FII DII Data October 28: Both Buy as Sensex Slips 353 Points

The FII DII data for October 28 had something we haven’t seen often this month: both camps on the same side. Foreign institutional investors were net buyers of ₹871.83 crore in the cash market on Wednesday, and domestic institutions added ₹643.35 crore, according to NSE’s provisional FII/FPI and DII figures, which combine trades on NSE, BSE and MSEI. And yet the Sensex still ended lower.

FII DII data October 28: the numbers

FIIs/FPIs bought shares worth ₹16,834.53 crore and sold ₹15,962.70 crore. DIIs bought ₹17,240.90 crore and sold ₹16,597.55 crore. Put together, institutions were net buyers of a little over ₹1,500 crore on the day.

The foreign buying is smaller than a day earlier. On October 27, FIIs were net buyers of ₹4,240.39 crore while DIIs were net sellers of ₹1,250.03 crore, as CNBC-TV18 reported. We had looked at that session in our FII DII data for October 27. So that’s two straight sessions of net foreign buying, though Wednesday’s figure is roughly a fifth of Tuesday’s.

Why the index fell anyway

Flows and index moves don’t always line up, and Wednesday showed why. The Sensex fell 353 points to 73,246 and the Nifty slipped 51 points to 22,699, per CNBC-TV18. The drag came mostly from IT. The Nifty IT index fell more than 2% as tech stocks tracked global AI-related earnings, a move we covered in our note on the Nifty IT fall. With IT down that much, steady buying elsewhere wasn’t enough to keep the benchmarks green.

Outside the benchmarks, the tone was better. The Nifty Midcap index rose 245 points to 57,275 and Nifty Bank gained 293 points to 54,267. Stock-specific moves were driven by results:

• L&T rose over 4% after its Q2 numbers and a bigger order book.
• Piramal Pharma jumped more than 17% after its September-quarter results.
• Apollo Hospitals rose over 4% and was the top Nifty gainer.
• TVS Motor gained nearly 4%.

There was also the Jio Platforms debut. The stock closed at ₹1,419 against a listing price of ₹1,358, and its market capitalisation crossed ₹13 lakh crore, which CNBC-TV18 said made it the second-largest company by market value on day one. More on that in our Jio Platforms listing report. Big listing days can skew a single session’s flow figure, so we wouldn’t read too much into one day.

What it means

One session of joint buying doesn’t make a trend. These are provisional numbers, so the final figures may differ. Still, two days of net FII buying is a change in tone, and DIIs returning to the buy side after Tuesday’s selling suggests Tuesday’s outflow wasn’t the start of anything bigger.

Here’s what we’d watch next: whether foreign buying holds once the Jio listing effect fades, and whether IT stabilises. If the heavyweights keep falling, steady institutional buying may just cushion the indices rather than lift them.

Disclaimer: This article is for information and education only and is not investment advice. Please do your own research or consult a SEBI-registered adviser before making any investment decision.