What changes when you automate for Indian markets

2 October 2026 · Soft Trade Enterprises · All guides

The market has a hard schedule

International instruments trade nearly continuously through the week. Indian exchange segments do not, and almost every difference below follows from that one fact.

Segment	Session
NSE equity and F&O	09:15 – 15:30 IST
NSE pre-open	09:00 – 09:08 IST
MCX	09:00 – 23:30 / 23:55 IST, seasonally
Currency derivatives	09:00 – 17:00 IST

Software has to know the session, the pre-open window, the exchange holiday list and the seasonal MCX closing change. A holiday list that is not updated each year is a bug waiting for January.

Expiry is a first-class concept

This is the biggest structural difference. An option or future contract expires, and on that day the instrument you have been holding stops existing.

Automation has to answer, explicitly:

• Which expiry do we trade — current week, next week, monthly?
• When do we roll, and at what time of day?
• Do we stop entering new positions on expiry day? From what time?
• What happens to an open position as expiry approaches?
• How is the strike selected — fixed, ATM, or a fixed distance from spot?

Nothing equivalent exists in a spot instrument, which is why specifications ported from MetaTrader thinking are usually silent on all five.

Instrument identifiers change constantly

An MT5 symbol is stable for years. An Indian F&O instrument token changes every expiry, and the tradingsymbol encodes the expiry and strike:

NIFTY25OCT24500CE
│     │  │  │    └── CE (call) / PE (put)
│     │  │  └─────── strike
│     │  └────────── expiry month
│     └───────────── expiry year
└─────────────────── underlying

Robust software downloads the instrument master from the broker each morning and resolves tokens fresh. Caching an instrument token overnight is a defect, not an optimisation.

Lot sizes are set by the exchange

You do not choose a lot size; the exchange does, and it revises it periodically. NIFTY, BANKNIFTY and every stock F&O contract have their own lot size, and your order quantity must be a multiple of it. Reading the lot size from the instrument master rather than hard-coding it is the difference between software that survives an exchange circular and software that does not.

Broker APIs instead of a terminal

There is no universal MetaTrader equivalent. Each broker exposes its own REST and WebSocket API with its own authentication, rate limits and order semantics. The practical consequences:

• Daily login. Most Indian broker sessions expire every day and need a fresh token, often with a TOTP step. The automation has to handle that each morning, not just at install time.
• Rate limits are real. Order and quote endpoints have per-second caps, and exceeding them gets you throttled at the worst moment.
• WebSocket for prices, REST for orders. Polling quotes over REST will hit limits quickly.
• Your own credentials. The API key and secret are yours, stay on your own machine, and are never asked for or stored by us.

Auto square-off

Brokers square off intraday positions automatically, typically from around 15:10 for equity intraday. If your software has not exited by then, the broker exits for you, at its price and with its charges. Build the exit earlier than the broker's cut-off and make the time an input, because brokers change it.

Where this leaves a specification

A workable Indian-market brief answers the schedule questions before it answers the strategy questions: which segment, which expiry, which strike rule, what time to stop entering, what time to be flat, and which broker's API. With those six settled, the rest of the build is ordinary software work.

What this is not

This is one-time software development to your specification. Soft Trade Enterprises is not a SEBI-registered intermediary. We provide no tips, calls, advice or research, we do not handle anyone's account or funds, and we never ask for your broker login, investor password or OTP.