A freeze is an event. Do not invent the fill you wanted.
Circuit limits, halts and the temptation to write down a price that never traded.
On the day a stock locks in a circuit or the market halts, the most damaging thing you can do to your own records is to write down the exit you would have taken.
Record what happened, not what you intended
If you could not exit, the journal entry is: position open, exit unavailable, reason freeze. That is a complete and honest row. A fabricated price is not.
- Whether it was a stock-level circuit or a market-wide halt
- Time the freeze began and when trading resumed
- Position state at the freeze, and margin implications
- Actual exit price and time, whenever it eventually happened
Name the mechanism
Stock circuit limits and index-triggered market halts are different things with different rules. Writing which one occurred takes a second and makes the entry searchable later.
A quiet heatmap can hide live risk
Closed-trade P&L shows nothing while a position is frozen open. If you review only the closed book on such a day, you are reviewing the calm half of the story.
Stock-level circuit
- Applies to one security
- Price locked at a band
- Orders may sit unexecuted
- Position can stay open for days
Market-wide halt
- Triggered by index movement
- Trading stops across the market
- Resumption time is announced
- Everything reopens together
Key takeaways
- Never write a fill that did not happen.
- Distinguish stock circuits from market-wide halts.
- Remember that closed-book views hide open, frozen risk.
Where these numbers come from
Not advice, not a call. NiyataBook is a personal trading journal, not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst. Everything above looks backwards at trades that already closed. What happened in a book does not promise what happens next, and F&O can take a year’s savings in a week.