Participant flows
NSE participant-wise open interest · close of 2026-09-09 · since 2012
Index futures, who is on which side
long ◀ | ▶ short, one shared scaleCLIENT
Clients (mostly retail)
2,83,444
52,964
5.35
DII
Domestic institutions
43,738
29,127
1.50
FII
Foreign institutions
39,027
3,15,277
0.12
PRO
Proprietary desks
63,306
32,147
1.97
Every contract has a long and a short, so the four books sum to zero across the market — one side's position is the other's. That is what makes the split readable: when foreign institutions run 3,15,277 short against 2,83,444 long held by clients, those are largely the same contracts seen from opposite ends.
Participant
Leg
Measure
Window
Latest ratio
0.124
net short
Median, this window
0.288
Percentile
15th
within these 750 days
Window low
0.064
Window high
5.190
FII · long ÷ short
750 trading days · hover for any day
long ÷ short long book short bookcontract-size change — levels not comparable across it
What this data will not tell you. Open interest is a position, not a trade — it cannot say who initiated, at what price, or why. A large short book may be a directional bet, a hedge against cash equities, or one leg of an arbitrage, and the report does not distinguish them. Four dates are excluded as corrupt at source: 2013-08-22 has its participant labels shifted by one row, 2012-01-20 and 2012-01-23 carry values in the tens where neighbours are in the hundreds of thousands, and 2019-12-12 has a single bad FII row whose ratio of 0.103 falls inside today's plausible range and would never look wrong on a chart.