NSE
The National Stock Exchange (NSE) will roll out a pre-open session for equity futures & options (F&O) from December 8, 2025, giving traders a mechanism to discover opening prices in index and stock futures before the regular session begins. The move aligns the derivatives market with the equity cash market’s pre-open call auction; the exchange said it will use a similar 15-minute window to improve price discovery and manage volatility.
The F&O pre-open session will run from 9:00 am to 9:15 am, and follow a call auction format. Order entry, modification, and cancellation will be allowed until a random closure between 9:07-9:08 am, followed by price discovery and trade matching until 9:12 am. A three-minute buffer will transition the market to continuous trading at 9:15 am.
How NSE’s F&O pre-open session will work
The mechanism will initially apply to current-month futures on single stocks and indices, and extend to next-month contracts in the final five trading days before expiry. Options, spreads, and corporate-action ex-dates are excluded from the framework.
During the auction, traders will see indicative opening prices and order imbalance data in real time. Both limit and market orders are allowed, but stop-loss and IOC orders are barred in the pre-open. Unmatched limit orders will move to the normal market with the original time-stamp, while unmatched market orders convert to limit orders at the discovered opening price .
Orders will also be margin-validated at entry, and self-trade checks remain active. Trades executed in this window cannot be cancelled, the exchange clarified. Mock trading for the feature is scheduled on December 6, giving brokers and participants a brief testing window before live rollout.