The tug of war

Flow is published once, after the close — there is no intraday feed, so this is the shortest window that exists. Net alone hides the turnover behind it, so each side shows what it bought against what it sold, and where that net sits against five years of sessions.

The same correlation, measured at every offset between flow and return. Bars left of zero pair today's flow with returns that already happened; bars right of zero pair it with returns still to come. Anything inside the shaded band is indistinguishable from no relationship at all.

How much each index moves on a day of heavy net foreign flow. This is co-movement measured from daily data — not a claim that foreign money went into that sector. Nobody publishes daily sector-level flow; the fortnightly measured version is in the next section.

The only real sector-level foreign-flow number published in India. NSDL reports it every fortnight, per sector, from custody records — so this is measured money, not inference. The trade-off is frequency: it arrives twice a month, not daily.

Cash flow says what they bought. Index-futures open interest says how they are hedged. The ratio below is FII long open interest divided by short — under 1.0 means more short contracts open than long.

What the index actually did in the sessions following the top and bottom 5% of foreign-flow days. This is a historical record with its sample sizes attached, not a projection — read the n column before reading anything else.

Monthly net flow across the full record. The relationship between flow and returns is strongest at this horizon — and the regime change since 2021, when domestic money overtook foreign as the marginal buyer, is visible without any statistics at all.