FII and DII flows: what they are, where NSE publishes them and how to read them

FII, foreign institutional investor, is the older name. Today SEBI registers these investors as foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) under the SEBI (Foreign Portfolio Investors) Regulations, 2019, notified on 23 Sep 2019. NSE's own table still uses both names, "FII/FPI". They include foreign funds, pension plans, sovereign funds and other overseas investors buying listed Indian securities. Under the FEMA (Non Debt Instruments) Rules, 2019, investment by a single FPI, or by an investor group, in one company is held within a 10 percent limit.

DII, domestic institutional investor, covers Indian institutions: mutual funds, insurance companies, banks and pension funds.

What neither label covers matters as much: individual investors, HNIs, corporates and brokers' own proprietary trading sit outside both groups. They are on the other side of many FII and DII trades.

Each table gives, for each group, the gross purchase value, the gross sales value and the net value in ₹ crore, and can be downloaded as a CSV. The data appears the same evening. The historical version sits under All reports.

How is it compiled? The exchanges' own notes, carried on the MSEI version of the page, explain it. NSE's data is built from the client codes trading members enter with each order and the client category they upload in the unique client code details. BSE's comes from the client type marked on each order. Both are provisional and can change, among other reasons, after custodians confirm the trades.

Three differences trip people up:

• Coverage. NSDL's daily report covers equity, several kinds of debt, hybrid instruments, mutual fund units and AIFs, in rupees and in US dollars. The exchange table covers only cash market trades.
• Route. NSDL splits equity into purchases on the stock exchange and "primary market and others", which includes IPOs and other issues. A month of heavy FPI buying in a large share sale can show up at NSDL and barely at all on the exchange table.
• Timing. The exchange figure is same day and provisional; NSDL's is confirmed and a day later. The two rarely match exactly.

Net is simply gross purchase minus gross sales, for that group, on that day. On this made up day, foreign investors sold ₹2,500 crore more than they bought and domestic institutions bought ₹2,200 crore more than they sold.

The two nets do not cancel out, and they do not have to. The other ₹300 crore of net selling was taken by everyone else: individuals, HNIs, corporates and proprietary desks. Every rupee of shares sold had a buyer at that price. "FIIs sold ₹2,500 crore" never means ₹2,500 crore left the market; it means one group of participants handed shares to the others.

Read the gross figures too. Gross purchases and sales of ₹12,000 and ₹14,500 crore tell you foreign investors were very active on both sides. A small net on large gross volumes is a very different day from the same net on thin volumes.

• Provisional data moves. The exchange figure can be revised once custodians confirm trades.
• One day is noise. Large index rebalances, block deals and the expiry of derivative positions can swing a single day's cash figure sharply.
• The cash market is not the whole picture. Foreign investors also hold index futures and options. NSE publishes participant wise open interest separately; the learn question on participant wise OI and FII data explains how to read it.
• Flows follow prices as often as they lead them. A fund that has to rebalance after a fall sells because prices fell, not before.

1. Add them up. A month or a quarter of net flows shows the trend better than any single day.
2. Use the right source for the question. For foreign money including IPOs, use NSDL. For the split between foreign and domestic institutions in the cash market, use the NSE combined table.
3. Scale them. ₹5,000 crore of net selling in a day means less in a market whose daily cash turnover is many times that.
4. Keep the date. Every flow figure belongs to a date and a source. Without both it is a rumour.

The blog notes on flow as signal or noise and flow is not direction go further into why I treat them as context, not as a call.

1. Download the CSV. Use the combined NSE, BSE and MSEI file from the NSE report each evening, and keep the date with every row.
2. Note the source in a column. Mark each row "exchange, provisional". When NSDL's figure for the same date is out, add it beside the first, marked "depository, final".
3. Sum by month. Add the daily nets into a monthly total for each group, so one heavy day does not dominate.
4. Write down what else happened. An IPO, an index rebalance or a large block deal explains many outsized days.

After a few months of this, you will see for yourself how often the provisional and final numbers differ, and how rarely one evening's figure mattered a month later. That habit is worth more than any single reading.

This page explains how the data works and where to find it, and you can read the latest figures yourself on the NSE and NSDL pages in the sources. I do not quote any figure from the last 30 days here, and nothing on this page is a view on where the market goes.

None of the RupeeCase index algos trade on flow data. Large Midcap ranks the Nifty LargeMidcap 250 by price momentum and holds 40 names, rebalanced every 2 weeks; Allcap does the same across the whole market. Flows appear on The Tanmay Edge as background for the day, alongside the learn module on rupee and FII flows. Large Midcap's model back test shows a CAGR of 37.83% and a deepest fall of −19.31%, as of 27 Apr 2026.