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@article{208183,
        author = {Prajeet Singh and Vatsal Vishwam},
        title = {Did Aligning the Open Matter? Evidence from India's 2025 Equity-Futures Pre-Open Auction},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {13},
        number = {4},
        pages = {688-709},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=208183},
        abstract = {Abstract—On 8 December 2025 India's National Stock Exchange extended its opening call auction to equity futures. The auction applies to current-month contracts but not to the next maturity, except in the final five trading days before expiry, which yields a same-symbol, same-day control group. We validate this eligibility rule against the exchange's own daily contract masters over 144,047 contract-days and reproduce it on 225 of 226 trading days. Using 227 trading days of daily bhavcopy data and 34,553 complete near-versus-next-maturity pairs, we estimate changes in opening spot–futures dislocation. In December 2025, the first natural post-reform window, the differential moves by +1.75 basis points (95% confidence interval [0.02, 3.47]), providing no evidence of an immediate improvement. A descriptive window ending on 27 January 2026, selected after a break-date search, gives -0.92 basis points ([-3.83, 1.99]); its interval is conditional on that endpoint and is not a confirmatory causal interval. An illustrative Brownian clock calibration spans -5.80 to -11.95 basis points, but its timing and volatility inputs are estimated or assumed, so we do not treat it as a known null. Over the full sample the differential falls by -8.03 basis points. A conditional single-break diagnostic places the shift in late January 2026; when indicators for 8 December and 28 January enter together, the former is -0.92 basis points (t = -0.62). Opening dislocations reverted at an unchanged rate. Because public files record eligibility but neither auction execution nor opening-trade timestamps, all estimates are intention-to-treat and cannot distinguish thin auction participation from other explanations for the short-run null.},
        keywords = {call auction, India, market microstructure, non-synchronous trading, pre-open session, price discovery, single-stock futures},
        month = {September},
        }