NSE Just Added 8 New Stocks to F&O

Here's What You Should Know

So, starting today April 1, 2026 the National Stock Exchange has officially brought eight new stocks into its futures and options segment. And no, this isn't an April Fool's joke, even though the timing is a little suspicious. NSE actually put out the circular on March 30th, so it's very much real. The eight stocks are Adani Power, Cochin Shipyard, Force Motors, Godfrey Phillips India, Hyundai Motor India, Motilal Oswal Financial Services, Nippon Life India Asset Management, and Vishal Mega Mart. Quite a mixed bag, honestly you've got an EV-adjacent auto name sitting next to a tobacco company, a shipyard, and a retail chain. Something for everyone, apparently.
The Basics: Lot Sizes and Tick Sizes
Before anything else, if you're planning to trade these, you need to know the lot sizes. Because some of these are... not small. Vishal Mega Mart comes in at a lot size of 4,850. That's the biggest of the bunch. Then there's Adani Power at 3,550, which is also quite chunky. On the smaller end, Force Motors has a lot size of just 25 makes sense given how expensive that stock is per share. Cochin Shipyard is at 400, Motilal Oswal at 775, Nippon Life AMC at 625, and both Godfrey Phillips and Hyundai Motor India come in at 275 each. On tick sizes futures contracts will follow the same tick size as the underlying stock in the cash segment. Options, meanwhile, will have a standard tick of Re 0.05 across all eight. NSE has also declared position limits market-wide, trading member-wise, FII/FPI, mutual fund, proprietary, and client-level. So the framework is all in place.
How Have These Stocks Actually Been Doing?
This is where things get interesting. Or concerning, depending on how you look at it. Hyundai Motor India is down over 31% in the last six months. It only listed in October 2024, so that's a rough start for what was one of the most hyped IPOs of the year. Cochin Shipyard is down 33%. Godfrey Phillips has fallen 45% that's a steep drop for a company that most people associate with steady, if boring, cash flows. Motilal Oswal and Vishal Mega Mart are both down about 29%. Nippon Life AMC dropped around 8%. Force Motors, though? Up more than 15%. And Adani Power has gained roughly 4%. So not everything on this list is in the red. It's a bit of an odd moment to be adding several of these stocks to F&O, given the recent underperformance. But that's not really how the selection process works it's more about liquidity and market depth than price momentum. Why SEBI Tightened the Rules in 2024
A quick bit of context here. Back in August 2024, SEBI revised the eligibility criteria for stocks entering the derivatives segment. The regulator made it clear that only stocks with sufficient market depth meaning a wide enough base of participants trading them would qualify. The logic is straightforward: thin markets are easier to manipulate, and manipulation in derivatives can cause outsized damage compared to the cash segment. SEBI's circular from August 31, 2024 specifically mentioned that the criteria hadn't been updated since 2018, and given how much the market had grown since then, a revision was overdue. So the bar got higher. Which makes it slightly more meaningful that these eight stocks cleared it.
What This Actually Changes
Adding stocks to F&O generally does a few things. It brings in more institutional interest. It allows traders to hedge existing positions more efficiently. And it tends to improve liquidity in the cash segment too, since arbitrageurs move between the two. Whether that plays out the same way for all eight of these is hard to say. Some of them Motilal Oswal, Nippon Life AMC are financial sector names with already reasonable institutional following. Others, like Vishal Mega Mart, are relatively newer listings still finding their footing. The market will figure out the rest pretty quickly. It always does.