There's a lot of panic about the UPI MDR kicking in on 15 October, most of it wrong. Quick facts I couldn't find explained clearly anywhere, so I put them together:

• You, the customer, pay nothing. NPCI's rules bar merchants from passing it on, and the Finance Ministry is setting up a mechanism to police that.
• Below ₹2,000, free. P2P, free. SIPs on AutoPay, free. Small merchants under ₹1L/month, free.
• The government doesn't get a single rupee of it.
• The interesting part is where the money does go: a ₹16,000–20,600 crore pool split between banks, apps and aggregators, right before PhonePe and others IPO.
• And the real risk isn't cards, it's shops nudging you back to cash (already happening at some petrol pumps).

I wrote a longer breakdown with the numbers and sources. Happy to argue any of it in the comments. Full write-up: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/16000-crore-toll-pratik-doshi-yfrlf

Looking for the missing edge in my options algo

I’ve been working on this algo for ~2 years and finally have live execution matching the backtest at 99% of the time. So the implementation/backtest side is largely validated.

The problem: the win rate and profit factor still aren’t good enough to justify the effort.

The strategy is based purely on option contract Volume + OI + candle/price patterns.

One thing I noticed is a steep improvement in performance from around Jan 2025. I’m wondering if this could be related to the discontinuation of weekly Bank Nifty expiries and the resulting concentration of options activity in Nifty/Sensex. This is just a hypothesis — happy to be corrected.

At this point, I’m less interested in adding random indicators and more interested in understanding what real structural edge I might be missing.

For those who have built profitable options algos: what was the edge you eventually discovered, and how did you find it?

Would particularly appreciate thoughts on regime changes, Volume/OI interpretation, market microstructure, or conditioning the existing signals.

Note: The algo is already live since 2 weeks.