Bulk Deals and Block Deals on NSE: How to Read the Daily Disclosure Lists

Each evening NSE puts out two short lists that a lot of market watchers comb through for hints about big money: the bulk deals list and the block deals list. It pays to understand bulk deals and block deals on NSE, because while both lists name the buyer or seller, the quantity and the price, they’re triggered by different rules and tell you quite different things about what actually happened. Below we cover the SEBI rules behind each list, how the block deal window works after the framework was revised in 2025, and how to read the daily files without jumping to the wrong conclusion. Our examples are real rows from NSE’s bulk deal file for the October 16, 2026 session.

For the day-to-day market backdrop, keep our Stock Market Today India hub open. And if you want the full price and volume picture for the same stocks, read this alongside our guide on how to read the NSE bhavcopy.

Bulk deals: a quantity test

SEBI defines a bulk deal by quantity, not value. Its January 14, 2004 circular on disclosure of trade details of bulk deals, now folded into the master circular for stock exchanges, says a bulk deal covers all transactions in a scrip on an exchange where the total quantity bought or sold is more than 0.5% of the company’s equity shares listed on that exchange. That 0.5% can be crossed in one trade or across several trades through the day in the normal market segment.

The disclosure rules flow straight from that:

• The broker discloses the scrip name, the client name, the quantity bought or sold and the traded price.
• The broker must report immediately when the trade is executed.
• The exchange makes the information public the same day, after market hours.

NSE’s own circular of February 16, 2004 split reporting into two cases. A single trade above 0.5% gets reported immediately on execution. If instead it’s the day’s cumulative quantity, bought or sold under the proprietary account or any single client code, that crosses 0.5%, members report it within one hour of the close. That second case explains why the NSE file often shows a weighted average price instead of a single trade price. The column is literally labelled “Trade Price / Wght. Avg. Price”.

A hypothetical makes the threshold concrete. Say a company has 20 crore equity shares listed. Half a percent of that is 10 lakh shares. A fund buys 6 lakh shares in the morning and 5 lakh more in the afternoon. That’s 11 lakh shares under one client code in a day, above the threshold, so it lands on that evening’s bulk deal list even though neither trade on its own would have.

Block deals: a separate window

A block deal is a different animal. SEBI describes it as executing large trades in a single transaction without putting the buyer or the seller at a disadvantage, and it allows exchanges to run a separate trading window for them. The window goes back to a SEBI letter of September 2, 2005. Today’s rules, though, come from SEBI’s circular Review of Block Deal Framework dated October 8, 2025, which kicked in from the 60th day after it was issued.

Here’s what that circular sets out:

• Morning window: 8:45 AM to 9:00 AM, using the previous day’s closing price as the reference price.
• Afternoon window: 2:05 PM to 2:20 PM, using as the reference the volume weighted average price (VWAP) of the stock’s cash-segment trades between 1:45 PM and 2:00 PM. Exchanges work out that reference and broadcast it between 2:00 PM and 2:05 PM.
• Price range: orders have to sit within 3% either side of the reference price, subject to surveillance measures and applicable price bands.
• Minimum size: ₹25 crore per order.
• Delivery only: every block trade must end in delivery. It can’t be squared off or reversed.
• Disclosure: exchanges publish the scrip, client name, quantity and traded price the same day after market hours.

These rules apply to the block window under the optional T+0 settlement cycle too. When the circular came out, BusinessLine reported that it lifted the minimum block deal size from ₹10 crore to ₹25 crore and widened the price band. Under SEBI’s December 2024 master circular, orders had been allowed only within 1% of the reference price.

A bulk deal is a disclosure that something big happened in the normal market. A block deal is a separate, delivery-only trade struck in its own window. Same evening list format, very different meaning.

Inside the NSE block window

NSE’s equity market segment page fills in the operating detail beneath SEBI’s rules:

• Block trades run in the odd lot market under series BL or TL, so they never touch the regular order book.
• The morning window takes securities in both the T+0 and T+1 settlement cycles. The afternoon window is for T+1 securities only. The block session has no pre-open or post-close.
• Orders match only when price and quantity both match, with time priority between identical orders. Market orders, stop-loss orders and disclosed-quantity orders aren’t permitted.
• The exchange cancels an unmatched block order after 60 seconds, and morning orders don’t carry over to the afternoon.
• The 3% range can’t go beyond the stock’s own price band for the day. NSE’s example: a stock in a 2% band in the normal market stays at a 2% range in the block window.
• If nothing trades in the 1:45 PM to 2:00 PM slot, NSE falls back on the VWAP of trades from 9:00 AM to 1:45 PM, and if that’s missing too, the previous day’s adjusted close.
• If an index-based market-wide circuit breaker trips during the afternoon session, that session shuts. If one trips earlier and normal trading is halted at any point between 1:45 PM and 2:00 PM or 2:05 PM and 2:20 PM, there’s no afternoon session that day.

Another hypothetical. A stock closed at ₹400 yesterday. In the morning window, a block order has to be priced between ₹388 and ₹412, 3% either side of ₹400. At ₹400 a share, the ₹25 crore minimum comes to 6,25,000 shares. Since both orders must match on price and quantity, and an unmatched order dies after 60 seconds, the buyer and seller in practice have to line things up before the window even opens.

That ±3% range is closely tied to price bands and circuit limits. For how those bands are set, see our explainer on price bands and circuit limits on NSE.

Bulk deals and block deals on NSE, side by side

A big block deal in a small or mid-sized company can cross 0.5% of listed shares as well. But the bulk deal rule counts trades in the normal market segment, so it’s better to read the two lists together than to assume they overlap.

Walking through the October 16, 2026 bulk deal file

NSE posts both lists on its bulk and block deals report page, and you can download the latest files as CSVs. The October 16, 2026 bulk deal file had eight columns: Date, Symbol, Security Name, Client Name, Buy/Sell, Quantity Traded, Trade Price / Wght. Avg. Price, and Remarks. It ran to 131 rows across 35 stocks and 57 different client names, with 62 buy rows and 69 sell rows. Every row had a dash in Remarks. The block deal file for the same session had no records at all, a handy reminder that block deals of ₹25 crore or more don’t happen every day.

Three examples from that file show how little the client name tells you on its own.

Example 1: same firms on both sides (M and B Engineering)

M and B Engineering (symbol MBEL) had 18 rows: nine buy rows adding up to 56,73,790 shares and nine sell rows adding up to 56,39,881 shares. The same nine names show up on both sides, among them NK Securities Research, Junomoneta Finsol, Alphagrep Securities, Irage Broking Services and Blitzquant Research. Take NK Securities Research. It bought 12,51,116 shares at a weighted average of ₹296.89 and sold exactly 12,51,116 shares at ₹297.05. By our calculation that’s roughly ₹37.1 crore of stock each way, yet the firm finished the day with no net change in the quantity it reported.

When one entity appears as buyer and seller of almost the same quantity in a session, that’s intraday trading, not someone building a stake. If you’d only looked at the buy rows, you’d have read it completely wrong.

Always check whether a buyer in the bulk deal list is also a seller of the same stock that day. If the quantities roughly cancel out, nobody is accumulating anything.

Example 2: one set of funds handing over to another (Green Asia Impex)

Green Asia Impex (GREENASIA) tells a different story. Every row was at ₹77.40. Selling: VBCube Ventures Fund II sold 5,24,800 shares, and VBCube Ventures Fund sold 1,10,400 and 2,57,600 shares, for 8,92,800 shares in all. Buying: Nautilus Private Capital picked up 6,44,800 shares and MGO High Conviction Fund 1,28,000 shares, for 7,72,800 in all. Same price, named funds on each side. That points to a negotiated transfer from one group of holders to another. The 1,20,000-share gap between the totals means the rest went to buyers who stayed under the 0.5% threshold and so never showed up on the list.

Example 3: a broker on both sides (Motisons Jewellers)

In Motisons Jewellers (MOTISONS), Arihant Capital Markets bought 1,10,72,829 shares at an average of ₹17.58 and sold 1,24,25,295 shares at ₹17.73. When a broker or prop trading name shows heavy volume on both sides, those rows more likely reflect trading flow than a long-term bet. They tell you the stock was busy, not who owns it for the long haul.

Five habits for using deal data

1. Net out both sides. Total each client’s buys and sells in the stock before you conclude anything.
2. Put the price in the day’s range. Compare the deal price with the stock’s high, low and close in the bhavcopy. A bulk buy at the day’s high in a stock that then closed lower means something different from one at the close.
3. Find out who the client is. A mutual fund, insurer or foreign fund is a very different signal from a high-frequency or proprietary trading firm.
4. Remember what’s missing. Anyone below the 0.5% threshold never appears, so the list isn’t a full map of who traded.
5. Confirm stake changes elsewhere. A deal list is one day’s snapshot. The company’s shareholding pattern filings show whether a holder actually held on to the shares.

Our earlier report on a Lenskart block deal shows how one of these trades turns into a market story. And since the afternoon window’s reference price is itself a VWAP, our guide to the VWAP trading strategy on NSE explains that benchmark.

Indian block deals vs US block trades

If you read foreign coverage, be careful: the term means something else abroad. Investopedia describes a block trade as a large, privately negotiated transaction, typically at least 10,000 shares of stock or $200,000 worth of bonds, often broken into smaller orders to soften the price impact. Here in India, a block deal is defined by a rupee minimum, has to fall within a fixed price range around an exchange reference price, and is executed and disclosed through the exchange’s own block window.

Quick answers

When do bulk and block deals get published?

SEBI requires exchanges to publish both the same day, after market hours.

Does every bulk deal mean institutions are buying?

No. The October 16, 2026 file is a good example: many of the biggest rows came from trading firms that bought and sold nearly the same quantity that day.

Can a block deal be reversed the same day?

No. SEBI’s October 2025 circular says every trade in the block window must result in delivery and can’t be squared off or reversed.

What’s the minimum block deal size on NSE?

₹25 crore per order under the revised SEBI framework, up from ₹10 crore before.

The short version

Bulk deals and block deals on NSE answer one narrow question: who traded unusually large quantities in a stock today, and at what price? Bulk deals flag anyone who crossed 0.5% of listed shares in the normal market. Block deals are delivery-only trades of ₹25 crore or more, done in two short windows within 3% of a reference price. Read the lists together, net each name’s buys against its sells, check prices against the bhavcopy, and treat any single evening’s entry as a lead worth digging into, not a reason to trade.

This article is for education only and is not investment advice. Deal figures are taken from NSE’s published bulk deal file for October 16, 2026 and are used to illustrate how the data is structured; hypothetical examples are labelled as such. Trading and investing in securities carries risk of loss. Consult a SEBI-registered adviser before making investment decisions.