Three stocks are in the F&O ban for Monday: AMBUJACEM, BANDHANBNK and SAIL
Three stocks are in the F&O ban period for the session on 5 October 2026: AMBUJACEM, BANDHANBNK and SAIL. The list comes from NSE's own ban file for that trade date. Only 3 securities are on it, which leaves the great majority of the futures and options universe trading without restriction that day.
The ban is not a penalty on the company and it is not a trading halt. It is a position limit that has been reached. When a stock's combined futures and options open interest crosses 95 per cent of its Market Wide Position Limit, the stock enters the ban period, and NSE publishes the list before each trading day.
No fresh F&O positions can be opened in a banned stock. Existing positions can still be reduced or closed. In practice that means a trader already holding futures or options in the name can exit, but nobody can add, and the ordinary pattern of opening and closing a position inside the same session is not available in that contract.
The restriction applies to the stock's futures and options contracts, not to its shares. A holder of AMBUJACEM, BANDHANBNK or SAIL shares in the cash market is unaffected by the ban, and cash-market trading in those names continues as normal.
Leaving the ban works differently from entering it. The exit condition is open interest falling back below 80 per cent of the MWPL, against an entry trigger at 95 per cent. A stock therefore does not leave the moment its positioning stops rising. Open interest has to unwind by a meaningful amount, which is why a name can sit on the list for several consecutive sessions once it gets there.
The limit itself exists to cap how concentrated derivatives positioning can become in a single stock. MWPL is calculated as a percentage of the stock's free float, the shares actually available to trade after excluding promoter holdings and other locked-up stakes. The purpose is to stop any one stock from becoming so heavily positioned in futures and options that a forced unwind would destabilise the cash market.
Because the limits are set stock by stock and revised periodically, a stock's MWPL is not a fixed number, and two otherwise similar companies can move in and out of the ban on different schedules. Nor does the list carry any view about the company: it is a statement about derivative positioning in that contract, not about the business.
That is the most common misreading of the ban list. It is treated as a list of stocks to avoid, when what it actually describes is a set of stocks whose derivative positioning is constrained for the next session. The entry threshold is a share of the permitted limit, and the limit itself is a market-stability tool rather than a signal about direction.
For anyone holding a position in one of the three names, the practical question is whether the position needs anything added to it, because nothing can be added while the ban is on. The exit trigger is the exchange's own open interest figure, not anything the trader does, so the position either unwinds on its own or waits.
There is one more asymmetry worth holding on to. Entry at 95 per cent and exit at 80 per cent means the list turns slowly in both directions, so a name appearing on it is usually a story about the previous several sessions rather than the one just finished, and a name leaving it has unwound materially rather than merely paused.
For a trader who does not hold any of the three, the list still matters as a measure of where positioning has built up. A stock entering the ban has had unusually heavy futures and options activity, which is why the list is watched even by people who never trade the banned contract itself.
What to watch is whether the three names are still listed when NSE publishes the file for the following session, which would show that open interest has not yet unwound below 80 per cent of the limit. The composition of the list over the coming week is the other thing to follow, given how slowly it moves.
The live list, with the entry and exit conditions for each stock, is on the Strota F&O ban list page, and the mechanism itself is set out in our MWPL and F&O ban explainer, which covers how the limits are calculated and revised.
Sources: NSE securities-in-ban file for the trade date 5 October 2026, and NSE's published MWPL rules as summarised on Strota's own pages. This describes the exchange's position limits for the session and does not indicate the direction of any security.
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