Market mechanics
How to read the NEPSE floorsheet (and why it matters).
The floorsheet is where the truth lives. The NEPSE price chart shows where a stock closed; the floorsheet shows exactly who bought and who sold to get it there. Once you can read it, you can't unsee what it tells you.
5 min read · Updated · 11 May 2026
What the floorsheet is
The NEPSE floorsheet is the official record of every individual trade executed on the exchange during a trading day. Each row contains:
- Symbol — the stock that traded.
- Buyer broker — the broker code that bought.
- Seller broker — the broker code that sold.
- Quantity — number of shares in this single execution.
- Rate / Price — the per-share price the trade executed at.
A normal NEPSE trading day produces 40,000–60,000 of these rows across all listed securities. NEPSE publishes the floorsheet on its official portal, but only paginated 20 rows at a time — which means manually reading a full day requires scrolling through roughly 2,400 pages.
Why brokers matter
Every NEPSE trade is matched between two licensed brokers. A small number of brokers tend to dominate volume on a given stock on a given day. When the same broker is the buyer on most large trades in a stock, that broker is likely executing on behalf of a single large client who is accumulating the position. The reverse — one broker consistently selling — suggests distribution. None of this is visible in the daily OHLC chart.
Three ways to read the floorsheet
1. By stock
Pick a symbol and aggregate the day's floorsheet rows for that symbol. Sum buy quantity and sell quantity by broker. Sort by net flow. The top of the list tells you which brokers were the day's biggest net buyers; the bottom shows the net sellers. If the top broker is, say, +50,000 shares net on a 200,000-share day, one client through one broker drove 25% of the day's volume on the buy side.
2. By broker
Pick a broker and look at every stock they traded across the day. Brokers that specialise — say, mostly trade hydropower — are easy to spot. Brokers that are unusually active in a single stock today versus yesterday are a signal worth noting. A broker leaderboard sorted by total daily turnover surfaces who's moving the most capital across the exchange.
3. Big-block trades
Sort the day's floorsheet by quantity descending. The biggest single executions — say, any row with a quantity that's 5–10× the median trade size for that stock — are typically institutional or HNI activity. Watch for clusters: three 5,000-share blocks executed in the same 5 minutes by the same buyer broker usually means a single client quietly accumulating a position over multiple smaller fills.
Limits of floorsheet analysis
The floorsheet is not omniscient. A few caveats:
- Broker codes don't reveal client identities. You see that a broker bought, not who the broker bought for. A broker may be working a single large client or hundreds of retail orders bundled together.
- Bilateral floor-trades and odd lots can distort the read. Most platforms exclude obvious special-case trades before computing broker pressure.
- Yesterday's broker is not necessarily today's broker. A single day of strong accumulation can be unwound the next day. Floorsheet analysis is most useful across a window — a week, a month — not a single day.
How Punji handles the floorsheet
Punji's Floorsheet Intelligence ingests the entire daily floorsheet and pre-computes three roll-ups: per-stock summaries (broker activity for a single symbol), per-broker summaries (a single broker's day across every stock), and a broker × stock cross-tab. During market hours a live sample of the partial day's trades is shown with a banner indicating data is provisional; off-hours, Punji shows the final settled floorsheet for the latest closed business day. Today's top brokers and the day's biggest single tradesare surfaced as two one-tap views, alongside the full paginated raw floorsheet per symbol — all free.
Read the NEPSE basics guide if you're new to the market, or the CGT guide for the tax math that runs alongside the trade decisions you make from reading the floorsheet.