On 8 December 2023, two GQG Partners-linked funds bought a combined 28.3 crore shares of GMRAIRPORT, worth close to ₹1,670 crore at that day’s weighted average price of ₹59.09. Four existing large holders, including Deccan Value Investors and ASN Investments, sold into the same session. All of it was public within hours, filed as a bulk deal on the BSE.
That filing is one of three separate windows Indian markets give you into who owns a stock. You have probably only ever noticed one of them, usually as a headline: “FII buys stake in XYZ.” Here is what each window actually discloses, what none of them show you, and how to read all three without over-trusting any single one.
What counts as a bulk deal, and what counts as a block deal
A bulk deal is any single transaction where one investor buys or sells shares worth 0.5% or more of a company’s total listed equity, executed on the regular order book like any other trade. There is no minimum rupee value attached to the rule. A large investor in a small, thinly traded company can trigger a bulk deal with a few crore rupees; the same 0.5% in a Nifty 50 name might take tens of crores.
A block deal is a different mechanism. It is a privately negotiated trade for a single counterparty, routed through a dedicated exchange window instead of the open order book. Under SEBI’s revised block deal framework, effective 7 December 2025, a block deal now needs a minimum order value of ₹25 crore, up from ₹10 crore under the earlier rule. It has to execute in one of two daily windows: 8:45 to 9:00 AM, priced off the previous day’s close, or 2:05 to 2:20 PM, priced off the same day’s afternoon VWAP, within a band of plus or minus 3% of that reference price.
Every block trade settles with actual delivery, and the exchange publishes the stock, the client name, the quantity, and the price that same evening.
Both disclosures come from whichever exchange the trade actually happened on. Neither is a leak, a tip, or insider information. They are mandatory, same-day public filings.
The rule exists to solve a specific problem. A single trade worth crores of rupees can move a stock’s price if it hits the open order book without warning, and it can look very different from the outside depending on who gets to see it first. Forcing same-day disclosure of any trade above these thresholds means a retail investor reading the exchange’s website at 6 PM has access to the same fact as anyone else. It does not level the timing, since the trade already happened before you read about it, but it does level the visibility.
Reading a real disclosure: GMRAIRPORT, two ways
The December 2023 trade was a bulk deal, not a block deal, and it is a useful worked example because the shape of the disclosure matters as much as the headline number. The BSE’s bulk deal list for that day showed four buyers and four sellers, each an independent line item, not a matched pair:
| Client | Side | Shares | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goldman Sachs Trust II - GQG Partners Intl Opportunities Fund | Buy | 19.02 crore | ₹59.09 |
| GQG Partners Emerging Markets Equity Fund | Buy | 9.26 crore | ₹59.09 |
| Nomura India Investment Fund Mother Fund | Buy | 6.25 crore | ₹58.20 |
| ASN Investments Limited | Sell | 43.91 crore | ₹58.21 |
| Varanium India Opportunity Ltd | Sell | 13.90 crore | ₹58.47 |
That last point is worth sitting with. A bulk deal listing tells you who crossed the 0.5% threshold that day, on which side. It does not tell you that GQG bought specifically from ASN Investments, or from any of the other named sellers. Bulk deals are gross disclosures, not a record of matched counterparties. Read the buy side and the sell side as two independent facts about the same day, not as one transaction.
A block deal reads differently, because it is a matched trade by construction. On 30 March 2026, GMRAIRPORT’s BSE block deal list showed exactly one line on each side: BNP Paribas Financial Markets bought 36.3 lakh shares, and Copthall Mauritius Investment Limited sold the identical 36.3 lakh shares, both at ₹85.75, a trade worth just over ₹31 crore. Same quantity, same price, one counterparty each. That is what a privately negotiated block trade looks like once it hits the tape.
Both examples are GMRAIRPORT, and both are BSE disclosures. GMRAIRPORT also trades on the NSE, and a bulk or block trade executed there would show up only in NSE’s own list, never BSE’s. The two exchanges run independent order books, so a stock’s full bulk and block deal history is genuinely split across two separate public feeds, not duplicated across both.
The other window: shareholding patterns
Bulk and block deals are transaction records. They only exist because a trade was large enough, in one day, to cross a threshold. A position built patiently over weeks, in pieces smaller than 0.5% a day, never generates either disclosure.
That gap is partly closed by a different filing: the shareholding pattern, which every listed company must submit within 21 days of each quarter’s end under SEBI Regulation 31. It is not a transaction record. It is a census, a snapshot of exactly who owns what as of one date. The format splits ownership into promoter and promoter-group, and public, and it names every public shareholder holding 1% or more individually, alongside their share count and percentage stake.
Follow the same thread forward. As of the quarter ended 31 March 2026, both Goldman Sachs Trust II - GQG Partners and GQG Partners Emerging Markets Equity Fund still appear by name in GMRAIRPORT’s shareholding pattern filing, more than two years after the original bulk deal. The filing does not tell you when they bought or at what price. It tells you they were still on the register, above 1%, on that date. Bulk deals and shareholding patterns answer different questions: one is “what moved, and when,” the other is “who is currently holding, and how much.”
The same filing also carries the categories you see summarised on Screener or Tickertape: promoter holding, FII holding, DII holding, mutual fund holding, and promoter pledge, each as a percentage of total shares outstanding. Named holders sit underneath those totals. If a company’s FII holding rises from one quarter to the next, the aggregate percentage tells you the direction; the named-shareholder list, when you go and read it, tells you which specific funds moved.
What none of the three show you
Put a position below every threshold at once, built through ordinary market orders instead of a single large trade, and it disappears entirely. Under 0.5% of listed equity in any single day means no bulk deal. Under ₹25 crore in any single negotiated trade means no block deal. Under 1% of total shares outstanding at quarter-end means no name in the shareholding pattern. A fund can hold a real, meaningful position in a stock you track and never once appear in any public disclosure built for retail investors to read.
GMRAIRPORT had just over 1,055 crore shares outstanding as of the March 2026 filing, so a stake just under 1%, close to 10.5 crore shares, could sit on a fund’s books worth several hundred crore rupees at the stock’s March 2026 block-deal price of ₹85.75 and still stay off the named-shareholder list, provided it was accumulated a little at a time rather than in one large print. Scale that logic to a company where 1% is a smaller absolute number, and the same gap gets easier to fall into, not harder.
The same blind spot runs in reverse. An investor who exits gradually, a little below 0.5% a day, generates no sell-side bulk deal either. Silence in these filings is not proof that a large holder is still in, and a past buy is not proof they still are. A bulk or block deal is a fact about one specific day. Funds trim, rotate, and exit for reasons that have nothing to do with the stock’s prospects, and the disclosure that told you they bought will not tell you when they eventually sell in smaller pieces.
None of this makes the data useless. It makes it a fact, dated and specific, not a signal that generalises on its own.
Reading these responsibly
The temptation with any of these three disclosures is to treat “a large fund bought” as a reason to buy too. That is recency bias wearing a spreadsheet: a single data point, from a single day, standing in for a thesis. Cognitive biases that destroy algo trading strategies covers this pattern in more depth, but the short version applies directly here. A fund with a multi-year, multi-billion-rupee mandate has a different time horizon, cost basis, and risk tolerance than a retail portfolio reacting to a headline three days later. Copying the trade without copying the thesis is not the same decision.
If a stock’s ownership structure genuinely matters to your process, the more defensible approach is to define what you are actually looking for as a rule, not a headline, and check whether that rule would have worked across many companies and many years, not just the one that made the news this week. “A fund I recognise bought some shares last week” is a headline. It is not a rule you can test.
What to try next
saral.money will not tell you whether a specific bulk deal is worth following, because that is a one-off event, not a repeatable rule. What it does is let you take a testable idea, like ranking a universe by ROE or ROCE, and check it against 15 years of NSE and BSE history before you decide it is worth acting on. Open a strategy and see what a rules-based version of your thesis would actually have done, rather than a single trade’s worth of evidence.
Further reading
- Cognitive biases that destroy algo trading strategies
- Momentum: the closest systematic cousin to “buy what’s being bought”
- Backtesting: how to check a rule against history instead of a single data point