NSE has revised the market lot sizes for all futures/options contracts starting March 2009. The new lot sizes correspond to the 2 lakh contract size requirement SEBI has in place.
Luckily the Nifty lot size hasn’t changed, but most stocks have. Two stocks, Sterling Biotech and Lupin labs have had their lot sizes decreased by half (their prices are still way too high!) but everything else has seen a lot size increase.
Unitech, for instance, has seen its lot size go up from 900 to 9000, since the price has fallen to 1/10th of its highs. Puravankara has shot up from 500 to 7000 – that was what was needed to move the price to 2 lakhs.
I find some of these lot sizes very difficult to understand – like Reliance Capital is 138 and the new lot size is 552. The 138 would have been because of a corporate action (I think this was the big reliance capital venture merger) but why not rationalise it now? Yes, you will impact some calendar spreads and margin calculations but that is definitely easy; if you can do it one way during a corp action, you can do it another way during a new contract opening.
In any case the new lot sizes are only applicable in March 2009 and onwards – meaning, existing contracts will continue to use the same lot sizes – only the new contracts opened in January (for March 2009) will carry the new lot sizes.
