The News Flash Dictionary

Business TV compresses everything into a dialect. Here's the phrasebook — each entry: what it means, plus the honest answer to "good or bad?" (which is usually "it depends, and here's on what").

"FII/DII buying/selling ₹X crore." FIIs = Foreign Institutional Investors (big overseas funds). DIIs = Domestic Institutional Investors (Indian mutual funds, insurers — including your own SIP money). Daily flow numbers are published every evening. Good or bad? One day means little. Sustained FII selling for weeks pressures the whole market (often driven by US rates — Chapter 18); sustained DII buying has repeatedly cushioned it. Direction and persistence matter; single-day numbers are noise.

"Block deal / bulk deal in XYZ." A block deal is one large negotiated trade between two big parties in a special trading window; a bulk deal is any single-day trade crossing 0.5% of a company's shares. Both are disclosed publicly by evening. Good or bad? Depends entirely on who. A promoter selling a big stake = read carefully (why do the people who know the company best want out?). A respected fund buying = mildly interesting. The identity, not the deal, is the news.

"Board to consider buyback." A buyback = the company using its own cash to purchase and extinguish its own shares — fewer shares remaining means each surviving share owns a bigger slice of the same business. Good or bad? Generally shareholder-friendly and a signal management thinks the stock is cheap — but check the funding: a cash-rich company buying back is confidence; a company borrowing to buy back is financial engineering.

"Bonus issue 1:1" / "Stock split 1:5." Both slice the same pizza into more pieces — a bonus gives you extra shares free (1:1 = one new share for each held), a split cuts each share's face value into smaller pieces. Good or bad? Economically neutral — you own the same fraction of the same company; the price adjusts proportionally the same day. TV celebrates these; nothing of substance happened. (Mild real effect: cheaper per-share prices can improve liquidity.) Never confuse "the price fell after the bonus" with losing money — your quantity rose to match.

"Dividend declared, ₹X per share." Real cash paid to you per share (Chapter 4's Bucket 3). Good or bad? Cash is real and honest — but for a fast-growing company, large dividends can also mean "we've run out of high-return ideas to reinvest in" (Chapter 16's capital allocation). Judge against the company's reinvestment opportunities.

"XYZ hits 52-week high / upper circuit." A 52-week high/low is simply the year's price extreme. A circuit is an exchange-imposed daily price-move limit (5/10/20% depending on the stock) — "upper circuit" means buying demand hit the day's ceiling with no sellers left. Good or bad? These describe price behavior, not business quality — momentum information, not fundamental information. A stock at 52-week lows can be an opportunity or a falling knife; the label doesn't tell you which. Your Modules 1–4 tools do.

"GDP at X%, CPI at Y%, IIP at Z%." The economy's own report card. GDP growth = how fast the whole economy expanded. CPI = consumer price inflation, the silent tax (Chapter 19) — and the number the RBI targets when setting rates (Chapter 18). IIP = industrial production growth, a monthly pulse of the factory sector. Good or bad? Strong GDP + cooling CPI = the good-weather combination for stocks. Hot CPI = rate-hike risk = Chapter 18's gravity strengthening. You now own the full chain: CPI print → RBI response → rates → valuations.

"Results beat/missed street estimates." Chapter 26 in four words. "Street" = the analyst community; "estimates" = the consensus forecast. The gap between result and estimate — not the result itself — moves the price.

"Promoter stake sale / stake hike." The controlling family selling or buying their own company's shares (disclosed mandatorily). Good or bad? Among the more honest signals in markets: sustained promoter buying with their own money is historically one of the strongest positive tells (Chapter 16's skin in the game); large sustained selling deserves your attention — occasionally innocent (tax, diversification), often not.