Who is on the other side of your trade?

Every evening (around 6:30 PM IST) the NSE publishes how many F&O contracts each participant category holds: FII (foreign institutions), DII (domestic institutions), Pro (proprietary trading desks) and Client (everyone trading through a broker account — predominantly retail). It is split long vs short across index futures, stock futures, and index and stock options. It is the only official daily answer to "who holds what" in Indian derivatives.

Mechanically, whoever sold what you bought. Statistically, the participant-wise OI table shows which cohorts are net long and net short each instrument every day. SEBI's own studies found 93% of individual F&O traders lose money while proprietary desks and FII algorithms book the bulk of profits — so knowing which side of the table you are standing on, and how crowded that side is versus history, is context most retail traders never see.

We take today's FII net index-futures position (long contracts minus short contracts) and rank it against every prior session in our archive. A 95th-percentile reading means FIIs have been this net-long or more on only 5% of days in the recorded history. It is a crowding measure — a statistic, not a forecast or a recommendation.

It tracks how many index put contracts the Client (retail) category has written net of the puts it holds, ranked as a percentile of history. Selling a put is selling downside insurance. When retail collectively sits at an extreme of short-put exposure, the market's loss-absorbing capacity in a sharp fall is historically thinner. It describes positioning fragility; it does not predict a crash.

FIIs operate two books: the cash market (actual share buying/selling, published daily) and index derivatives (the positioning in this dataset). When the two disagree — say, sustained cash buying while futures positioning stays in the bottom half of its range — history reads it as hedged accumulation rather than conviction. We classify each day into one of five disclosed states.

NSE publishes participant-wise OI after market close, usually between 6:00 and 7:00 PM IST (later on expiry days). Our collector stores it, recomputes the percentiles and publishes the day's positioning regime the same evening. The regime, once published, is never edited — that dated record is the point.

No. Everything on this page is aggregate, index-level statistics computed from public NSE disclosures with a published rule tree, plus historical frequencies. There are no buy/sell recommendations, no targets, no stop losses and no stock-specific calls. Downstox is not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst; treat this as market data, not advice.

Most sites show today's raw table and stop there. The raw table is nearly useless without context: FII net longs of one lakh contracts can be a 30th or a 99th percentile event depending on the era. The value here is the accumulated archive — every day is scored against years of history, the regime is named with a disclosed rule tree, and each day's classification is timestamped and immutable, so the track record can be audited rather than backfitted.