Trade playbooks: real Indian trades from start to finish

Prerequisites common to every playbook: M00 (accounts, orders, tax), M01 · 1.7–1.8 (costs and taxes), M03 · 3.1, 3.1.1 and 3.9 (R-multiples, how many trades it takes to detect an edge, position sizing), and the risk limits and trading plan of M14 · 14.8–14.10. Beyond that, each playbook's first subsection lists its own prerequisites, split into essential reading and reading for depth, and the study plan places each playbook straight after its essential reading. Time: ~16 hours for the module (about 1.5 hours per playbook to read and check, plus the problems and the simulator exercises). Primary data: Yahoo Finance daily and 5-minute bars (yfinance, fetched 6 Nov 2026); NSE equity (CM) and F&O bhavcopies in the UDiFF format from nsearchives.nseindia.com (M09A · 9A.2); the NSE Nifty 50 constituent file ind_nifty50list.csv (fetched 6 Nov 2026); company filings on NSE.

Read this first These are educational reconstructions of trades. Nobody in this course placed them. They use real prices, and the rules were written down before the trade was located, but every reconstruction still makes assumptions about fills and slippage, and every one is a single draw from a distribution. A single trade says almost nothing about whether a setup has an edge: the post-mortem of each playbook computes how many trades it would take to find out (M03 · 3.1.1), and the answer is always in the hundreds. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security or to use any strategy. Four of the five trades in 15.1–15.5 lost money. That is what the rules produced, and it is the most useful part of the module.

How the episodes were chosen Each playbook states its rules, a universe and a date window. A script applies the rules to every stock and day in the window, and the playbook trades the first signal in the window, whatever happened next. The window is stated with its reason. Where a rule had to be changed after a first run (for example, because a data field turned out to be wrong), the playbook says so. The scripts also replay the same rules on every other signal in the window, which gives a small in-sample record to set beside the single trade.

Conventions used in every playbook

• Paper capital ₹10,00,000. Risk per trade 1% (₹10,000), unless the playbook says otherwise. Position size by M03 (3.23): units $= \lfloor 0.01 \times 10{,}00{,}000 / |P_e - P_s| \rfloor$, rounded down to whole lots for derivatives. One unit of risk, $1R$, is the loss at the initial stop.
• Fills. Entries at the next session's open or at a stated trigger, with an adverse slippage of 0.1% of price for daily swing trades and 3 basis points (bp) per side for the intraday playbook. A stop is a stop-market order: if the session opens beyond the stop, the fill is the open; otherwise the fill is the stop price less the same slippage. Stop-loss orders are not accepted in the pre-open (M01 · 1.2), so a stop works only from 09:15.
• Costs (rates as of 6 Nov 2026; M01 · 1.7 derives the algebra). Statutory and exchange charges: securities transaction tax (STT) 0.1% of value on each side for delivery equity, 0.025% on the sell side for intraday equity, 0.15% of premium on the sell side for options and 0.15% of intrinsic value on options exercised (the rates in force from 1 Apr 2026 under the Finance Act 2026 amendments to the Finance (No. 2) Act, 2004); stamp duty on the buy side 0.015% (delivery), 0.003% (intraday and options); NSE transaction charges 0.00307% of turnover (equity) and 0.03553% of premium (options); SEBI turnover fee ₹10 per crore; GST 18% on brokerage, transaction charges and the SEBI fee. Brokerage is an illustrative parameter: ₹20 or 0.03% per executed order, whichever is lower; set your own broker's rate. A depository charge of ₹15 per scrip on each day you sell from your demat account is also illustrative; it depends on your depository participant.
• Taxes (M01 · 1.8 and M00 · 0.7): delivery trades produce short-term capital gains or losses (20% if held 12 months or less); intraday equity is speculative business income; F&O is non-speculative business income; both business heads are taxed at the slab rate. Tax figures below ignore surcharge and cess.
• Universe caveat. "Nifty 50" means the 50 stocks in NSE's constituent file of 6 Nov 2026. Applying today's list to earlier dates introduces survivorship bias (M04 · 4.4.3): a stock that was dropped from the index during 2026 is missing, and a stock that was added because it rose is present. NSE publishes historical constituent changes; a proper backtest would use point-in-time membership.
• Replays. Each playbook ends with a trade replay on a real chart (the lab after the section) and an exercise for the paper-trading simulator (Simulator → New order).

The playbooks build on each other: 15.1 and 15.2 are daily swing trades in cash equity, 15.3 an intraday trade, 15.4 an option trade around one company's results, and 15.5 a week of index options with margins and Greeks. Playbooks 15.6 onwards, in the following sections, cover further setups.