Promoters buying and selling their own shares

Bundles: ownership/promoters/monthly, ownership/promoters/stats/buyer_share_12m and ownership/promoters/recent. Code: compute/promoter_trades.py and publish/promoter_trades.py; step promoters.

Source: disclosures under SEBI’s takeover code, Regulation 29, as filed with NSE (nse_sast_reg29), from July 2015. A filing is due when a holder’s stake crosses 5% of a company, or, above 5%, moves by 2% or more. Each filing names the holder, says whether they are a promoter or in the promoter group, how the shares changed hands, the shares bought or sold and the holding afterwards. Values use NSE’s bhavcopy closing prices.

What counts

• Promoter and promoter-group filings only.
• Open-market trades only. Transfers within the promoter group, gifts, preferential allotments, rights issues and other off-market moves are left out: they are not a decision to buy or sell at the market price. Block deals done on the exchange count as open market.
• Direction from the filing: “Acquisition” (and NSE’s misspelling “Acqisition”) is a purchase; “Sale” and “Disposal” are sales. NSE used “Disposal” for most sales in 2022. Filings marked “Both” or “Others” are left out.

Duplicates: each person acting in concert files the same trade, often under a full and a short name (“Tenneco Mauritius Holdings Limited (TMHL)” and “TMHL”), and some filings are re-sent. Filings with the same company, direction, share count and transaction window count once, at the first disclosure.

Measures

• Months are by disclosure date, so a finished month’s figures never change. Filings can arrive days or weeks after the trade.
• For each company and month, promoters are net buyers or net sellers by rupee value (by number of filings where no value is available).
• The headline is the share of companies with promoter trades where promoters were net buyers, over the trailing twelve months. It counts companies, not rupees: a few very large block sales by promoters dominate rupee totals (the largest single filing in the record is worth over ₹35,000 crore), so rupee sums are published but not led with.
• Value: shares × the closing price on the last day of the transaction window (the latest NSE session on or before it). A filing that sums buying over a long window is valued at that window’s last price, an approximation. A price more than 14 days older than the trade gives no value. About 99% of filings are valued.

Limits

• The 5% and 2% thresholds leave out smaller trades. Trades by directors and senior staff under SEBI’s insider-trading rules are a separate disclosure, not used here.
• The monthly series and the stat stop at the latest complete month; the table of recent filings runs to the latest disclosure.
• Descriptive only. Whether promoter buying predicts returns in India is a research question this note does not answer.

Checks (in the bundle’s meta.checks): every filing is counted once (buy plus sell filings equal the total), the share valued, and the first and last disclosure dates.