The Securities and Exchange Board of India has said that 24 market players were involved in manipulations in the futures & options segment on the National Stock Exchange.

The players against which "cease and desist" orders have been issued include Indiabulls [Get Quote] Securities, Angel Capital, SMC Global Capital and Khandwala Financial Services.

The 40-page order by G Anantharaman, Sebi's whole-time member, on Tuesday said this was not a final order since further investigations are on. This is the first time that such an order has been passed in the derivatives trading segment.

The F&O segment has been attracting huge volumes in recent months, with the average daily turnover above Rs 40,000 crore on the National Stock Exchange.

All 24 players (10 entities and 14 brokerages) were found to have created artificial volumes in the F&O segment between January and March this year by buying and selling equal quantities of contracts within the same day at a price that was significantly above or below the price at which the first transaction was executed, though there was no significant variation in the traded price of the underlying instrument.

The manipulation, commonly referred as "reversal of trade", implies that for a buy transaction initially entered into by a broker for a particular client for a specific quantity, there is a corresponding sale transaction that takes place during the same day for the same quantity between the same set of broker/clients and vice-versa.

"It was observed that the transactions were in the nature of fictitious transactions, resulting in creation of misleading appearance of trading in these options. It also resulted in unusual profit and loss for these entities," the order said.

The 10 entities warned against F&O manipulation are Rakhi Trading P Ltd, Kasam Holding P Ltd, Tungarli Tradeplace P Ltd, Manu Vyapar P Ltd, Raj Corporation Ltd, TLB Securities Ltd, Amar Mukeshbhai Shah, Shah Chirag Kirtikumar, Amit Business Ltd and Suresh Bharat.