How do you read a shareholding pattern?

Promoter & promoter group is the founding or controlling interest — the people and entities that control the company. FII/FPI covers foreign portfolio investors registered with SEBI. DII covers domestic institutions: mutual funds, insurance companies, banks, pension funds and alternative investment funds. Government holdings appear in public-sector companies and a few others.

Everything else is public — from retail investors to family offices — and shares underlying depository receipts (ADRs/GDRs) are shown separately. The filing is made every quarter, so ownership shifts can be tracked as a time series: Solomo’s company pages chart these categories over 12 quarters, and the shareholding explorer goes back to 2001.

The filing names every public shareholder holding 1% or more of the company. This threshold is why individual investors’ portfolios can be tracked from public data at all — and also its limit: a holder who sells down to 0.9% simply disappears from the list, which is not the same thing as selling out entirely.

Named-holder rows are where the interesting reading is: a new institutional name appearing, a known investor adding across quarters, or a large holder quietly shrinking. Solomo aggregates these rows across every company into investor portfolio pages, so a single holder’s disclosed positions can be read in one place instead of company by company.

A single quarter’s pattern is a snapshot; the signal is in the deltas. The comparisons that carry information: promoter holding versus last quarter (and whether pledging moved with it), FII and DII percentages trending in or out, and the named-holder list gaining or losing institutional names.

One caution — percentages can change without anyone trading. A preferential allotment or QIP issues new shares and dilutes everyone’s percentage; a buyback concentrates it. Before reading a falling promoter percentage as selling, check whether the total share count changed in the same quarter.