Bhav Copy

Bhav Copy is the daily settlement report that NSE (and other Indian exchanges) publish after market close, listing every equity, futures, and options contract traded that session along with its open, high, low, close, last traded price, total traded volume, and open interest. The term itself comes from “bhav,” meaning price or rate, and the Bhav Copy has long served as the authoritative, exchange-verified record of what actually happened in the market on a given day, distinct from third-party charting data that may be aggregated or adjusted differently by different vendors.

For F&O traders, the derivatives Bhav Copy is particularly valuable because it captures the closing state of every strike across every expiry for every underlying in one structured file: Nifty, Bank Nifty, and every stock with listed options, all in a single standardized format. This makes it the primary raw source that most platforms use to reconstruct expired contract data once a contract’s expiry has passed and it’s no longer visible in the live option chain.

Because Bhav Copy data is exchange-sourced rather than broker-sourced, it’s the dataset most commonly used as the ground truth for backtesting strategies across long historical periods, a trader building a multi-year study of how Bank Nifty options behaved around monthly expiries would typically pull the historical Bhav Copy series rather than relying on a single broker’s retained history, which may not extend as far back. Tracking open interest changes day over day by comparing consecutive Bhav Copy files is also a standard way analysts build participant positioning and buildup signals before more real-time tools existed.

One practical nuance is that Bhav Copy reflects only end-of-day closing figures, not the intraday path a contract took to get there, two contracts can show an identical closing price in the Bhav Copy while one moved smoothly and the other swung violently intraday before settling flat. For any analysis that depends on intraday behavior rather than just the daily close, Bhav Copy needs to be supplemented with tick-level or minute-level data rather than used on its own.