Backtest Lab · Nifty · 19 January 2023 to 26 May 2026

Nifty hero zero on expiry day: a 3.5-year backtest

Not SEBI-registered. Educational content only. Every figure on this page is from a backtest on historical data, 19 January 2023 to 26 May 2026. It is not investment advice, a recommendation, or a forecast.

What is hero zero?

Hero zero is one of the most talked-about option strategies in India. On expiry day, late in the afternoon, you buy options that cost almost nothing: one rupee, two rupees. Most of them go to zero. But once in a while, one of them goes to a hundred, and that one trade, the story goes, pays for everything. You have probably seen the screenshots. So we backtested it properly: not one screenshot, but every expiry day.

The rules we tested

Exactly the way it is usually taught:

• When: on expiry day, at 14:00, look at the five-minute candle that has just closed.
• What: the out-of-the-money call and the out-of-the-money put trading between ₹1–3. If there are several, take the one nearest the money.
• Buy: both, at the open of the next candle (14:05), one lot each. No stop-loss and no target.
• Sell: whatever is still held, at the close of the 15:15 candle.

Costs. In our other backtests we charge ₹100 for every trade, entry and exit together. These options are cheap, so the brokerage and taxes on them are lower, and here we assume ₹65 a trade. The real cost may be a little higher; we took the lower number to give the strategy its best chance, and we added no slippage.

First, prove the code trades the rules

Before running the rules on every expiry day, we checked them on real days from the backtest, one chart at a time: every entry and every exit where the rules put it.

Every entry and exit lands where the rules say. Only after days like these is it worth trusting the code with all of them.

The result

Across 3.5 years of our backtest, 175 expiry days, the rules took 337 trades. 9 of them made money after costs.

Where the money went

Not one bad year. Every year.

The longest run without a single winning trade lasted 46 expiry days in a row.

All 9 winners

They are real, and some of them are big. The biggest is 16 May 2024, the one above. But together, 9 winners cannot pay for 328 losers: ₹16,874 won against −₹63,502 lost. That is the whole problem with this strategy.

Maybe the timing is wrong?

Maybe 14:00 is too early, or ₹1–3 is too cheap. So we tested every combination: four entry times (13:30, 14:00, 14:30, 15:00), five price ranges from ₹0.5–1 to ₹10–20, and calls, puts and both together. 60 combinations. 4 made money; 56 lost.

Net per trade after costs, held to 15:15. Rows: entry time. Columns: option price at that time.

More expensive options win more often

There is a pattern. The more you pay, the more often the option wins: options under ₹1 made money 0.7% of the time, ₹1–3 options 3.3%, and ₹10–20 options 18.8%. But every price range still loses money overall. Across all 4,097 trades, the loss is −₹5,07,084.

The heroes are real, and rare

The biggest winners in the whole grid are genuinely spectacular: an option bought at ₹2.25 and sold at ₹191.00, and moves of up to 99x. But look at the dates. 11 of the 12 biggest winners came on just three days: 16 May 2024, 12 September 2024, 22 February 2024. A handful of days in 3.5 years, and you cannot know in advance which expiry will be one of them. On every other expiry, you pay.

But it was in profit

Here is what surprised us. Most of these trades were in profit at some point. Of the 337 trades, 59% went up at least 25% after we bought them, 43% went up at least 50%, and 29% doubled. Only 2.7% were still in profit at 15:15. So the obvious question: why not just take that profit?

Book the profit

So we tested exactly that: sell as soon as the option is up by the target, and if it never gets there, hold to 15:15. With a 25% target, the target was hit on 59% of trades, and not one trade made money after costs.

Here is why. A 25% gain on a ₹2 option is ₹0.50. On one lot, that is ₹32.50, and every trade pays ₹65 in costs. Even a 50% gain, ₹65 on one lot, only just covers them.

The 73% strategy

Book 25% on more expensive options, ₹10–20, and the picture changes completely: 73% of trades make money after costs. That is the kind of accuracy you see advertised. And the total is still a loss: −₹79,122 over 549 trades. The average win is ₹166; the average loss is −₹984. It takes many small wins to pay for one full loss, and the market does not give you enough of them.

So the next time you see a high win rate, ask one more question: how big are the wins, and how big are the losses?

Then trail it: 16 ways, all lost

Then a trailing stop should fix it: let the winners run, and protect the gains. We started the trail once the option was up 25%, 50%, 2x or 3x, and exited if it fell 25%, 33% or half from its peak, or back to our entry price. All 16 lost money. The best still lost −₹33,325.

Why trailing doesn't save it

1. Most trades never get going. 57% never reach +50%. They still go to zero, and a trailing stop cannot help them.
2. What the trail locks in is smaller than the costs. 50% of a ₹2 option is ₹1: ₹65 on one lot, exactly what the costs take.
3. The trail cuts the real winners early. A 20x or 50x move does not go up in a straight line; it shakes, falls back, then runs, and the trail sells on the shake. Held to 15:15, 16 May 2024 made ₹6,692. 15 of our 16 trailing stops sold it for ₹471 or less, and that is exactly the trade hero zero depends on.

Targets and stops

What about a bigger target, 3x, 5x or 10x what you paid? All three did worse than simply holding to 15:15. A 50% stop-loss lost the least, −₹35,043, but it still lost.

A smarter entry?

Maybe buying blindly at 14:00 is too simple. What if you only buy when the option shows strength, for example when its price closes above its 12-candle moving average? We did not test that once. We tested 4,05,000 variations: moving-average crosses on the option's own price, new highs for the day, the option doubling from its low, Nifty breaking out or moving towards the strike, filters for trending, gap and quiet days, five start times, and ten ways to exit, including trailing stops.

45 entry signals × 5 price ranges × 12 day filters × 5 start times × 3 sides × 10 exits = 4,05,000

With that many variations, some will look amazing by luck alone. So we used the one test that separates luck from an edge: we chose the best rules using only 2023 and 2024, then tested them, unchanged, on 2025 and 2026, data they had never seen.

The moving-average idea

Buy the ₹1–3 option when it closes above its 12-candle average, from 14:00, and hold. In 2023–24 it made a small profit, ₹35 a trade. It looked promising. In 2025–26 it lost −₹121 a trade. We tested 1,600 versions of that idea on cheap options; not one made money in both periods.

The best ten

Then we took the ten best rules from 2023–24, out of all 4,05,000. Not one was a cheap option: all ten bought options costing ₹10–20. 97% of their 2023–24 profit came from the same three days. On the data they had never seen they averaged ₹47 a trade, close to zero, and 10 of 10 lost money in 2026.

No better than random

And for cheap options, one more check: we compared the clever entries against simply buying at a random moment, 200 times over. On data they had not seen, the clever entries lost −₹124 a trade; random entries lost −₹127 to −₹137. No better than random.

The StrikeATM Score

Finally, the same ten-question check we use for every strategy in our course: costs, slippage, concentration, sample size, every year, tested or fitted. Hero zero, as it is taught, scores 1.5 out of 10.

So, does hero zero work?

On 3.5 years of Nifty data, in our backtest: no. The heroes are real; 16 May 2024 was real. But they are rare, they come on a few days you cannot pick in advance, and everything in between costs more than they pay. Booking profits did not fix it. Trailing did not fix it. Smarter entries did not fix it. A strategy is only as good as the questions it survives, and this one does not survive the first few.

The same score, for the strategies we teach

For comparison, here are the option-selling strategies we build in the course, scored on the same card. They were tested on the same years, with higher costs than we gave hero zero: ₹160 a round trip against ₹65.

None scores ten, and the course shows where each one loses its points. These are backtest figures on historical data, not a promise of future returns; each has its own drawdown and needs its own capital.

Watch the full test

Frequently asked questions

How we tested

• Data: five-minute Nifty option and spot prices on every expiry day, 19 January 2023 to 26 May 2026, 175 expiry days.
• Rules: decision on the 14:00 candle's close; out-of-the-money call and put at ₹1–3, nearest the money; bought at the next open; sold at the 15:15 close; one lot each.
• Costs: ₹65 per trade, entry and exit together, on every trade; no slippage added. Both choices favour the strategy.
• No look-ahead: every strike choice was replayed with every candle after the decision removed; all of them matched.
• Out-of-sample: the smarter-entry search chose its rules on 2023–24 only and judged them, unchanged, on 2025–26.

Is there a strategy you want us to test next? Tell us in the comments on the video.

Not SEBI-registered. Educational content only. Backtest on historical data, 19 January 2023 to 26 May 2026. Past results, real or simulated, do not guarantee future results. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security.