Premium turnover on India's NSE slid to about ₹670 billion a day, its lowest since the bourse moved expiry day to Tuesday a year ago, and cash-equity volumes fell to their weakest since November. The culprit is the new closing-auction mechanism plus tighter trading rules, which have thinned the expiry-day strategies that once drove the tape. That timing stings: options fees generated roughly 60% of NSE's operating revenue last fiscal year, just as it lines up India's biggest-ever IPO.
Individual investors have bought a net ₹39,053 crore of NSE-listed shares in FY27 so far, versus a ₹5,803 crore net sale across all of last year. Primary-market bets have collapsed to ₹7,134 crore from ₹42,608 crore, with mainboard IPOs raising just 18% of FY26's haul. Cheap valuations after the correction, not a retreat from equities, appear to be pulling the money back into the secondary market.
The numbers behind a structural shift: in October 2024, FIIs pulled out ₹91,934 crore from Indian equities and mutual funds put back ₹91,433 crore, absorbing 99.5% of the selling. That steady drip of domestic SIP money, not any change in foreign behavior, is why the index barely flinched through multi-month outflow peaks. India no longer lives or dies by FII flows, and the article goes deep on how the buyers on the other side got here.