnoticed until the end of the day. That is the same principle the peak-margin framework established in 2020, extended and tightened. For a trader, the practical effect is that the cost of carrying index-derivatives positions, especially short ones and especially near expiry, has risen and become harder to under-fund, and that a plan built on the leverage of a few years ago will not survive contact with the current rules. Any specific figure here should be checked against the live position, because implementation has been staggered and refined, and because this is the part of the framework most likely to move again.
What maintenance looks like in practice
Put the mechanisms together and disciplined maintenance turns out to be a short, unglamorous routine rather than a special skill. It rests on a handful of habits. Carry a buffer, so that a random snapshot on a volatile morning, an overnight surveillance margin, or a haircut moving against you does not push you into a shortfall you will pay for. Read the daily margin statement your broker issues, which is the authoritative record of what was required and what was held, rather than trusting the terminal's live "available margin" figure, which can lead the clearing-level ledger during fund transfers and fast markets. Model the close before you send it on any multi-leg position, so a partial close never surprises you with a higher margin. Watch the cash component, not just the total collateral, so a pledged book does not leave you unable to open a position for want of cash. And respect the expiry week of any stock derivative, deciding in advance whether you will settle it physically or be out before the delivery margins ramp.
None of this is difficult, and all of it is boring, which is exactly why it is neglected and exactly why neglecting it is expensive. Margin is where a trading plan meets the account's actual constraints, and a plan that ignores it is not a plan but an intention. The habit of treating the margin number as a live thing you manage, sized to risk and moving with the market, is one of the quiet differences between traders who last and traders who are periodically removed from their own positions by a square-off they did not see coming. It is also, not incidentally, the kind of operational rigour that runs through the whole of what the curriculum is built to teach: the position sizing, the risk budgeting and the record-keeping that make margin a constraint you plan around rather than a surprise you absorb.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between SPAN margin and exposure margin?
+They are the two layers of the initial margin the clearing corporation requires before it will let you carry an F&O position. SPAN margin (Standard Portfolio Analysis of Risk) is the model-driven core: it revalues your whole portfolio across a fixed set of scenarios of price and volatility, then charges the worst single-day loss it finds, sized to cover roughly a 99 percent one-day move. Exposure margin sits on top as a flat buffer for the risk the scenarios do not fully capture, currently of the order of 3 percent of notional for index positions and higher for single stocks. The two together are your initial margin, and both are collected upfront before the order is accepted. Verify the current percentages with your broker and the exchange, since they are set by the clearing corporation and change.
What does peak margin mean and how is it checked?
+Peak margin is a verification framework, not a separate charge. Under SEBI's framework of 20 July 2020, the clearing corporations take several snapshots of your margin at random times during the trading day, currently four for the cash and equity-derivatives segments, and record the highest margin your positions required across those snapshots. Your account is then assessed against the higher of that peak requirement and the end-of-day requirement. The point is to stop the old practice of checking margin only at the day's end, which let intraday positions run on a fraction of the real requirement. It was phased in from 25 percent in December 2020 to 100 percent from 1 September 2021. If sufficient margin was not in place at a snapshot, that is a reportable short-collection and attracts a penalty.
What is the penalty if my F&O margin falls short?
+Short-collection and non-collection of client margin are penalised on a slab set by SEBI and levied by the exchange on the broker, who passes it to the client responsible. Broadly, where the shortfall for a client on a day is both less than one lakh rupees and less than 10 percent of the applicable margin, the penalty is 0.5 percent of the shortfall for that day; otherwise it is 1 percent. If the same shortfall continues for more than three consecutive trading days, the penalty rises to 5 percent per day beyond the third day, and if short-collection happens on more than five days in a month, 5 percent per day applies beyond the fifth instance. There is relief when a broad Nifty 50 move of 3 percent or more causes the shortfall. Confirm the current slab, since these figures are set by the regulator and the exchange and can change.
Do option buyers need margin, or just the premium?
+An option buyer posts no SPAN or exposure margin. The most a long option can lose is the premium paid, so the premium itself is the whole cost and the whole risk, and since 1 February 2025 that premium is collected upfront from buyers rather than being netted intraday. An option seller is the mirror image. A short option has open-ended risk, so the seller posts SPAN plus exposure margin exactly like a futures position, the requirement moves as the underlying and its volatility move, and on expiry day short index options carry an additional extreme loss margin. This asymmetry, capped risk for the buyer and margined open-ended risk for the seller, is the single most important thing to internalise before selling options.
Why did my margin go up when I closed one leg of my spread?
+Because the margin benefit you were enjoying belonged to the hedge, not to either leg on its own. When you hold a defined-risk spread, SPAN revalues both legs together and sees that a move which hurts one leg helps the other, so it charges a small net margin. The instant you close the protective leg, the remaining leg is naked again, its risk is no longer offset, and SPAN recomputes it at the full standalone requirement. Closing what looks like half the position can therefore raise the margin rather than lower it. The discipline is to unwind a spread as a spread, or to check the portfolio margin the close will produce before you send it, never leg by leg on the assumption that fewer positions means less margin.
What is mark-to-market margin and how does it cause a margin call?
+Futures are settled to market every day. At the close the position is repriced to the daily settlement price, and the day's loss is debited from your account while a gain is credited, in actual cash. That daily debit is the mark-to-market, and it eats real margin rather than paper value. As losses accumulate, your available margin falls toward the required margin, and when it can no longer cover the requirement the broker issues a margin call asking you to add funds. If you do not, the broker is entitled to square off positions to bring the account back within margin, at whatever price the market is then offering. Mark-to-market is why a position that is only slowly going wrong can still force an exit: it is not the final loss that removes you, it is the running one.
What are delivery margins in the expiry week for stock F&O?
+All single-stock futures and options in India are physically settled, so a position carried to expiry can turn into an obligation to deliver or take delivery of the actual shares, which needs the full contract value rather than a margin. To make that transition orderly, the exchange levies additional delivery margins on positions likely to result in delivery, chiefly in-the-money options and futures, in a staggered manner over the last few trading days before expiry, rising as expiry approaches. The exact day-by-day percentages are set by the clearing corporation, so verify the current schedule. The practical lesson is simpler than the arithmetic: do not drift into the expiry of a stock derivative you cannot or do not intend to settle, because the margin will climb under you and an unsettled in-the-money option becomes a delivery obligation.
Can I use my shares as margin for F&O, and what is the haircut?
+Yes, through the pledge system SEBI introduced in 2020. Your shares stay in your own demat account and are pledged in favour of your broker, who re-pledges them to the clearing member and on to the clearing corporation, with the whole trail visible in your demat statement, so the securities are never transferred into anyone else's account. The collateral value credited to you is the market value less a haircut set by the clearing corporation, which is larger for more volatile securities, and that value drops when the pledged shares fall. Two limits matter. At least half of your total margin must be in cash or cash-equivalents, so non-cash collateral cannot fund more than half the requirement, and pledged value moving with the market means collateral itself needs a buffer.
What did the October 2024 SEBI measures change for F&O margins?
+SEBI's circular of 1 October 2024 tightened the index-derivatives framework in stages. From 20 November 2024 the minimum contract value for index derivatives was raised, weekly expiries were rationalised to one per exchange, and an additional extreme loss margin of 2 percent was applied to short index options on expiry day to cover the concentrated risk of that session. From 1 February 2025 option premium is collected upfront from buyers and the calendar-spread margin benefit no longer applies on the day a contract expires. From 1 April 2025 position limits are monitored intraday rather than only at end of day. The direction is consistent: more of the true risk is funded before the trade, and less of it is allowed to build unfunded through the day. Verify the current position, since implementation has been phased and refined.
Sources
- SEBI, circular SEBI/HO/MRD2/DCAP/CIR/P/2020/127 (20 July 2020). Framework to Enable Verification of Upfront Collection of Margins from Clients in Cash and Derivatives segments: the peak-margin framework, the random intraday snapshots, and the phased implementation to 100 percent by 1 September 2021. sebi.gov.in
- SEBI, circular SEBI/HO/MRD/TPD-1/P/CIR/2024/132 (1 October 2024). Measures to Strengthen Equity Index Derivatives Framework: upfront collection of option premium from buyers, removal of the calendar-spread benefit on expiry day, the additional extreme loss margin on short index options on expiry, revised contract value, and intraday position-limit monitoring, with their phased effective dates. sebi.gov.in
- SEBI, circular SEBI/HO/MIRSD/DOP/CIR/P/2020/28 (25 February 2020). Margin obligations to be given by way of Pledge/Re-pledge in the Depository System: securities remain in the client demat account and are pledged and re-pledged up the chain, effective from August 2020. sebi.gov.in
- NSE Clearing Limited, equity-derivatives margins. Composition of the initial margin (SPAN and exposure), premium and assignment margins, and delivery margins on physically settled stock derivatives. nseclearing.in
- NSE Clearing Limited, penalty for margin shortfall. The short-collection and non-collection penalty slab and its escalation for repeated or persistent shortfalls. nseclearing.in
Related reading
- Peak margin reporting and the intraday margin rules Indian retail traders keep getting wrong
- Options selling in India and risk management
- What is a lot size in F&O?
- How futures and options trading is taxed in India
- The real cost of an Indian trade, charge by charge
Learn to manage margin as a constraint, not a surprise
Margin sits where a trading plan meets the account's real limits: position sizing, risk budgeting, and the daily record-keeping that keeps you above the requirement as the market moves. That operational discipline runs through the whole curriculum, from reading a chart to running a systematic book. See where it is taught, or test where you stand.
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