How to read this site
Research tool · not investment advice. Full disclaimer →
Five conventions and five steps.
Descriptive record only — past data and published method.
Five minutes, five steps
the shape of a sessionSource: orientation.
- 1Understand the dayOne calibrated read of the tape — mood, breadth, delivery, who was buying.
- 2Find a nameEvery symbol on the site is a link. Type one into Pat, or click any chip.
- 3Learn what a number meansEvery metric has a plain-English definition and names the table it came from.
- 4Form your own viewRead the evidence — coverage, the validation record, the pre-registered gates.
- 5Track itPut the name on your watchlist and let the change log tell you when it moves.
You can ignore all of this. Nothing on the site is hidden behind a walkthrough — this page exists so a first visit has a shape.
How to read anything here
five conventions, whole siteSource: conventions.
- Every number names its source. The small grey chip on each card is the table it came from and how often that table is refreshed.
- Sample means sample. When a live read is empty we show an illustrative version and mark it — it is never passed off as real.
- Empty means empty. A blank section tells you what would appear there and why it has not, rather than showing a zero.
- Descriptive, not directive. Nothing here ranks a stock for you or tells you to act. Where a method failed its test, the page says so.
- Symbols are links. Any ticker takes you to that name's evidence.
Read one chart with me
two minutes, no finance backgroundSource: NSE daily market internals.
Every chart on this site is one of a handful of simple shapes. We will read a real one together first, then name the six shapes — after that you can read any analytic here. Nothing on this page needs a finance degree.
- This one strip is 22 years. Each thin bar is about a week; the left edge is 2004, the right edge is today.
- Green = most stocks rose that week; red = most fell. The brighter the colour, the stronger it was.
- See the bright-red bands? Those are real market crashes you may remember — the 2008 crash and COVID in March 2020, marked right on the strip. Almost nothing rose in those weeks.
- That's the whole trick — don't squint at one bar, read the bands: long green = a calm rise, red clusters = trouble.
You just read a 22-year chart. Every coloured strip on this site works exactly like this one — the shape is the skill, not the subject.
The six shapes you'll meet
the whole visual vocabularySource: worked examples · per read.
Six shapes are the whole visual vocabulary of this site: the colour ribbon, the filled line, the fingerprint, the gain-vs-pain bar, the “how unusual” gauge and the coloured table. Learn one once and you can read a page you have never opened, because the shape is the skill and not the subject.
- What it is. A row of thin coloured bars, one per week (oldest on the left). It squeezes years into a single strip.
- How to read it. Colour = direction (green = up, red = down); brightness = strength. Read the bands, never a single bar.
- What it is. A line that fills green above a middle line and red below it. The middle means “neither buying nor selling hard”.
- How to read it. Distance from the middle is the message, not the wiggle. A long green stretch is sustained appetite; a dip below is it draining away. The shape over time is the story — note the deep-red dip at the 2008 crash.
- What it is. Bars spread left and right from a centre line — one trait per row. This is the actual result: before big moves, the strength traits run well above normal (the top bars) while the heavy-buying traits run below normal (the bottom bars).
- How to read it. Right of centre = more than normal, left = less. The longest bars are the traits that actually separate the moment from an ordinary day.
- What it is. A floating bar showing a typical journey, not one number: how far something dips and how far it rises.
- How to read it. The red end (left) = how far it typically dipped; the green end (right) = how far it rose. A bar leaning right = more gain than pain.
- What it is. A marker on a range showing where today sits compared with its own past.
- How to read it. The faint hill is where the number usually sits; the bright line is today. Near the left = unusually low; near the right = unusually high (e.g. “more extreme than 88% of history”); in the hill = an ordinary reading.
Exchange filings only. Each cell is the median ROCE of the companies' own annual filings with the exchange (NSE XBRL), and a cell needs at least five of them: the first year that happens is FY2023. Earlier years are withheld — the filings are too thin, and the older third-party archive that covers them is not used here.
- What it is. A coloured table — rows (here, sectors) and columns (here, years).
- How to read it. Warmer = higher. Read across a row to watch a sector rise or fade over time; read down a column to compare in one year. A blank cell = too little data to trust.
Every analytic on this site is one of these six shapes. Learn the shape once and you can read a page you have never opened before.
The words, in plain English
twelve ideas the pages assumeSource: glossary · plain.
- Breadth. How many stocks are actually rising — not just the one headline index. Broad = most stocks up.
- The tape. Whether buyers are aggressive (paying up to own stock) or quietly stepping back. Rising price with a weak tape is a warning.
- Delivery. Shares actually bought to keep (moved to your demat / holding account), not flipped the same day. High delivery = real conviction.
- Drawdown. The dip — how far something falls from a high before (maybe) recovering. The pain you sit through before a payoff.
- Dispersion. How differently stocks move. High = each on its own merits (picking matters); low = they all move together on the big news.
- Median vs average. The median is the middle outcome — the “typical” one. The average gets pulled up by a few huge winners, so we prefer the median.
- Percentile. Where a number sits versus its own history. “88th percentile” = higher than 88% of the past — unusually high.
- Base-rate. How often something happened historically. It describes the past; it is not a prediction of the future.
- Survivorship. We mostly see companies that survived. Failures dropped off the list, so raw historical returns look rosier than reality.
- FII / DII. FII = foreign investors. DII = domestic (Indian) mutual funds & insurers. They often trade against each other.
- ROCE / OPM. ROCE = profit earned per ₹100 of capital a company uses. OPM = profit left from every ₹100 of sales. Higher = a better business.
- Long / short. A “long” bet profits if the price rises; a “short” bet profits if it falls. “Net short” = more down-bets than up.
The one rule that matters most
descriptive, never directiveSource: read this last.
Everything here describes the past — it never tells you what to do. These analytics tell you what has happened, with all the caveats stated on each page. No chart on this site is a signal to trade on. They are for understanding the market's character and history — the decision is always yours.
When a page shows a caveat (survivorship, “after the fact”, thin data), that is the honest fine print, not a footnote to skip.
Where the evidence lives
the whole proof estateSource: Proof index.