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Shares of brokerage firms, including Angel One and Motilal Oswal Financial Services, fell by as much as 2.5 percent on Friday after BSE derivatives data indicated a sharp decline in trading activity across key market participant categories during the Sensex weekly F&O expiry on August 6. Foreign institutional investors (FIIs) and foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) recorded derivatives turnover of Rs 19,00,755.72 crore on August 6, down from Rs 26,27,935 crore on July 30. Proprietary traders also saw a significant drop in activity, with turnover declining to Rs 2,33,49,282.97 crore from Rs 4,86,27,141.21 crore a week earlier. Reflecting the weaker sentiment, Angel One shares were trading 2.4 percent lower at Rs 2,901 apiece, while Motilal Oswal Financial Services slipped 1 percent to Rs 866.05. The decline in brokerage stocks comes amid heightened volatility in the benchmark Nifty 50 following the introduction of a new methodology for calculating closing prices of stocks with derivatives contracts. Earlier this week, exchanges introduced the Closing Auction Session (CAS), a dedicated 20-minute window that begins at 3:15 pm IST after the close of regular trading in eligible stocks. During this session, exchanges collect buy and sell orders, with order entry ending at a random time between 3:28 pm and 3:30 pm. Trades are then matched to determine the closing price that maximises executable volume. The National Stock Exchange (NSE) said that NSE and BSE maintain separate order books, which could result in different closing prices for individual stocks across the two exchanges, potentially leading to divergence in the closing levels of benchmark indices. Unlike regular market hours, where traders can view bid and offer prices in real time, the new closing auction mechanism does not provide such visibility during the final 20 minutes of trading, altering the price discovery process at the close.