FII and DII data today

FII stands for foreign institutional investor: a fund, bank or insurer based outside India that buys Indian shares. SEBI has called them foreign portfolio investors (FPI) since 2014, and both names are used. DII stands for domestic institutional investor: Indian mutual funds, insurers, banks and pension funds.

What a group bought less what it sold in the day. A positive figure means it bought more than it sold; a negative one, that it sold more. Every sale has a buyer, so when foreign investors sell on balance, someone else, often the domestic institutions, is buying on balance.

The stock exchange posts them each evening from the trades of the day, in the cash market only. They are provisional because trades can still be corrected before they settle; the final figures for foreign investors come from the custodians a day or two later.

The yearly and monthly figures are the custodians' reports of foreign portfolio investors, which count every route into Indian markets (the exchanges, share sales and placements, and debt) and date each trade by the day it was reported, a day or two after it was made. The daily figures are the exchange's count of cash-market trades only. Both are shown, each as reported, and never added together.

Every fortnight the custodians report how much foreign portfolio investors put into or took out of each sector's shares, and what they held in each at the fortnight's end. It shows where foreign money is going inside the market, which the daily total cannot.

The day's figures in the evening after the session, once the exchange posts them; the custodians' figures each evening for the day reported; the sector report once a fortnight.