Bulk & block deals
Trades large enough that the exchange names who was on each side of them, published the evening they are done.
Everything else on this terminal that says who owns a company is quarterly and late: a shareholding pattern arrives weeks after the quarter it covers. A fund that bought in October and sold in December never shows up at all. A bulk deal is published the same evening, with the client’s name on it.
A bulk deal is any trade crossing 0.5% of a company’s listed shares, netted across the session per client. A block deal is a pre-negotiated trade done in its own window with a floor of ₹10 crore. Different things, filed separately, and the chips keep them apart.
One trade is often filed four times. A large deal crosses both thresholds, so it appears in the bulk file and the block file, and both sides of a block deal are always filed. The table is the record as published, with every row tagged with the file it came from. The figures above it count each trade once, on the bigger of its two sides. That is why the total is smaller than the rows add up to.
| Company | Client | Side | Shares | Price | Value (Cr) | % of m-cap | Day |
|---|
How to read a deal
A deal has two sides and the file shows you one of them at a time. The exchange files one row per client per side. So one holder selling to nine funds arrives as ten rows about a single event. That is why the panel above groups by company: what matters is what happened in the stock that day, not which single row was biggest.
The price is a weighted average, not a print. Where a client traded all through the day, the exchange nets it and publishes one price for the lot. So a deal a rupee below the close is not always a discount, it is an average of a day.
A name on both sides is usually not a change of hands. Market makers, arbitrage desks and index funds appear constantly and on both sides, and the “Market Maker” remark the exchange sometimes attaches is worth reading before drawing anything from a row.
Value, not size. Share count alone says nothing. A million shares of a ₹12 stock and a thousand shares of a ₹12,000 stock are the same size of trade. The value in crore is the comparable number, and the share of market capitalisation beside it is what says whether it was a placement or a rounding error.