someone told me if you hold equity let say of 500 quantity and then you option sell/buy a lot then you pay less margin and if the equity equals the f&o lot size you pay no margin. is this true ? sounds like bs.
Even if you hold underlying shares, you will need sufficient margin to sell options or trade futures of that stock. One alternate is to pledge the shares and use the margin received for trading F&O. You can check out this thread for more on this topic: Covered call in Kite Zerodha - #16 by Ananth