Futures OI
View intraday futures open interest vs price by interval, with session buildup totals, level breaks and OI interpretation.
What Futures OI shows
Futures open interest against price, interval by interval, with each interval labelled for you. Futures give a cleaner directional read than options because there is no strike ladder and no writers to disentangle — a long is a long and a short is a short. Above the table sit the futures basis and the cost of carry: the premium or discount to spot, the annualised carry, and where that carry ranks against recent sessions.
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Futures OI, section by section, in a 3-minute video, also in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.
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How to read the columns
- OI Interpretation — the buildup label derived from price change and OI change together — Long Build Up, Short Build Up, Long Unwinding or Short Covering.
- Session totals — cumulative OI change for each buildup quadrant since the session's first bar — the day's net positioning at a glance, at the selected interval, without scanning every row.
- Total OI and Total OI Chg — the standing position and how it moved in that interval. Changes are measured bar-versus-previous-bar for the current-month contract — not against yesterday's close, which is what NSE's 'Change in OI' figure shows. The Qty/Lots toggle shows OI quantities in contracts using the instrument's current lot size.
- OI Churn — the magnitude of the OI move versus the previous bar, which separates a steady build from a single burst.
- Volume — units traded in that interval for the same contract. Read build-ups against it — a build on strong volume carries conviction; one on thin volume is easier to fade. Follows the Qty/Lots toggle.
- LTP and LTP Chg — price and its change for the same interval — the other half of every buildup label.
- Direction — an arrow for whether open interest rose or fell in that interval, so a run of builds or a run of exits shows at a glance.
- OI change vs price chart — every interval's OI change as a bar coloured by its label — solid green long build-up, light green short covering, solid red short build-up, light red long unwinding — under the price line, so the day's positioning reads as a picture before you scan the table.
- Level Break — marks intervals where price broke the day's high or low, so you can see whether the break came with fresh open interest or on closure.
- Basis and annualised carry — futures minus spot, then annualised so it is comparable across expiries, with the days to expiry and the basis charted through the session. The percentile tells you whether today's carry is unusual or ordinary.
- Live or Historical — Live follows today; Historical opens a past session. Pick Index or Stock, the interval and the expiry; CSV downloads the table.
- Rollover (indices) — at the bottom, day by day toward expiry: the current month's open interest, the next month's, the share already rolled (next-month OI as a share of both) and the roll cost (the next month's premium over the current one), with chips for today's figures and the days left.
Frequently asked questions
Options open interest is spread across dozens of strikes and every contract has a buyer and a writer with opposite intent, which makes the aggregate ambiguous. A futures contract has one series and a straightforward long or short, so price and open interest together give an unambiguous read.
The difference between the futures price and the spot price. Futures normally trade at a premium that decays to zero by expiry; an unusually wide premium or an outright discount says something about positioning or the cost of funding.
It measures how much open interest moved in an interval relative to the previous one. High churn with little net change means positions are being swapped rather than built, which is a weaker signal than a steady one-way build.
Usually a definition difference, not a data difference. This page measures change bar-versus-previous-bar for the current-month contract, while NSE's 'Change in OI' compares against the previous day's close; some platforms aggregate all expiries, and some quote contracts (lots) where others quote units. Intraday open interest is also the exchange's provisional feed — the official end-of-day figure is settled after clearing and typically lands slightly below the last intraday tick. Same market, different lenses; the Qty/Lots toggle and the raw quantity on hover let you reconcile them.
Every interval's open-interest change is bucketed by its buildup label — Long Build Up, Short Build Up, Short Covering or Long Unwinding — and summed across the session at the selected interval. The first bar is excluded because its change is the overnight gap rather than intraday positioning, and intervals where price or OI is unchanged sit in a flat residual, so the four totals always reconcile to the session's net OI change.