FPIs sell Rs 7,443 crore of Indian shares in the first week of September

Foreign portfolio investors sold a net Rs 7,443 crore of Indian equities in the first week of September, reversing two months of buying. PTI, citing the usual NSDL tally, said they had put in Rs 30,919 crore in August and Rs 20,200 crore in July. From March through June they had been net sellers.

With the September week counted, calendar-year equity outflows stand near Rs 2.32 lakh crore. That is already larger than the Rs 1.66 lakh crore withdrawn in the whole of 2025. ET Now's reading of the same NSDL series put the year-to-date figure around Rs 2.31 lakh crore and listed the earlier monthly hits: about Rs 1.17 lakh crore in March, Rs 60,847 crore in April, Rs 32,963 crore in May and Rs 49,340 crore in June.

Rajkumar Rathi, chief investment officer at YES Securities, tied the latest sales to a rebound in crude oil, higher U.S. bond yields and a firm dollar index. Dearer crude raises the inflation and current-account risk for an oil importer. Higher U.S. yields and a strong dollar pull money back into dollar assets and out of emerging-market equities. Those three prices moved together in the first days of September. The FPI tape followed.

The fiscal-year picture is worse than the two-month bounce suggested. SEBI's annual report for FY26, covered by CNBC-TV18 in August, put total net FPI outflows from Indian markets at Rs 1,52,692 crore, the largest financial-year exit on that record. Equity alone saw Rs 1,80,832 crore of net sales, more than 40 percent above the previous year's equity outflow. Debt still took some money in. March 2026 accounted for nearly Rs 1.17 lakh crore of the equity total.

Domestic institutions have been the other side of that tape for most of 2026. Mutual fund SIPs and insurer buying absorbed a share of what foreigners sold. That is why the Nifty can hold a range while the FPI column stays red. It is also why a week of Rs 7,443 crore matters less as a crash signal than as a reminder that the 2026 foreign book is still being unwound.

Rathi also flagged that foreigners extended selling into debt. If that persists, the rupee loses one of the buffers that July and August provided. A firm dollar already makes that buffer thinner.

What would stop the week from becoming a month is a drop in crude, a pause in U.S. yields, or a domestic earnings print strong enough to keep local buyers in size. None of those three arrived in the first week of September. The next NSDL cut will show whether last week's sales were a reset after the July-August inflow or the start of a third-quarter repeat of March.