Every month, when the current month’s futures contract expires, it disappears from the watchlist, and we have to manually add the next month’s contract. This can be inconvenient, especially for active traders.
It would be great to have the following features at the broker level:
Continuous Futures Contract – Just for charting/viewing, like the feature available on TradingView or with IBKR. This helps avoid switching symbols manually for analysis purposes.
Auto Rollover for Trading Positions – A broker-level feature where, near expiry, the system automatically exits the current month’s contract and enters a position in the next month’s contract. This would be extremely useful for positional traders who want a seamless transition without manual intervention.Alternatively, brokers can provide an option to roll over contracts in a single transaction, similar to the Spread Order feature in HDFC Securities or the Rollover feature in Sharekhan. This simplifies execution and reduces slippage during expiry transitions.
Perpetual Futures Contracts – Ultimately, the best solution would be to introduce perpetual contracts for major indices, similar to what exists in crypto markets. This would eliminate the need for rollovers altogether and offer uninterrupted trading.Since Zerodha is part of a consultative committee setup by NSE to explore trader-friendly initiatives and new trading instruments to boost retail participation, this could be a valuable suggestion to consider under that framework.
Implementing these features would significantly improve the trading experience and reduce operational friction for active traders.
Guess this is once a month activity , may take few minutes to add again onto market watch,anyhow will check with team on this possibility.
This is clearly not allowed, we can’t do that for clients, many may not want us to do this and we have no know who want us to do, even if we give option to user to choose as a regulation we can’t do this.
Yeah, this we can check but now user can create quick basket and do this in single click but they need to add those contracts to basket.
This sounds good but very tough to implement considering our market dynamics, crypto is different.
All options should have expiry, so on this perpetual future it will be tough to have options, currently we have weekly options though without weekly futures but still.
If it is perpetual then it is as good as underlying in which case one may buy ETF on it, but one can’t short it though, and get no leverage.
@siva Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I believe the future of futures contracts lies in perpetual contracts, as there’s no limit to how we can evolve beyond the current complexities in derivatives.
However, at the very least, brokers should allow two important features:
Adding continuous contracts to the watchlist, and
Rolling over contracts through a single order — similar to what HDFC Securities and Sharekhan offer. Interactive Brokers already has this functionality.
I request you to kindly explore the possibility of enabling these features.
Yes definitely.
Having continuous futures contracts in the watchlist will add lot of convenience for the FnO Traders.
This will remove our hassles of updating our watchlists with Futures contracts every month.
Having continuous Futures contracts on the charts also will help us retain our analysis and the drawings on the charts for longer time.
With both of these advantages it will save lots of time for the users specially the futures traders.
Hi, it seems that this issue has been sufficiently raised to the team at Zerodha and I am sure there might be some constraints to implement. But I’d like to point out that the continuous futures contract on the daily resolution (at least for commodities) is not back-adjusted for contract expiry jumps. It really gives an absolutely different picture to someone looking at a cash chart vs the forward curve especially during a regime change, something happening in several commodities right now. Is it not possible to implement this?