A company reports a strong quarter, beats earnings estimates comfortably, and the stock still falls on the day of the result. Scroll through the news that evening and the explanation often points not to the company at all but to a single recurring line: foreign institutional investors were net sellers in the broader market that day. Multiply this pattern across hundreds of stocks on a heavy selling day and entire indices can move several percentage points on flows that have v

A pre market cue is simply any piece of information that becomes available before the Indian market opens and that traders use to form an early view of where stocks or the index are likely to head once trading begins. These cues fall into a few broad buckets: an overnight derivative indicator tracking where Nifty itself is already trading abroad, the performance of major global equity markets that closed or are trading while India was asleep, movements in commodities and curr

A company with one of the largest total market capitalisations on the Indian exchanges is sometimes nowhere to be found in the Nifty 50 or holds a far smaller weight in the index than its size would suggest. Investors who look only at the headline market cap figure, the kind reported in news articles ranking the biggest listed companies in the country, are often surprised to learn that size alone does not earn a company a place, or a proportionate weight, in the major indices

Every investor who moves beyond Nifty 50 index funds and blue-chip stocks eventually confronts the same question: how far down the market capitalisation spectrum should I go? The answer requires understanding not just the return potential of smaller companies but the specific ways in which midcap and smallcap stocks are structurally different from large caps, and from each other. These differences are not just matters of degree. They are differences in kind: the risks that ma

Delivery trading is the straightforward act of buying shares and taking ownership of them. When you place a delivery order to buy 50 shares of a company at Rs 400 each, you are spending Rs 20,000. On the next trading day, T+1, those 50 shares are credited to your demat account. You own them. They sit there until you decide to sell. You can sell those shares tomorrow, next month, or ten years from now. There is no deadline. Your holding period is entirely your own choice. Whil

SpaceX's Nasdaq debut on stock market is the single event that has crystallised the space economy as an investable theme for a new generation of investors. But SpaceX is not the only way to invest in the commercial space industry. It is not even the only way to invest in the commercial space industry from a Nasdaq or NYSE brokerage account. Alongside SpaceX, a growing ecosystem of pure-play space companies has been listed for years, building real businesses in launch, satelli

Before Zerodha, stockbroking in India was a business built on information asymmetry and high commissions. Full-service brokers charged 0.50 to 1.00 percent per trade, earned from research products most retail clients did not read, and provided a service that was expensive enough to discourage the kind of frequent, independent investing that compounding requires. Zerodha, founded in 2010 by Nithin Kamath and Nikhil Kamath, changed this in a single move: it offered flat-fee bro

Every quarter, listed companies in India publish their financial results. News channels run tickers. Business newspapers print earnings tables. Analysts compare numbers from one year to the next. In the middle of all that data, one figure appears consistently in almost every earnings discussion: EPS. A company beats its EPS estimate and the stock rallies. It misses EPS expectations and the stock falls. Funds are described as holding companies with growing EPS. Valuation multi

The private banker at a major Singapore financial institution describes his Indian client book without much drama: promoters of mid-sized Indian listed companies, founders of businesses that have sold in whole or in part to private equity, and second-generation inheritors of old trading and manufacturing wealth. Most of them have not left India. They have a family office entity or an investment holding company registered in Singapore, they visit two or three times a year to m