FII DII data: how to read daily and monthly flows

What problem does the FII DII data page solve?

Most evenings the market's mood gets summed up in one line: foreign investors sold again. The FII & DII data page puts that line next to the numbers that explain it: how much each side bought, how much it sold, what domestic institutions did on the same day, and how the month adds up. Every figure is NSE's provisional cash-market number, in ₹ crore.

This walk-through uses data to Thursday 15 October 2026.

Step 1: read the two cards at the top

The page opens with two cards, "FII / FPI net" and "DII net". Each shows the latest day's net flow in large type, green for net buying and red for net selling, with the gross figures underneath as "Bought ₹… cr · Sold ₹… cr".

On 15 October 2026 the FII card read −₹5,285.37 crore: bought ₹12,735.59 crore, sold ₹18,020.96 crore. The DII card read +₹3,319.39 crore. The sentence under the page heading repeats the same two figures in words, which is the line to copy if you only need to quote the day.

FIIs are foreign institutional investors, registered with SEBI as foreign portfolio investors (FPIs). DIIs are domestic institutions: mutual funds, insurers, banks and pension funds.

Step 2: scan the "Day by day" table

Below the cards, "Day by day" lists the last 30 trading days in seven columns: Date, FII buy, FII sell, FII net, DII buy, DII sell and DII net. Read the two net columns first, then the gross ones.

A net figure on its own hides how busy the day was. On 8 October 2026 FIIs bought ₹15,725.45 crore and sold ₹28,669.03 crore. The net of −₹12,943.58 crore was about 29% of the ₹44,394 crore they traded in total. A ₹2,000 crore sale on thin volume and the same sale on heavy volume are different days, and only the gross columns tell them apart.

One quirk is deliberate. Rows from 30 September 2026 onwards carry two decimals, as NSE's own feed does. Earlier rows come from a one-off historical import rounded to one decimal, so 29 September shows −9,980.2 rather than a figure to the paisa.

Step 3: use "Month by month" for the bigger picture

"Month by month" adds the daily rows into calendar months, up to 25 of them, with a Trading days column so a part month is easy to spot. Monthly totals are rounded to whole crore. A few rows as they read on 15 October 2026:

March 2026 is the largest monthly FII sale of the 25 months on the page. The next largest is October 2024, at −₹1,14,446 crore. For a month told as a story rather than a table, FII and DII flows in September 2026 is the companion recap.

Worked example: how long has the October selling run lasted?

The daily table answers a question the monthly one cannot. Read the FII net column from the top down and stop at the first positive number. As of 15 October 2026, FIIs had been net sellers on every session since 24 September: 15 trading days in a row. The last net-buying day was 23 September, at +₹1,617.4 crore. Ten of those fifteen sessions fall in October; we covered the run when it was nine sessions long.

Add the ten October rows of FII net and you get −₹49,934.93 crore, which the monthly table rounds to −49,935. DIIs bought ₹51,829 crore over the same ten days, 103.8% of what FIIs sold. On the heaviest single day, 8 October, DII buying of ₹10,703.11 crore covered 82.7% of the FII sale.

That offset is not new. In September DIIs bought ₹76,030 crore against FII selling of ₹44,013 crore, and quarter by quarter the pattern has held through 2026. Whether the selling moves the index is a separate question, which does FII selling move the Nifty? tests against daily index moves.

When does the page update?

NSE posts the day's provisional figures after the close, at no fixed time in the evening. The FII DII data page starts checking at 17:30 IST, keeps re-checking through the evening until 21:30 IST and less often after that, and stores the day shortly after it appears. If you open it at 6 pm and still see the previous session, NSE has not published yet. The source table is on NSE's FII/DII report page.

What the FII DII data page does not tell you

• Derivatives. The figures cover the cash market across NSE, BSE and MSEI. FII positions in index futures and options are not here.
• Final numbers. These are provisional. The FPI figures the depositories publish later can differ.
• Who sold what. A net figure sums many institutions and many stocks. For what mutual funds actually hold, the most-held stocks page is the closer source.
• What happens next. Fifteen sessions of selling is a record of what happened, not a forecast. Reading flows as a signal to follow the crowd is the trap the herd mentality guide describes, and global macro and Indian funds covers why foreign money moves in and out in the first place.

Valuation is the other half of the picture: the Nifty P/E ratio page shows where the index stands against its own history while the flows play out. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell.