BSE sorts every listed scrip into a group, labelled with a letter or short letter pair. The group is not cosmetic. It determines whether a stock can be traded intraday at all, how wide its daily price band is, and in some cases signals that the company has compliance problems. All of that shows up in the price history you download — as stair-step charts, as suspiciously round daily moves, as long flat stretches.
The exported workbook does not carry a group column, so this is context you have to bring with you. It is worth knowing before you interpret anything.
The shape of the listed universe
The scrip list bundled with this tool covers roughly 5,000 active equity scrips. Their distribution across groups is lopsided in a way that surprises people who assume BSE looks like NSE:
| Group | Scrips | Share |
|---|---|---|
B | 1,628 | 32% |
X | 1,201 | 24% |
A | 728 | 15% |
XT | 607 | 12% |
M | 346 | 7% |
T | 195 | 4% |
MT | 127 | 3% |
Z | 96 | 2% |
P | 63 | 1% |
| Others | 31 | <1% |
The headline: only about 15% of the universe sits in group A. Around one scrip in five is in a trade-to-trade group — the T, XT, MT and Z rows together — where intraday trading is not permitted. If you pick BSE scrips at random you will land on thin, restricted paper far more often than on anything resembling Reliance.
What the letters mean
A — the main board
Established companies with the deepest order books. Normal rolling settlement, intraday trading permitted, widest price bands, and generally the only part of the universe where daily figures are robust enough to support the sort of analysis people want to do. Sensex constituents live here.
B — everything else in normal settlement
The residual category for scrips in rolling settlement that are not in A and not restricted. Enormously varied: some are perfectly liquid mid-caps, others trade a few hundred shares a week. Group membership alone tells you little here, so check the actual volume and trade-count columns before trusting a row.
T — trade-to-trade, and the one that changes behaviour
This is the consequential one. In the trade-to-trade segment every trade must result in delivery. You cannot buy and sell the same scrip on the same day to net off the position — each transaction settles individually. Scrips are placed here as a surveillance measure, typically after unusual price or volume behaviour, and the placement can be temporary.
What that does to the data you downloaded:
- Delivery percentage sits at or near 100%. By construction — squaring off intraday is impossible, so almost everything traded is delivered. A near-100% figure on a
Tscrip carries none of the meaning it would carry on a groupAstock. - Volume collapses. Removing intraday traders removes most of the turnover.
- Price moves cluster at the band limit. Trade-to-trade scrips usually run tighter daily price bands, so the chart becomes a staircase of near-identical percentage steps rather than a continuous line.
- A visible regime change mid-history. If a scrip moved into or out of
Tduring your date range, the character of the data changes partway through. Nothing in the file flags it.
Z — compliance problems
Companies that have failed to comply with listing requirements, or have unresolved investor grievances, or lack the required depository arrangements. These also trade on a trade-to-trade basis. Treat Z as a warning label rather than a classification: the reason a scrip is here is a governance failure, and that is usually more interesting than anything in its price series.
X and XT — the BSE-only long tail
Together these are more than a third of the universe. Broadly, small companies listed on BSE without a corresponding NSE listing, with XT being the trade-to-trade variant. Liquidity here is often measured in trades per week rather than per day. Price history for these scrips is real data, but it is sparse enough that returns, volatility and moving averages computed from it are close to meaningless. The rest of the market has no opinion on these names because the rest of the market is not trading them.
M, MT, MS — the SME platform
Scrips on BSE’s SME platform, with MT again the trade-to-trade variant. SME issues carry larger minimum lot sizes and much thinner trading than the main board, and their price history is correspondingly jumpy. Do not benchmark an SME scrip against the Sensex and expect the comparison to mean anything.
P and the residual groups
P covers a small set of scrips associated with physical settlement. Beyond that there is a scattering of low-count categories — ZP, TS, MS, IP, R, Y— together fewer than 35 scrips, generally variants of the above for particular settlement or issue types. If you land on one, check its current classification on BSE’s own site rather than assuming; these categories change and are not worth memorising.
Price bands, and why moves look identical
BSE applies daily price bands — circuit limits — to most scrips, commonly at 20%, 10%, 5% or 2% depending on the scrip’s classification and surveillance status. Securities with derivatives on them are generally exempt from a fixed daily band.
In a downloaded file, a band shows up unmistakably: a run of days where Close moves by an almost exactly constant percentage, often with Open, High and Lowcollapsing to the same value. That is not a data error and it is not a market opinion. It means demand exceeded what the band permitted, trading locked at the limit, and the queue carried into the next session. On a tightly-banded thin scrip this can persist for many consecutive days, and the resulting “trend” is an artefact of the mechanism rather than a price discovery process.
Practical implications
- Check the group before you interpret the numbers. BSE’s own scrip pages show the current group. It is the single most useful piece of context that is not in the file.
- Do not compare delivery percentages across groups. A trade-to-trade scrip is structurally near 100%. The delivery guide goes into this.
- Filter on trade count, not just group. Requiring, say, a minimum number of trades per day before including a row will do more for the quality of your analysis than any group filter.
- Expect regime changes mid-series. Surveillance reclassifications are invisible in the data. A sudden, permanent change in volume and delivery character is usually a group move, not news.
Group membership and band status are set by the exchange and change over time. Verify the current position on BSE’s site for anything that matters — the figures in the table above are a snapshot of the bundled list, not a live feed.
Keep reading
- Every column in your BSE export, explained — What Open, High, Low, Close, WAP, No. of Shares, No. of Trades, Total Turnover, Deliverable Quantity, % Deli. Qty and the two Spread columns actually mean — and where people misread them.
- BSE scrip codes: why the number matters more than the ticker — BSE identifies every security by a six-digit scrip code, not by symbol. What the code is, why two companies can share a ticker, and how to find the right one.
- Delivery percentage on BSE: how to read it, and its limits — How deliverable quantity and delivery percentage are calculated, why the columns are sometimes blank, what high and low readings suggest, and the cases where the number misleads.
Or go straight to the download console and pull a file.