Frequently Asked Questions

OI buildup is a classification of a stock's futures activity based on the joint movement of price and open interest. There are four categories: Long Buildup (price up + OI up — fresh longs added), Short Covering (price up + OI down — shorts closing), Short Buildup (price down + OI up — fresh shorts added), and Long Unwinding (price down + OI down — longs exiting). The first two are bullish; the last two are bearish.

Long Buildup means a stock's price rose while its futures open interest also rose. The two together imply new buyers are entering the futures market and willing to pay higher prices — a bullish signal that's stronger than a price rise on falling OI (which would just be short covering).

Short Covering occurs when a stock's price rises but its open interest falls. The OI fall happens because existing short positions are being closed, not because new longs are entering. Short-covering rallies can be sharp but often lack the follow-through of genuine buying — they tend to fade unless fresh demand emerges.

Short Buildup is the bearish mirror of Long Buildup: the stock's price falls while open interest rises, meaning new short positions are being added on weakness. This pattern often precedes further downside until shorts are forced to cover.

PCR is the total put open interest divided by total call open interest on a given expiry. A PCR above 1.0 means more puts than calls — often a contrarian bullish signal because option writers (who tend to be the smart money) are positioned for the index to stay above their put strikes. PCR below 0.7 means call-heavy — contrarian bearish. PCR between 0.9 and 1.1 is considered neutral.

Max Pain is the strike price at which option writers collectively lose the least money if expiry happened today. It's computed by summing the loss to call writers and put writers at every candidate strike, then picking the minimum. Near expiry, the underlying often gravitates toward this strike — a phenomenon traders call the "max-pain magnet."

Delta = price change per ₹1 move in the underlying. Gamma = how fast Delta itself changes. Theta = daily time decay (negative for buyers). Vega = sensitivity to a 1% change in implied volatility. Rho = sensitivity to interest rates (usually negligible for short-dated options).

An Iron Condor is a four-leg options strategy: sell an OTM call, buy a further-OTM call, sell an OTM put, and buy a further-OTM put — all on the same underlying and expiry. It's a defined-risk premium-collection trade that profits if the underlying stays within the two short strikes. Maximum profit equals the net premium collected; maximum loss is the wing width minus the net premium.

A Bull Call Spread is a two-leg strategy: buy a call at one strike, sell a higher-strike call on the same expiry. It's a bullish directional bet with capped upside and capped downside — cheaper than a naked long call because the short leg's premium offsets part of the long leg's cost. Use it when you expect a moderate rise, not a runaway rally.

Smart money refers to large institutional traders whose flows historically lead the market: Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs), domestic mutual funds (MFs), insurance companies, and well-known fund managers. Their positions in futures, bulk and block deals, and disclosed cash flows are tracked because their decisions tend to drive multi-day moves more reliably than retail activity.

Bulk deals are transactions executed in the normal market window that exceed 0.5% of a company's listed shares for that day. Block deals are large negotiated transactions executed in a special 35-minute window each morning (8:45–9:00 AM) and afternoon (2:05–2:20 PM), priced within a ±1% band of the prevailing market price. Both are disclosed to the exchange the same evening.

FII net-long ratio is the share of FII index-futures positions that are long, expressed as a signed percentage from -100% (entirely short) to +100% (entirely long). A ratio of -67% means FIIs are heavily net-short. Daily changes in this number are often more predictive than the absolute level — sharp moves toward the long side signal short-covering, while moves toward short signal fresh hedging.

Live stock quotes refresh every 60 seconds via live broker quote feeds during market hours. End-of-day F&O data and FII participant data refresh once per trading day around 6:30 PM IST (when the exchange publishes them). Bulk/block deals and insider disclosures refresh every 15 minutes. Macros and earnings refresh every 12 hours.

All data comes from public sources: official exchange archives (F&O participant OI, end-of-day data, bulk/block deals, NIFTY 500 constituents), regulatory disclosure filings (insider and promoter trades), third-party market data feeds (live prices, sector indices, macros, earnings, news), and broker-API live quote feeds for low-latency intraday data. No private sources, no scraping behind paywalls.

Stocks in Play is a composite scorer that ranks F&O stocks by the number of concurrent smart-money signals firing on them: meaningful price move, OI buildup classification, institutional bulk/block deal, and insider activity. A stock with three of these signals firing simultaneously ranks higher than one with just a price move. On non-trading days, the score uses end-of-day signals from the most recent session.

The four core tags (Smart Money Accumulating, Distribution at Highs, Short Covering, Fresh Shorting) have been backtested over 376 trading days against next-1d/3d/5d returns on Nifty and BankNifty, with measurable lift over baseline at the 5-day horizon. Newer detectors (DII Futures Build-up, Retail Trap, Expiry Proximity, etc.) are clearly marked as experimental on the dashboard until they accumulate enough fires for validation.

Yes. The entire dashboard — flow tracker, option chain with Greeks, strategy builder, per-stock pages, news, calendars — is free with no logins, no paywalls, no walls of any kind. Strota's roadmap may eventually include ads to cover hosting costs, but the core analytics will remain free.

No. Strota is an analytics tool. Signals on the dashboard are descriptive pattern detections, not predictions or recommendations. Data may contain delays or errors. Always do your own research and consult a SEBI-registered investment advisor before trading.