Markets · Futures
Algo trading for NSE futures — index and stock contracts, automated
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Short answer
Yes — INDfolio AI automates NSE futures trading on index contracts (NIFTY, BANKNIFTY, FINNIFTY) and stock futures. Strategies are built in plain English or visual blocks, sized in whole lots with margin-aware limits, backtested on NSE history with the full Indian cost stack, and deployed live through the official APIs of seven brokers — with rollover, expiry and square-off handled by the platform.
Futures are the natural home for systematic trend and momentum trading in India: deep liquidity in index contracts, clean directional exposure without option Greeks, and leverage that rewards discipline and punishes its absence. INDfolio AI automates the whole discipline — entries, exits, lot-based sizing, stops, daily loss caps and square-off — so the system trades the plan even when you wouldn’t.
Typical automated futures systems: EMA crossover trend-following on NIFTY futures, Supertrend-based intraday systems on BANKNIFTY, breakout strategies on liquid stock futures, positional trend systems that hold across days and roll at expiry. All are expressible in plain English or visual blocks, and all validate on years of NSE data before a rupee is at risk.
Index and stock futures
NIFTY, BANKNIFTY and FINNIFTY futures plus liquid NSE stock futures — intraday or positional.
Lot-size aware sizing
Positions are sized in whole lots from current NSE contract specifications, with position limits that respect margin reality.
Expiry and rollover handled
Contracts expire monthly; the platform tracks the calendar, and positional systems can roll to the next series by rule instead of by memory.
Leverage with hard limits
Stops, targets, maximum daily loss and automatic square-off run in the cloud — the controls leverage makes non-negotiable.
Lot sizes, margin and position sizing for futures algos
A futures strategy that ignores lot mechanics is not a strategy, it is a spreadsheet. Every NSE futures contract trades in a fixed lot size set by the exchange, and one lot of an index future represents a notional exposure of several lakhs — so the minimum position is already substantial, and sizing errors compound fast under leverage. INDfolio AI sizes every position in whole lots from current contract specifications and enforces your position limits before any order is placed.
Margin is the other half. Exchange margins vary by contract and volatility regime; check your broker’s margin calculator for current numbers. What the software must do — and does — is respect available margin and your configured limits so a strategy cannot attempt positions it cannot fund.
Handling expiry and rollover automatically
NSE futures expire on a monthly cycle, and a positional system that ignores expiry simply stops trading — or worse, gets carried into settlement. INDfolio AI tracks the live expiry calendar: intraday systems are unaffected beyond square-off, and positional systems can be configured to exit or roll into the next contract series as expiry approaches, by rule rather than by you remembering.
Backtests respect the same mechanics. A three-year backtest of a positional futures system includes the roll points, so the simulated equity curve reflects a trade sequence you could actually have executed, not a continuous-contract fiction with the awkward parts smoothed away.
Backtesting futures strategies with honest Indian costs
Futures costs look small per trade — until frequency multiplies them. Brokerage, STT on futures, exchange transaction charges, GST, stamp duty and slippage are deducted from every simulated trade, so an intraday BANKNIFTY futures system that trades five times a day is judged after the roughly ten cost events that implies, not before.
Then pressure-test: parameter optimisation to find stable rather than peak settings, walk-forward analysis to check the edge holds across regimes, Monte Carlo simulation to see how deep drawdowns plausibly get under leverage. Futures magnify everything — including the cost of a curve-fit backtest — so the validation stack matters more here, not less. Leverage means losses can exceed your initial margin; size for the pessimistic tail, and let the daily loss cap be the final backstop.