What market breadth actually looks like across 1,762 NSE stocks
39% advancing, 28% declining, and the largest single momentum bucket is “Sideways”.
The Nifty level tells you what happened to fifty companies weighted by size, and half that weight sits in ten of them. Breadth asks a different question: what fraction of the whole market is actually in an uptrend? Here is that picture for a single session, across 1,762 non-ETF NSE stocks.
Trend state across the market
| Stage | Stocks | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Stage 2 — advancing | 694 | 39.4% |
| Stage 4 — declining | 499 | 28.3% |
| Stage 3 — topping | 331 | 18.8% |
| Stage 1 — basing | 129 | 7.3% |
| Unclassified | 109 | 6.2% |
On this date roughly 39% of the market sat in an advancing stage and 28% in a declining one. The 150-day trend direction gave a similar split: 1,033 stocks trending up against 729 down.
The momentum labels tell a flatter story
| Momentum state | Stocks |
|---|---|
| Sideways | 598 |
| Mild Uptrend | 555 |
| Strong Uptrend | 242 |
| Mild Downtrend | 237 |
| Overbought | 101 |
| Oversold | 29 |
The largest single bucket is "Sideways". Combined with the earlier finding that Caution is the majority verdict, a consistent picture emerges: on a typical day most of the market is not doing anything clearly directional.
Two numbers that put moves in perspective
RSI. The median stock sat at 50.2 — almost exactly neutral. Only 5.7% were above 70 and 1.6% below 30. So the "overbought" and "oversold" readings that dominate market commentary apply to a small tail on any given day.
Distance from the 52-week high. The median stock was about 19% below its own 52-week high. Not near a peak, not collapsed — simply somewhere in the middle of its own range, which is where most stocks are most of the time.
The alignment number
Only 60 stocks — 3.4% of the universe — showed full weekly alignment on this date. Conditions requiring several things to hold simultaneously are rare almost by construction, and their rarity is a property of the definition, not evidence that they work.
Why breadth and the index can disagree
Because the index is capitalisation-weighted and the market is not. A session where ten large companies rise and eight hundred small ones fall produces a green index and a deteriorating breadth reading, and both are accurate descriptions of different things.
This is the main reason we compute conditions per stock across the full universe rather than reading the index. The index answers "what happened to the largest companies". The distribution answers "what happened to the market".
A caution about single snapshots
Everything above is one day. Breadth measures are most informative as a time series — whether the share of stocks in an advancing stage is rising or falling over weeks — and a single reading has no trend to it.
We publish the snapshot because the base rates are useful on their own: knowing that 39% advancing is this date's figure gives you something to compare the next reading against. We have not published a measurement of whether breadth changes predict index moves, so we make no claim that they do.
Key takeaways
- 39.4% of stocks sat in an advancing stage and 28.3% in a declining one on this date.
- The 150-day trend split 1,033 up against 729 down.
- Median RSI was 50.2; only 5.7% above 70 and 1.6% below 30.
- The median stock was about 19% below its own 52-week high.
- Breadth and the index can diverge because the index is capitalisation-weighted and the market isn't.
See these ideas on real stocks
StockLearn runs this read on ~2,000 NSE stocks every evening. Nifty 50 is free, no login.
Browse today's scan →This guide is educational and explains how StockLearn interprets common technical indicators, using illustrative examples. It is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security.