₹100 in every listed company in India: how 2026 went

Here is a simple experiment. On 1 January 2026, you put ₹100 into every company listed on the NSE and the BSE. Not just the famous ones. Every one with a share price, from Reliance to small companies on the SME platforms whose names most people have never heard.

That is 5,352 companies and ₹5,35,200 in total.¹ By the close on 26 October 2026, it was worth ₹5,45,568, including dividends. That is a gain of 1.9%.²

That number needs a warning straight away. 639 of those companies did not trade on 1 January, so I “bought” them at their last earlier price, which nobody could actually have paid that day. Counting only the 4,713 companies that traded on 1 January, ₹4,71,300 became ₹4,65,669, a fall of 1.2%. Both numbers are honest. They answer slightly different questions.

Over the same days, ₹5,35,200 in the Nifty 50 would have fallen to about ₹4,70,278, a loss of about 12%.³ Either way, the “buy everything equally” portfolio did far better than the famous index. But two out of three companies lost money, and a handful of winners held the total up.

A few words first

The main board is the regular part of a stock exchange. Both exchanges also run separate SME platforms for small and medium-sized companies: NSE Emerge and BSE SME. Their shares can only be bought in large fixed lots, and an SME company can later move up to the main board.

A bhavcopy is the file each exchange publishes after every trading day, with the opening, high, low and closing price of every share. All the prices here come from the NSE and BSE bhavcopies. A corporate action is anything a company does that changes its shares or pays out to shareholders, such as a split, a bonus or a dividend.

Putting the same amount into every company is called an equal-weight portfolio. An index like the Nifty 50 works differently. Bigger companies get a bigger share of the money, so a fall in Reliance or HDFC Bank moves it far more than a fall in a small company.

How I did it

I tried to include every equity share listed on 1 January 2026: on the NSE main board, NSE Emerge, the BSE main board and BSE SME. I left out ETFs, REITs, InvITs, bonds, partly paid shares, rights entitlements and a second class of shares for one company. I matched companies listed on both exchanges by their ISIN, a unique code every share has, so each company counts once.¹

4,713 companies traded on 1 January. I “bought” them at that day’s closing price, using the NSE price where a company traded on NSE.

Another 639 companies were listed but did not trade that day. Many small shares go days, weeks or even years without a trade. For these, I used their last closing price before 1 January, from the exchanges’ own files.⁴ To decide who was still listed on 1 January, I used only what was known then: a company counts if it had traded in 2025 and had not merged or been delisted before 1 January, or if it was suspended but came back to trading later. 61 of these companies never traded again in 2026. Most are tiny and simply untraded; a few were suspended in insolvency. Two of them, Rolta India and Future Supply Chain Solutions, had all their shares cancelled without payment in 2026, so ₹100 there became nothing.

Last trade before 1 January	Companies
On 1 January itself	4,713
1 to 5 days earlier	377
6 to 30 days earlier	132
31 to 90 days earlier	51
91 to 365 days earlier	62
More than a year earlier	17
All	5,352

Some companies are left out, with reasons:⁴

• 12 merged into other companies before 1 January, so their shares no longer existed. ICICI Securities and Piramal Enterprises are examples.
• 3 came back from an insolvency or capital restructuring with far fewer shares, and I could not confirm by how many: McNally Bharat, JTL Defence and Lord’s Mark Industries. Without that ratio, any value I gave them would be a guess.
• 24 had been suspended for years and had changed their ISIN in the meantime, or had no earlier price I could find in exchange files going back to 2017.
• Companies suspended on BSE through all of 2025 and 2026 are not counted, because I could not get BSE’s full list of suspended shares.

On 1 January, 2,535 companies (about half) had a share price above ₹100, so ₹100 would not buy even one share. One MRF share cost ₹1,51,535. I assumed you could buy a fraction of a share. In real life you cannot, and SME shares trade only in large lots.

I then valued each holding at its closing price on 26 October 2026. If a company did not trade that day, I used its last closing price.² Thirteen SME companies that traded on 1 January moved up to the main board during the year. I followed them through the move.

Companies change their shares during a year, and I adjusted for that:⁵

• Splits and bonuses. In a split, each share is cut into smaller shares, like cutting a ₹10 note into ten ₹1 coins. In a bonus issue, the company gives existing shareholders free extra shares. Either way the price falls, but you own more shares. I changed your number of shares on the day it happened. The same goes for companies that did the reverse and combined shares, including companies that came back from insolvency with far fewer shares. For example, PAE Ltd (now called Aurique) gave its old public shareholders one new share for every 98.35 old ones.
• Rights issues. In a rights issue, a company lets its shareholders buy new shares, usually at a discount. Where NSE gave the terms, I treated it as if you sold your right to buy at its theoretical value, the usual way to adjust prices for a rights issue. BSE’s list does not give the terms, so for BSE-priced companies I counted the whole fall in price on that day as the value of the right.
• Demergers. In a demerger, a company splits off a business into a new company and gives its shareholders shares in it. Vedanta, for example, gave one share in each of four new companies for every Vedanta share. Where the new shares had started trading, I counted them at their 26 October price. Where they had not, I valued them at the drop in the parent’s price on the day of the split.
• Dividends. A dividend is cash a company pays its shareholders. Your ₹100 holdings would have collected ₹2,439 in total from about 1,670 companies. I added this as cash, based on the number of shares you held on the day.

The total and the typical company

The average ₹100 became ₹101.94, but the median ₹100 became only ₹87.15. The median is the middle company: half did better, and half did worse. So the typical company lost about 13%.⁶

Only 1,799 companies (34%) ended up above ₹100. 3,493 (65%) ended below, and 60 were exactly flat, almost all of them companies that never traded in 2026.

• Main board
• SME

5,352 companies, 1 January to 26 October 2026, with dividends. 'Up 0-25%' includes 60 companies (49 main board, 11 SME) that ended exactly flat.Source: NSE and BSE bhavcopies and corporate actions; my arithmetic

The biggest group, 1,779 companies, lost up to a quarter of their value. Another 1,350 lost between a quarter and a half. At the other end, 239 companies at least doubled.

A few winners carried the total

The whole portfolio gained ₹10,368. The ten best companies alone gained ₹11,357 between them, more than the whole portfolio. Take those ten out, and the other 5,342 companies lost 0.2%. Take out the best 54 (the top 1% of companies), and the rest lost 3.6%.⁶

Ten best	Board	Last price before buying	₹100 became
Antariksh Industries	Main	4 April 2022	₹2,156
Source Industries (India)	Main	29 December 2025	₹1,806
Rekvina Laboratories	Main	25 October 2021	₹1,290
Mrugesh Trading	Main	1 January 2026	₹1,176
Samtel India	Main	1 January 2026	₹1,131
Apollo Ingredients	Main	1 January 2026	₹1,128
Galada Power & Telecommunication	Main	1 January 2026	₹1,001
Tandhan Industries	Main	25 November 2025	₹928
Harig Crankshafts	Main	29 December 2025	₹893
Sterlite Technologies	Main	1 January 2026	₹846

Ten worst	Board	Last price before buying	₹100 became
Rolta India	Main	17 December 2025	₹0
Future Supply Chain Solutions	Main	27 October 2025	₹0
City Pulse Multiventures	SME	1 January 2026	₹3.71
Bhatia Colour Chem	SME	1 January 2026	₹5.67
Elitecon International	Main	1 January 2026	₹6.53
Trident Texofab	Main	1 January 2026	₹7.14
Anand Rayons	Main	1 January 2026	₹7.14
Cropster Agro	Main	1 January 2026	₹7.27
National Standard (India)	Main	1 January 2026	₹7.59
Aqylon Nexus	Main	1 January 2026	₹8.42

Five of the ten best were bought at an earlier price, and two of them, Antariksh Industries and Rekvina Laboratories, had last traded in 2022 and 2021. No single company now decides the result: the biggest, Antariksh Industries, adds 0.4 percentage points to the total.⁶

The two lists look different in one way. Market value is what all of a company’s shares are worth together. Nine of the ten best were tiny: their average market value in the second half of 2025 was under ₹10 crore each, and Antariksh Industries’ was under ₹3 lakh. Sterlite Technologies, at about ₹5,609 crore, was the exception. Eight of the ten worst were larger, each above ₹400 crore; Elitecon International had averaged about ₹27,167 crore. The other two, Rolta India and Future Supply Chain Solutions, were insolvent companies whose shares were wiped out.⁷

Galada Power’s price is from 23 October, its last trade. Aqylon Nexus split its shares and Antariksh Industries issued bonus shares this year, and the figures above count the extra shares.⁸ Many of these shares trade very little, so a big move can happen with very little money changing hands. I would not read much into any single name here.

SME companies against the main board

This is where the two parts of the market look most different.

Group	Companies	₹ put in	Worth on 26 Oct	Change	Median ₹100 became	Share that rose
Main board	4,352	₹4,35,200	₹4,45,669	+2.4%	₹87.70	33%
All SME	1,000	₹1,00,000	₹99,900	-0.1%	₹84.42	34%
NSE Emerge	533	₹53,300	₹52,661	-1.2%	₹83.53	33%
BSE SME	467	₹46,700	₹47,239	+1.2%	₹84.89	36%
Everything	5,352	₹5,35,200	₹5,45,568	+1.9%	₹87.15	34%

Counting only companies that traded on 1 January, the main board fell 1.0% and SME companies fell 2.1%.⁶

Either way, the typical SME company did worse: the median SME ₹100 became ₹84.42, against ₹87.70 on the main board. About a third of companies rose in both groups.

The bigger difference is how far SME shares swung. About one in eight SME companies (130, or 13.0%) lost more than half their value, against about one in nineteen on the main board (234, or 5.4%). At the other end, 6.1% of SME companies at least doubled, against 4.1% on the main board. The best SME company, Sancode Technologies, turned ₹100 into ₹767. The worst, City Pulse Multiventures, turned ₹100 into ₹3.71.

The SME total also leaned on a few winners. The ten best SME companies gained ₹4,062 between them. Without them, the other 990 lost 4.2%.

NSE’s index of NSE Emerge companies, the Nifty SME Emerge, fell 2.1% over the same days with dividends.³ It gives bigger companies more weight, so it is not directly comparable with an equal ₹100 in each.

SME prices are also staler. 339 of the 1,000 SME companies (34%) did not trade on 26 October, so their value is based on an earlier price. On the main board, the figure was 329 out of 4,352 (8%).²

Main board by size

AMFI, the mutual fund industry body, ranks listed companies by their average market value every six months. I used the list based on July to December 2025. The top 100 are large caps, numbers 101 to 250 are mid caps, and the rest are small caps. All but three main-board companies in my list appear in it.⁷

Main-board group	Companies	₹ put in	Worth on 26 Oct	Change	Median ₹100 became
Large caps (1-100)	100	₹10,000	₹9,504	-5.0%	₹93.22
Mid caps (101-250)	150	₹15,000	₹13,920	-7.2%	₹89.15
Small caps (rest)	4,099	₹4,09,900	₹4,21,945	+2.9%	₹87.41
Not in AMFI’s list	3	₹300	₹300	0.0%	₹100.00
All main board	4,352	₹4,35,200	₹4,45,669	+2.4%	₹87.70

Equal ₹100 in each company, by group (large, mid and small are main-board companies by AMFI rank; 'Traded 1 Jan' leaves out the 639 companies bought at an earlier price), against the Nifty 50, Nifty 500 and Nifty SME Emerge total return indices.Source: NSE and BSE bhavcopies and corporate actions; AMFI; NSE Indices; my arithmetic

All the companies bought at an earlier price are small caps, SMEs or companies outside AMFI’s list. Every large and mid cap traded on 1 January. Main-board small caps gained the most in total, but their median company did worse than the median large or mid cap. That fits the pattern above: the small companies hold most of the huge winners and most of the huge losers.

Even the 100 large caps, held equally, lost only 5%, far less than the Nifty 50. The Nifty gives more weight to the biggest companies, and several of the biggest fell hard. With dividends, ₹100 in HDFC Bank became ₹70.73, in Infosys ₹73.08 and in Reliance ₹76.66.⁹ NSE’s own Nifty 500 Equal Weight index, which also gives every company the same weight, fell 5.6% over the same days (price only, without dividends).³

This does not mean equal weighting always wins. It means that in 2026 so far, the giants did worse than the average company.

Mergers and companies that stopped trading

A fair test has to include the companies that disappeared, not just the survivors.¹⁰

• 6 were merged into other listed companies during 2026, all on the main board. For these, I swapped your shares into the buyer’s shares at the official swap ratio and followed those to 26 October. For example, Gujarat State Petronet holders got 10 Gujarat Gas shares (now Gujarat Energy) for every 13 they held, and Cigniti holders got one Coforge share for each Cigniti share.
• 2 had their shares cancelled without payment under insolvency plans, Rolta India and Future Supply Chain Solutions. I counted them at zero.
• 189 had no trade from 1 October onwards. 37 of them had traded on 1 January; BSE’s list shows that five of those were suspended under an insolvency resolution plan, and three for a reduction of their share capital. The rest were among the companies bought at an earlier price, including 59 that never traded at all in 2026. I valued all 189 at their last traded price. Some of these shares may be impossible to sell, so this probably flatters them.

If the 61 companies that never traded in 2026 were worth nothing, the total would be up 0.8% instead of 1.9%. If every company with no trade since 1 October, including those two, were worth nothing, it would be down 1.6%.⁶

One SME company, Cian Healthcare, went through an insolvency resolution plan and came back to trading in April. Under the plan, its public shareholders’ shares were replaced by far fewer new shares, so ₹100 there became ₹38.06 even though the share price rose.⁵

Caveats

• Stale prices. 639 companies are bought at their last price before 1 January, which you could not actually have paid that day. For most it was a few days old, but for 79 it was more than three months old, and for 17 more than a year. The result is sensitive to them: counting only companies whose last price was at most five days old, the total was up 0.4%; counting only those that traded on 1 January, it was down 1.2%.⁶
• Costs and taxes. I ignored brokerage, stamp duty, securities transaction tax and capital gains tax. Buying 5,352 tiny positions would cost far more in fees than it is worth.
• Fractional shares and lots. About half the companies cost more than ₹100 a share, and SME shares trade only in large lots, so this portfolio could not exist in real life with ₹100 each.
• Thin trading. Many small companies, especially on the SME platforms, trade very little. Their closing price may not be a price you could actually buy or sell at in size.
• Companies left out. 12 merged before 1 January, 3 have share ratios I could not confirm, 24 long-suspended companies had no usable earlier price, and BSE companies suspended through all of 2025 and 2026 are not counted.
• Status not checked one by one. Of the 61 companies that never traded in 2026, I confirmed what happened to 6. The other 55 are mostly tiny BSE companies that I assumed were still listed.
• Missing terms. BSE’s list of corporate actions does not give the terms of rights issues, or the share ratios for one consolidation and one reduction of capital. For those BSE-priced companies, I worked the adjustment out from the price change on the day, which can include that day’s ordinary market move.⁵
• A short window. This covers less than ten months, in a year when the Nifty 50 fell 13% (from 26,146.55 to 22,753.20). Over another period the result could look completely different.

What this means

Two things can be true at once. Owning a tiny slice of everything held up well this year, mostly because the biggest companies, which dominate the Nifty, fell more than the average company. And picking any single company was more likely to lose money than make it. That was even more true on the SME platforms, where big losses were far more common. Whether the total ended slightly up or slightly down depends on how you price the companies that nobody traded.

Footnotes

1. Company list from the NSE and BSE daily bhavcopies for 1 January 2026 (NSE, BSE), cross-checked against NSE’s full bhavcopy for the same day, plus the companies described in footnote 4. Included: NSE series EQ, BE and BZ (main board) and SM and ST (NSE Emerge); BSE groups A, B, T, X, XT, Z, ZP and P (main board) and M, MT, MS and TS (BSE SME); only shares with an equity ISIN. ETFs, REITs, InvITs, debt, partly paid shares and rights entitlements are left out, and GACM Technologies is counted once, without its separate DVR share class. Of the 5,352 companies, 4,352 are on the main board and 1,000 on the SME platforms (533 priced on NSE Emerge, 467 on BSE SME); 2,785 are priced on NSE and 2,567 on BSE. ↩ ↩²

2. Closing prices from the NSE and BSE bhavcopies for 26 October 2026 (NSE, BSE), and the daily bhavcopies for all 201 trading days in between (including a special Sunday session on 1 February), used to follow every company and find last traded prices. 668 companies did not trade on 26 October and are valued at their last close. Companies that moved from an SME platform to the main board kept the same ISIN, which is how I followed them. All totals are my arithmetic. I computed them twice with two separate programs, which agreed for every company. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Total return indices (which include dividends) from NSE Indices historical data, 1 January and 26 October 2026: Nifty 50 TRI 39,359.02 and 34,584.59 (-12.1%); Nifty 500 TRI 38,161.77 and 34,772.06 (-8.9%); Nifty SME Emerge TRI 14,762.20 and 14,446.57 (-2.1%). Price indices on 1 January are from NSE’s index closing file: Nifty 50 at 26,146.55 (22,753.20 on 26 October) and Nifty 500 Equal Weight at 14,277.05 (13,478.70 on 26 October, from NSE’s index data at the 3:30 pm close). My arithmetic. ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Companies that did not trade on 1 January: I went through every NSE and BSE daily bhavcopy for 2025 (249 trading days; for example NSE, 31 December 2025 and BSE, 31 December 2025) and took each company’s last closing price before 1 January 2026, on the exchange with the most recent trade (NSE if both traded that day). For companies with no trade in 2025, I searched older exchange files: every trading day from January 2023 to December 2024, and the first two trading days of each month back to 2017 (BSE) and 2015 (NSE), from the BSE and NSE archives. I counted a company as listed on 1 January if it had traded in 2025 and had not merged or been delisted before that date, or if it was suspended and traded again later. NSE’s list of securities available for trading on 1 January 2026 was used as a check: none of the 61 companies that never traded again in 2026 is on it, apart from two old ISINs of companies already counted under new ones, which I dropped. Excluded: 12 companies that merged before 1 January 2026 (ICICI Securities, Rane Brake Lining, Rane Engine Valve, Inox Wind Energy, Umang Dairies, Udaipur Cement Works, Ind-Swift, Piramal Enterprises, Dhani Services, Indiabulls Enterprises, Mangalore Chemicals & Fertilizers and Allcargo Gati, from news reports of their record dates); McNally Bharat, JTL Defence and Lord’s Mark Industries, which came back from insolvency or capital restructuring with an unconfirmed share ratio; and 24 companies with no trade in 2025 whose ISIN had changed, or whose earlier price I could not find. Rolta India (trading suspended 17 December 2025; all shares cancelled without payment under its resolution plan, delisting record date 17 January 2026) and Future Supply Chain Solutions (suspended 28 October 2025; shares cancelled without consideration; delisted 24 March 2026) are counted at zero, from news reports. For the 61 companies that never traded in 2026, I confirmed the status of 6 (these two, and suspensions at Goenka Diamond and Jewels, Suumaya Industries, Eros International Media and Hindusthan National Glass); the rest I assumed were still listed. BSE’s full list of scrips, including suspended ones, was not available to me. Staleness is counted in calendar days before 1 January 2026. For these companies I adjusted for share changes between their last trade and 26 October, and counted only dividends after 1 January; my arithmetic. ↩ ↩²

5. For companies priced on NSE: splits, bonuses, rights issues and dividends from NSE’s corporate actions data for the main board and for NSE Emerge (ex-dates 1 January to 26 October 2026). For companies priced on BSE, main board and SME: BSE, Corporate Actions, ex-dates 1 January to 26 October 2026, downloaded from bseindia.com on 26 October 2026. For companies on both exchanges, the two lists agree on every split and bonus, and on 1,545 of the 1,546 dividends that both list (Andhra Sugars: ₹1.40 on NSE, ₹1.20 on BSE; I used NSE’s). Most events that appear in only one list happened before the company listed on the other exchange. I fixed one NSE record that carried another company’s ISIN, and added one dividend that appeared only in BSE’s list (Hercules Investments, ₹2.50). AvenuesAI’s consolidation of 10 shares into 1 is listed by BSE without a ratio; the ratio is from Business Today. For Sanmit Infra (consolidation) and Trustwave Securities (reduction of capital), I inferred ratios of 10 into 1 and 5 into 1 from the price change and the new ISIN. Rights issues with known terms use the theoretical ex-rights price: (old shares × price before + new shares × issue price) ÷ all shares. For BSE-only rights issues, the factor is the previous close divided by the close on the ex-date, and never less than 1. Cian Healthcare (BSE SME): under its resolution plan, 1,82,20,867 public shares were replaced by 12,50,000 new shares, as summarised by ScanX; BSE’s list shows the resolution plan suspension, and the share changed its ISIN when it came back. Share changes for stale-priced companies: PAE Ltd (now Aurique), 1 new share for every 98.35 old public shares under its resolution plan (directors’ report, as published by IIFL; the company’s BSE filing of 18 February 2025 set the record date and the 50,000 new shares for public shareholders); Burnpur Cement, 5 old shares into 1 (Indian Cement Review); Gold Coin Health Foods, 2 into 1 (Whalesbook); Caspian Corporate Services, 10 into 1 (HDFC Sky). As a check, I flagged every day where a company’s price moved by more than a quarter, or changed its ISIN with a big price change: after these adjustments, every flagged day is explained by a corporate action or, for PB Fintech on 24 September, a real fall. Spin-offs not yet listed are valued at the parent’s previous close minus its opening price in the special session on the demerger day (Genus Power, Inox Green, K M Sugar, Veranda Learning, Bhagyanagar India, HEG and India Glycols). Bonus preference shares from Siyaram Silk Mills (7 per share) and TVS Holdings (46 per share) are valued at their ₹10 face value. Vedanta’s 1:1 entitlement in each of four companies is from Business Today, Triveni’s one Triveni Power Transmission share for every three is from Angel One, and Prima Plastics’ one Prima Innovation share for each share is from Whalesbook. My arithmetic. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. My arithmetic from the per-company results. The median and the up and down counts include dividends. Without dividends, the total for all 5,352 companies rose 1.5% to ₹5,43,129. The 4,713 companies that traded on 1 January: ₹4,71,300 became ₹4,65,669 (-1.2%), median ₹86.30; of these, the main board fell 1.0% and SME companies 2.1%. The 639 companies bought at an earlier price: ₹63,900 became ₹79,899 (+25.0%), median ₹98.85. Totals for all companies whose price was at most 5, 30, 90 and 365 days old: +0.4%, +0.7%, +0.9% and +1.2%. Antariksh Industries adds 0.38 percentage points to the total. With the 61 companies that never traded in 2026 at zero: +0.8%; with all 191 that had no trade from 1 October at zero: -1.6%. On 23 October the totals were +1.7% (all) and -1.5% (traded on 1 January). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

7. AMFI, average market capitalisation of listed companies for the six months ended 31 December 2025, with the large, mid and small cap categories as given in the file. The BSE SME companies in my list that appear in it are counted as small caps; none of the NSE Emerge companies traded on 1 January appear in it. ↩ ↩²

8. Aqylon Nexus split each share into ten (NSE corporate actions data, ex-date 5 March 2026). Antariksh Industries issued one bonus share for every ten held (BSE corporate actions, “Bonus issue 1:10”, ex-date 9 January 2026); its last trade before that was on 4 April 2022 at ₹1.34, under the same ISIN. ↩

9. My arithmetic from NSE closing prices on 1 January and 26 October 2026, plus dividends from NSE’s corporate actions data. ↩

10. Gujarat State Petronet into Gujarat Gas at 10 for 13, and Gujarat Gas into Gujarat Energy with one GSPL Transmission share for every three: Gujarat Gas press release, 1 May 2026. The other swap ratios are from media reports: Cigniti into Coforge 1:1 (TipRanks), Sanghi Industries into Ambuja Cements 12 for 100 (Goodreturns), J.B. Chemicals into Torrent Pharma 51 for 100 (HDFC Sky), Sir Shadi Lal Enterprises into Triveni Engineering 100 for 137 (MadeForTrade), and Wim Plast into Cello World. I checked each ratio against prices: the last traded price of each merged company was within 9% of the swap ratio times the buyer’s price on the same day. I could not open a source page for the Wim Plast ratio (86 Cello World shares for every 100 Wim Plast shares, in two parts, as summarised in search results), but it matches the prices to within 3%. ↩