Where to get reliable market information in India, and how to judge the rest

🎯 In 30 seconds: Most of what moves Indian shares is published first, for free, by a small number of official sources: the exchanges (company filings), SEBI (rules and enforcement), the RBI (interest rates and banking data), MOSPI (inflation, GDP and industrial output) and AMFI (mutual funds). News sites, TV channels and social media are retelling those documents, sometimes accurately. The habit that protects you is simple: before acting on anything, trace it back to the original filing or release. Tips in Telegram and WhatsApp groups, and "research" from people who are not registered with SEBI, deserve the most suspicion of all. SEBI's own tools let you check who is registered and pay them only through verified channels.

The information ladder

Think about how news of a cricket result travels. The official scorecard is published by the board. A newspaper reports it. A friend forwards a meme about it. By the fifth forward, someone says India won by 80 runs when it was 8. Market information works the same way, and money is lost on the distortions.

Rung	Examples	How much to trust it
1. Primary documents	Company filings on NSE and BSE, annual reports, SEBI circulars and orders, RBI policy statements, MOSPI releases	The company or regulator is legally responsible for them. Still read them critically: a company's own presentation is written to persuade.
2. Professional reporting	Business newspapers, wire services, established financial TV	Usually accurate on facts, often fast, sometimes wrong in the first hour. Headlines simplify.
3. Analysis and opinion	Brokerage reports, columnists, data sites	Useful for ideas. Check who wrote it and whether they have an interest.
4. Social media and chat groups	X, YouTube, Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp forwards	Unverified by default. Some is good, much is noise, and some is deliberate manipulation.

The rule: the further down the ladder you are, the more you need to climb back up before you act.

Exchange filings: what companies must tell everyone

Listed companies must disclose material events to the stock exchanges under SEBI's Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements (LODR) Regulations. The exchanges publish them on their websites, free, as soon as they are filed. This is the single most important source for anyone who holds Indian shares.

On the NSE website, the "corporate filings" section has separate pages for:

Announcements: everything the company files, from results to order wins, acquisitions, management changes, credit rating changes and litigation.
Board meetings: upcoming meetings and their purpose, such as results, dividends, fund raising or buybacks.
Financial results: the quarterly and annual results statements.
Corporate actions: dividends, bonus issues, splits and their ex-dates and record dates.
Shareholding pattern: who owns the company each quarter: promoters, institutions, the public.

BSE has equivalent pages. Large companies file on both; some smaller ones are listed only on one, so check both if you cannot find a filing. NSE also runs a section for verifying rumours, where you can see queries the exchange has raised with companies about news reports and the companies' replies.

Two filing types deserve special attention. Annual reports contain the full financial statements, the auditor's report, related party transactions and management's discussion of the business. Offer documents (the DRHP and RHP for an IPO) are the most detailed description of a business you will ever get for free. Reading company filings yourself shows which pages matter.

Set up alerts at the source

NSE's corporate filings dashboard lets you track the latest filings by a handful of companies you choose, and most broker apps show exchange announcements for shares in your holdings. Getting the filing yourself is faster and more reliable than waiting for someone to summarise it.

Company websites and investor relations

Most listed companies have an "investors" section on their website. Under LODR, it must carry certain information, including the audio recordings and transcripts of earnings calls (see Results season). You will also find investor presentations, annual reports from past years and contact details for the company's investor relations team and its registrar.

Treat presentations as the company's case for itself. They are useful for understanding strategy and segments, but they choose which numbers to show. The audited statements and the auditor's report are the documents to check them against.

SEBI: the rules and the referee

SEBI's website is where market rules are made and enforced. What to use it for:

Circulars and regulations: the actual text of every rule this course describes. When a broker or a news story says "SEBI has changed X", the circular is the place to confirm the details and the start date.
Enforcement orders: SEBI publishes its orders against companies, promoters, brokers and individuals, including people running unregistered tip services on Telegram and other channels. Searching a name there takes a minute.
Registered intermediaries: searchable lists of SEBI-registered research analysts, investment advisers, brokers and others. If someone wants to be paid for share recommendations, they must appear here.
Investor education: SEBI's investor website and its SCORES platform for complaints, which Who runs and polices the market explains.

Two tools launched in October 2025 help you pay only genuine intermediaries. SEBI-registered investor-facing intermediaries, such as brokers and mutual funds, collect payments through UPI IDs ending in the exclusive "@valid" handle, issued by NPCI with a suffix for their category. SEBI Check lets you confirm that a UPI ID or bank account belongs to a registered entity before you pay. If someone asking for money cannot give you a verifiable registration and payment route, do not pay.

The RBI: rates, banks and the rupee

The Reserve Bank of India sets the repo rate through its Monetary Policy Committee, regulates banks and NBFCs, and manages the rupee. Its decisions move bank shares, rate-sensitive sectors and the market as a whole.

Monetary policy statements: the policy decision, the vote and the reasoning, published on the RBI website on policy days. Read the statement, not just the headline rate. The tone on inflation and growth often matters as much as the decision.
Press releases: everything from policy decisions to actions against specific banks and NBFCs.
DBIE (Database on Indian Economy, at data.rbi.org.in): the RBI's data portal, with long time series on interest rates, money supply, bank credit, exchange rates and more, free to download.

The economy and stocks explains how rate decisions feed into share prices.

MOSPI and other economic data

The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI) publishes India's main economic statistics, including:

Consumer Price Index (CPI): retail inflation, the number the RBI targets.
GDP: quarterly estimates of economic growth, plus advance and revised annual estimates.
Index of Industrial Production (IIP): monthly factory, mining and electricity output.

MOSPI publishes a release calendar on its website, so you know in advance when numbers are due. In February 2026 it moved CPI to a new base year (2024 = 100) and GDP to a new base year (2022-23). When you compare figures from before and after that change, read MOSPI's notes on how the old and new series link, rather than mixing numbers from different bases.

Other official sources you will meet: the Union Budget documents, published on the Budget's official website on Budget day; Press Information Bureau releases for government announcements; and NSE Indices (niftyindices.com) for index methodology, constituents and index changes.

Fund flows: FPIs, DIIs and mutual funds

Indian market commentary constantly refers to "FPI selling" or "DII buying". These numbers are published, and you can check them yourself.

NSE's FII/FPI and DII trading activity report shows provisional daily buying, selling and net figures for foreign portfolio investors and domestic institutions in the cash market, across NSE, BSE and MSEI.
AMFI publishes monthly industry data on mutual fund flows, including SIP inflows and assets by category, along with daily NAVs for every scheme.
Depository data: NSDL also publishes FPI investment data on its FPI website.

A caution about flows: daily figures are provisional and noisy. A single day of heavy FPI selling tells you less than headlines suggest. Look at weeks and months, and remember that for every rupee one group sells, someone else bought.

Judging news

Professional business news is far more reliable than social media, but speed creates errors. A short checklist before you act on a story:

What is the original source? A filing, a regulator's release, a named official, or "sources said"? Stories based on unnamed sources can be right, but treat them as unconfirmed until the company or regulator files something.
Is it new? Many "news" items repeat a filing from days or weeks ago. Check the filing date on the exchange.
Which numbers? Standalone or consolidated? Year on year or quarter on quarter? Including or excluding one-time items?
What is the size? A "₹500 crore order" means a lot to a company with ₹800 crore revenue and little to one with ₹50,000 crore.
Who benefits? Paid content, sponsored articles and advertorials look like news. So do press releases rewritten without checking.
Has the price already moved? By the time a story reaches TV, the market may have reacted to the filing.

Tips, finfluencers and paid "research"

The rules here are clearer than many people realise.

Giving recommendations for a fee requires SEBI registration. In India, someone who gives investment advice or research recommendations on securities as a business must be registered with SEBI as an investment adviser or research analyst. You can check on SEBI's website in a minute.
Registered entities cannot work with unregistered advisers. Since August 2024, SEBI's rules bar brokers, mutual funds and other regulated entities from any direct or indirect association with a person who gives securities advice or recommendations without being registered, or who makes claims about returns without SEBI's permission. That is aimed at paid promotions by unregistered finfluencers.
Education is allowed, with limits. People who only teach may use market price data, but SEBI requires a lag: from 1 July 2026, price data for educational purposes must be at least 30 days old, and educators must not use the last 30 days of data to name securities in a way that suggests future prices or recommendations. That is one reason this course uses hypothetical companies and older dates.

Red flags that should end the conversation:

Guaranteed or "assured" returns, or "fixed profit every month".
A request to pay into a personal bank account or a UPI ID without the "@valid" handle.
Pressure to act right now, before the "upper circuit" or "before the news is public".
An invitation to a group where screenshots of huge profits are posted daily and losses never are.
A request for your trading login, OTP or TPIN, or an app that is not from a SEBI-registered broker. See Scams and red flags.

"Inside information" is a trap either way

If someone offers you advance knowledge of results, an order or a deal, either it is false and you are being set up to buy what they are selling, or it is unpublished price sensitive information and trading on it is insider trading, which SEBI prosecutes. Neither ends well for you.

A worked example: checking a forward

You receive this in a WhatsApp group at 10:20 a.m.:

"BIG NEWS!! Sharma Foods gets ₹2,000 crore government order. Upper circuit tomorrow. Buy below ₹490 before it's too late!!"

Here is how to check it in five minutes, using only primary sources.

Exchange filings. Open Sharma Foods' announcements on NSE and BSE. Has the company filed anything about an order today or this week? Material orders are the kind of event companies disclose under LODR. No filing means no confirmation.
Size check. From the latest annual results, Sharma Foods' yearly revenue is about ₹1,500 crore. A ₹2,000 crore order would be bigger than a whole year's sales. Possible, but extraordinary, and a company would rush to disclose it.
Price and volume. Is the share already moving on heavy volume? If it is up 6% on five times its usual volume with no filing, someone is buying on the rumour. Check NSE's large deals page later for bulk deals.
Exchange queries. Look at whether the exchange has asked the company to clarify a news report. Companies' replies are filed and public.
The sender. Is the person or group registered with SEBI? Do they disclose holdings? A group that says "buy below ₹490" may well be selling to you at ₹490.

If the filing exists, you can make your own decision from the actual document. If it does not, you have saved yourself from the oldest trick in the market: buying someone else's shares at the top of a move they started.

A short list of sources to bookmark

For	Go to
Company announcements, results, corporate actions, deals	NSE and BSE websites, corporate filings sections
Rules, circulars, enforcement orders, registration checks	sebi.gov.in
Investor education and complaints	investor.sebi.gov.in and SCORES
Rates, monetary policy, banking data	rbi.org.in and data.rbi.org.in (DBIE)
Inflation, GDP, industrial output	mospi.gov.in
Mutual fund NAVs and industry data	amfiindia.com
Index rules and constituents	niftyindices.com and BSE indices pages
Daily FPI and DII activity	NSE's FII/FPI and DII trading activity report

For a longer list of free learning resources, see Keep learning.

Try it

Pick one company you are interested in and spend 30 minutes building a one-page fact sheet from primary sources only. From NSE or BSE: the last four quarterly results (revenue and profit), the latest shareholding pattern (promoter, FPI, DII and public percentages) and any announcements in the last month. From the company's website: the latest annual report and the most recent earnings call transcript. From SEBI's website: search the company's name in enforcement orders. Then find one news article about the company from the past month and check every number in it against what you collected. Write down anything the article got wrong or left out.

Check yourself

Where should you look first to confirm that a company has won a large order? Answer: The company's announcements on NSE and BSE. Material events must be disclosed to the exchanges, so a real order should appear there.
Someone in a Telegram group charges ₹5,000 a month for share tips. What should you check? Answer: Whether they are registered with SEBI as a research analyst or investment adviser, on SEBI's registered intermediaries list. If not, they should not be providing paid recommendations.
What does an "@valid" UPI handle tell you? Answer: That the UPI ID belongs to a SEBI-registered investor-facing intermediary, issued through NPCI. You can also check with SEBI Check before paying.
Which organisation publishes India's CPI and GDP figures? Answer: MOSPI, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.
A headline says "FPIs sold ₹3,000 crore today". Why should you not read too much into it? Answer: Daily flow figures are provisional and noisy, every sale had a buyer, and trends over weeks or months tell you more than one day.

🔎 Where to get reliable market information in India, and how to judge the rest