🧭 The Crowd: who is on the other side of your trade
NSE publishes what each type of participant actually holds in derivatives every day. Almost nobody shows it with history attached. This page reads 6,608 daily records since 2020 and asks one question: is today's positioning normal, or extreme? All figures are net long-short as a share of that group's own open positions (+1 = entirely long, -1 = entirely short), so they are comparable across years and market sizes.
Retail minus FII, index futures +1.47100% percentile of 6.5 years
Today retail is positioned far more bullishly than foreign institutions: Client net +0.69 (100% percentile) vs FII net -0.78 (7% percentile). This is an extreme reading. Dashed line = the two groups positioned identically.
Retail minus FII, single-stock futures +0.7995% percentile of 6.5 years
Today retail is positioned far more bullishly than foreign institutions: Client net +0.88 (99% percentile) vs FII net +0.09 (37% percentile). This is an extreme reading. Dashed line = the two groups positioned identically.
Where each group stands today
Percentile = where today sits in that group's own 6.5-year history. Amber = beyond the 10th/90th percentile.
Client (retail)
Index futures
+0.69
100% pctile
Stock futures
+0.88
99% pctile
Index options tilt
+0.12
97% pctile
Stock options tilt
+0.26
94% pctile
FII (foreign institutions)
Index futures
-0.78
7% pctile
Stock futures
+0.09
37% pctile
Index options tilt
-0.38
0% pctile
Stock options tilt
-0.37
1% pctile
DII (domestic institutions)
Index futures
+0.15
66% pctile
Stock futures
-0.87
88% pctile
Index options tilt
-0.72
94% pctile
Stock options tilt
-0.88
94% pctile
Pro (prop desks)
Index futures
+0.29
95% pctile
Stock futures
+0.40
62% pctile
Index options tilt
-0.04
38% pctile
Stock options tilt
-0.20
65% pctile
What has historically followed extreme crowd positioning
Forward 20-day return of the equal-weight liquid F&O universe, grouped by how the retail-minus-FII stock-futures spread stood at the time. This is a base rate over 1,652 overlapping observations, not a forecast; the range column shows how wide the outcomes were in every bucket.
Positioning at the time
Days
Avg next 20d
Positive
Range of outcomes
When it occurred
Crowd most bullish vs FII (top 20%)
331
+1.82%
65%
-10% to +13%
5 of 7 years, max 29% in one year
Middle 60%
991
+0.90%
60%
-13% to +16%
7 of 7 years, max 21% in one year
Crowd least bullish vs FII (bottom 20%)
330
+5.69%
92%
-8% to +20%
4 of 7 years, 54% in 2020
⚠️ The most important column is the last one. The strongest-looking bucket is also the most concentrated: those days cluster in a handful of episodes (heavily the 2020 crash recovery), not evenly across seven years. A statistic drawn largely from one market episode tells you about that episode, not about a repeatable pattern. We publish the number and its fragility, because publishing only the number would be the exact trap this whole project was built to avoid.
Read this as context, not as a signal, and here is why we say so: our own research tested participant flow as a directional predictor and it failed. Kill-test #2 found flow signals significantly negative with a-priori signs; Sprint R1 found FII positioning barely varied through the 2025 regime change and failed as a regime classifier. The honest use of this page is awareness of who is on the other side and whether that is unusual, plus the risk framing that follows from it. Option tilts are computed from contract counts, which are not delta-equivalent exposure: treat them as a coarse lean, not position size.
Source: NSE participant-wise open interest, 2026-09-08. Client = individual and non-institutional traders; Pro = proprietary desks.
Educational data reference: NOT investment advice. Historical statistics do not predict future results. We are not SEBI-registered advisers. All data from NSE public sources; figures may contain errors. Trading, especially leveraged F&O, can cause significant losses.
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