SEBI chief Madhabi Puri Buch on Friday justified the regulator’s stance to relook at the existing F&O norms.

She said that three years ago investors needed information at a micro level and there was a need for a risk disclaimer. However, no one would have expected the F&O volumes to grow the way they have over the last three years. A number of young people had entered the market and lost money.

“We are still not a nanny state,” said Buch. “But given the way the F&O market has grown, the micro objective of protecting the individual investor has morphed into thinking about the macro aspect. Is this what our market is designed to do? To facilitate a lot of speculative transactions and channel household savings into speculative activity rather than capital formation? Therefore, we were compelled to change our stance.”

Buch said the need for making the results of stress tests for mutual funds public was to ensure that investors made an informed decision.

The SEBI chief said the regulator is working with exchanges and brokers to enrich the pop-up information available to investors at the point of trade.

“The larger, qualified brokers today display on a pop-up certain surveillance-related information of a particular stock before the investor places the trade. This could be information on ASM, GSM and so on. We are working to ensure that this pop-up has many more risk-related parameters that are made available at the point of trade,” Buch said.

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