Glossary

Every tedious disclosure rule exists because somebody once lost their savings to its absence.

Searching a name there takes under a minute. Anyone absent from it is not permitted to charge you for advice, and none of the grievance escalation path is available to you.

The third stage of the escalation path, after the broker and the exchange, and free like all of them. It runs on written complaints with reference numbers, which is why a phone call is worth nothing here.

Almost nobody reads it, and parts of it are ordinary business facts: attrition, safety incidents and regulatory penalties, filed under an ESG heading.

The label is a legal constraint on holdings, not marketing, which is what makes thousands of schemes comparable. It also fixes the only valid comparison: same category, against the fund's own declared benchmark.

Illegal, prosecuted, and the reason companies impose trading windows on their own staff.

Five of them share records between themselves, which is why a second broker did not put you through the whole process again — and why one deficient record can block a fresh purchase everywhere at once. The status is free to check with nothing but a PAN.

Established, liquid, well covered. Falls least in a crash.

Proven businesses still scaling. Meaningfully more volatile than largecaps.

A seller acting on a legal deadline rather than a view on value, and the gap is a subtraction anyone can do from the quarterly shareholding pattern. Listed public sector companies have repeatedly been given extended timelines that no private issuer would get.

Forced diversification across sizes. The manager is legally unable to retreat into largecaps during a smallcap crash — which is the whole difference from a flexicap.

An IPO in name and in reporting, under materially different rules. Analyst coverage is minimal, so promoter quality carries more weight here than anywhere else.

Offshore for regulatory purposes while sitting in Gujarat, which is how a dollar-denominated contract on India’s benchmark index can trade around the clock when the domestic market cannot. It keeps its own holiday calendar, so it sometimes trades when the Nifty does not.

In India a succession is simultaneously a management change and a transfer of a controlling shareholding.

A shareholder who is not deciding whether to sell but is prevented from selling until a date the offer document names. The absence of selling before that date says nothing whatever about intention.

Quick capital for the company and dilution for you. What decides whether it was acceptable is what the money is for: funding expansion is a different matter from repaying debt created by past mistakes.

A target placed on the exchange, not a promise made to you. When the exchange itself halts, no contingency route helps — nothing trades, for anybody, until the session resumes.

Searchable in a public register on SEBI’s site. If they are not in it, you have no recourse.

The rule that creates the announcements feed. It is why a resignation, an order or a board decision reaches a free public page before it reaches the news.

The position changes, so check it as it currently stands. What is permitted for personal use differs from distributing a strategy or managing other people's money, and the second triggers registration requirements.

Registration means holdings and conflicts must be disclosed, and there is somewhere to complain.

The first genuinely independent look at a SEBI order. Its judgments are published, and they record what the appellant argued as well as what was decided.

It defines the event rather than leaving it to argument: a malfunction of five minutes or more in trading hours affecting login, order processing, visibility of funds or risk systems. There will be an official timeline of what happened, and your own timestamps are what let you check your account against it.

SEBI publishes these in full on its website. Where a company’s intimation summarises, the order sets out what was actually alleged, found and imposed.

It removes the typing, not the thinking. Check your broker's current terms and SEBI's prevailing rules before building anything, because both have been tightened over time.

Filed publicly under SEBI rules, so you need no broker relationship. Four quarters read side by side beat one call listened to live.

Not regulated by SEBI, the RBI or IRDAI. The gold price is the same as an ETF's; the question is who holds it and what happens if they fail.

The word SEBI uses in the disclosure. Pledges are the common case; the category is broader.

SEBI has repeatedly flagged inflated subscription figures, circular funding of applications and post-listing manipulation here. Good companies do list; the base rate is not favourable.