Where real data lives

By now you can read a quote page, tell a corporate action apart from a scam, and separate a price from what a business is worth. But every one of those skills rests on a number, and every number came from somewhere. So the last question in getting oriented is the quiet one underneath all the others: where did that figure actually come from — and can you get to the original yourself?

A screenshot in a chat group, a confident post, a broker's "target," a clean-looking app: these are how most beginners meet a number. None of them is the source. Each is, at best, a copy of a source, and at worst a copy of nothing. This module names the real, free, primary places Indian market data lives — so that when a figure matters, you can trace it back to the document it was born in, and read the date on that document.

Almost everything that goes wrong for a beginner — the tip that costs money, the panic on a false rumour, the ratio quoted with no idea where it came from — is a failure of one habit: going to the source. The antidote to manipulation is not cleverness. It is knowing that a free, primary document exists for the claim in front of you, and being willing to open it.

That is the good news buried in this whole shelf. India's market data is unusually open. The exchanges, the regulator, the depositories, the companies themselves, and the industry bodies all publish primary records for free, on the public internet, in your own name where it concerns your holdings. You do not need a paid terminal to check whether a promoter really sold, what a fund really holds, or what a company really earned. You need to know which door to knock on.

A primary source is the original record — the document filed, audited, or maintained by the party with authority over the fact. An aggregator is a convenient re-presentation of many primary sources on one screen. Both are useful. The discipline is never to confuse the second for the first, and never to let a screenshot stand in for either. The best information starts at the source, not the summary.

Here are the primary sources that matter, what each is for, and the clock each runs on. Learn the map once and most "where do I even find this?" questions answer themselves.

The exchanges — NSE and BSE. The two exchanges are where a listed company's life is filed in public. Their sites carry corporate announcements (results dates, board meetings, orders won, clarifications to rumours), the quarterly shareholding pattern, and the settled end-of-day price and volume data — the bhavcopy and the separate delivery-data files. When a company must tell the market something, it tells the exchange, and the exchange timestamps it. That timestamp is why the filing beats the headline: the headline is a paraphrase written later.

The regulator — SEBI. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) publishes the rulebook, its enforcement orders, and — for investors — SCORES, the official complaint platform. It is also where a company heading for the market files its offer document. If a tip claims "SEBI is acting against this company," the order itself, on the SEBI site, settles whether that is true.

The company's own filings. A listed company publishes its annual report (the audited accounts, the notes, the auditor's opinion, and management's account of the year), its quarterly results, and its investor presentations. A company about to list publishes a DRHP and then an RHP — the offer documents that lay out the business, the finances, the use of the money raised, and, crucially, the risk factors. The glossy advertisement is marketing; the RHP is the record.

The depositories — NSDL and CDSL. Your own shares and units are held in dematerialised form at a depository. NSDL and CDSL keep the true record of what you own, which reaches you as the Consolidated Account Statement (CAS), usually monthly by email. Your broker's app is a convenient window onto this; the depository record is the thing itself.

The fund and macro bodies. For mutual funds, AMFI publishes official NAVs, and each scheme's own factsheet and scheme information document give you its portfolio, its expense ratio, and its rules. For interest rates, government securities, and monetary policy, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is the source. Both matter mainly for the "as-of date" they carry — a factsheet's holdings are a month-end snapshot, not a live one.

The aggregators — screener.in and its kind. Sites like screener.in gather these primary filings and re-present them on one clean page. They are genuinely useful — often the fastest first look. But they are a secondary re-presentation: numbers re-keyed from the originals, without the footnotes, and sometimes a version behind. Use them to orient; verify anything load-bearing against the primary filing they drew it from.

Every number you meet sits somewhere on a ladder of reliability, and the whole skill is knowing which rung you are standing on before you act. illustrative

At the top is the primary source: the filed, audited, or maintained original, with a date attached. One rung down is the aggregator: an honest copy of the primary, faster to read, but a copy — and possibly a version behind. At the bottom is the tip or screenshot: a claim with no verifiable origin and often no date at all. The move that keeps you safe is simple to say and easy to forget: when a number matters, climb back up the ladder one rung at a time until you reach the original document and read the date on it.

Notice what the ladder does not say. It does not say aggregators are bad or that you must read every filing in full. It says: match your trust to the rung. A first glance from an aggregator is fine. A decision — to buy, to sell, to believe a dramatic claim — should rest on the primary document, read with its date in view.

Take one ordinary claim and watch how far the source trail runs beneath it. Suppose a post says: "Promoter holding in this company has crashed — get out." illustrative

The tip is the post itself. It has urgency and no evidence. The aggregator view — a screener page — might show promoter holding at, say, 52%, down from 58% a year ago: better, but it is a re-keyed summary, and it does not tell you why the number moved. The exchange filing — the quarterly shareholding pattern on NSE or BSE — shows the same figures with the detail attached: whether the change was a sale, a fresh issue that diluted the promoter, or a pledge being created or released. And the company's own disclosure — an announcement or the annual report — may explain the reason in the promoter's own words.

Read only the tip and you might panic-sell into a non-event. Read down to the filing and you might find the "crash" was a pledge release that actually reduced risk. Same claim; opposite verdicts, depending on how deep you were willing to dig.

Here is the map made playable. Pick something you might genuinely want to know about a listed company or a fund, and the panel names the free, primary source it lives in, the clock that source runs on, the aggregator that re-presents it, and the one discipline that keeps you honest. illustrative

The point to feel as you click down the list: there is almost always a free, named, primary document — and the tip or screenshot is never it.

Source discipline is not only about which document — it is about when. Two figures can both be true and still not belong in the same sentence, because they are read from different clocks. illustrative

A reader is looking at a mutual fund. The scheme factsheet says its largest holding is 8.2% of the portfolio. The reader's app shows that same underlying stock down 3% today. So the reader does a quick sum: "the fund must have lost about 0.25% from this stock today." Reasonable? No — because the two numbers run on different clocks.

The 8.2% weight is a month-end figure, published a week or two after the month closed. The 3% price move is live, from today. Between the factsheet date and today the fund may have trimmed the position, added to it, or exited entirely. The weight was honest for its date; the price is honest for now; multiplying one by the other pretends they share a clock they do not.

The fix is not more maths. It is the habit of reading the as-of date on every figure before combining figures. A live price and a live price can be compared. A month-end weight and a month-end weight can be compared. A live price and a month-end weight cannot be multiplied together and trusted. Knowing where data lives includes knowing when it was true.

Source discipline makes you much harder to fool. It does not make you all-seeing, and pretending it does is its own trap.

A primary source can still be late. Announcements come after events; shareholding patterns arrive weeks after quarter-end; annual reports land months after the year closes. Reaching the original does not give you the present — only the most authoritative version of the past that exists.

A primary source can be complex or incomplete. An annual report can run to hundreds of pages, and the number that matters may sit in a footnote you have to hunt for. A filing tells you what happened, not always why, and not always the whole of it.

And reaching the source does not replace judgement. The document gives you clean evidence; what that evidence means for a business is still a question you have to reason through. The source is where inquiry begins, not where it ends. Fisher's point was never "read the filing and stop" — it was to build understanding from first-hand evidence rather than second-hand opinion, and a filing is the first-hand evidence you start from.

The same handful of source failures catch beginner after beginner. Name them once and they lose their grip.

1. Trusting a screenshot. A cropped image has no verifiable origin and often no date. It may be old, edited, or from another stock entirely. The filing it claims to show is the thing to open.

2. Mistaking an aggregator for the source. screener.in and its kind are useful first looks, but they re-key the numbers and drop the footnotes. For anything load-bearing, verify against the primary filing they drew from.

3. Mixing source clocks. A month-end fund weight and a live price do not belong in the same calculation. Read the as-of date before you combine any two figures.

4. Ignoring the company's own filings. The annual report and results carry the audited detail and the auditor's caveats. Skipping them for a summary means missing exactly where the story usually hides.

5. Ignoring exchange announcements. When a company must correct a rumour or disclose an event, it files with NSE or BSE. The forwarded version is a paraphrase; the announcement is the record.

6. Skipping the ownership record. Your true holdings live at NSDL or CDSL, read via your CAS — not on whichever app screen is most convenient. In any dispute, the depository record is the one that counts.

7. Reading the IPO ad instead of the RHP. The advertisement sells; the DRHP and RHP disclose, risk factors and all. The document that could give you pause is the one to read first.