MUMBAI: Market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has uncovered what looks like an encore of what the New York-based algo-trader Jane Street employed here earlier, wherein two little-known brokerages-- Prrsaar Sampada and Chaubara Eats-- adopted a strategy of sophisticated cross-segment price manipulation involving stock F&Os, and froze their alleged gains of Rs 28.12 crore, besides barring them and four key individuals from the market.
An ex-parte interim order issued by whole-time member Kamlesh Chandra Varshney on Wednesday directed Prrsaar and Chaubara, along with their key personnel Ved Prakash Gupta, Priti Gupta, Saroj Gupta, and Gaurav Tomar, to deposit Rs 28.12 crore in fixed deposits with SEBI. It also barred them from the market until they pay the amount and from trading in equity derivatives until the investigation is completed.
According to the order, these two related entities used alternating futures trades to distort prices and trigger profitable options orders targeting relatively smaller and less liquid stocks among the bottom 100 by market capitalisation of around 211 NSE-listed stocks eligible for derivatives trading.
“The cross-segment price manipulation using stock options and stock futures, while also engaging in possible deceptive orders and coordinated/synchronised trading, is a novel manipulative, fraudulent and unfair trade practice employed by the suspects to deceive other market participants and profit from price fluctuation artificially induced by them,” Varshney said in the order.
The case, which took place between December 2025 and June 2026, bears similarities to the kind of cross-market trading strategies adopted by the global proprietary trading firm Jane Street, which was banned from the market in July 2025.
The present case began with surveillance alerts raised by the NSE and SEBI over unusually large profits made by Prrsaar in stock options alongside losses in stock futures on the same underlying stocks.
Prrsaar, a SEBI-registered broker and depository participant, stopped proprietary trading after NSE questioned it in February and March this year. SEBI and NSE later found a similar pattern in the trades of Chaubara Eats, a related entity.
Sebi examined 23 scrips—13 involving Prrsaar and 10 involving Chaubara—covering stocks like Bharat Dynamics, Godrej Consumer Products, Godrej Properties, 360One, KFin Tech, Prestige Estates, Mphasis, Waaree Energies, Torrent Power, Marico, Swiggy, Lodha, Jio Financial, and Hindustan Zinc.
Their strategy involved first placing large near-the-money options orders at prices below and above the prevailing market price, but leaving them unexecuted. Then they alternated between net-buying and net-selling in stock futures in different time patches. Since F&O prices move together, a rise in futures prices increases call premium and reduces put premium, while a fall would have the opposite effect.
SEBI also noted that the futures leg incurred losses consistently, but they made disproportionately larger gains in the options leg. SEBI believes that they employed deceptive orders, coordinated or synchronised trading, and used multiple entities and contracts to evade surveillance systems.
SEBI said Rs 28.12 crore disgorgement represents only the suspected gains identified and examined so far. A wider investigation into related entities is on which will also look at potential manipulation in the cash market.