There is not much of a difference between September and December quarter periods' holdings of retail investors and HNIs, but there could have been some amount of profit-booking in the intermediate period.

With share prices remaining more or less the same in December quarter for most BSE-500 companies (with a few exceptions such as Infosys), an increase or decrease in the value of total holdings could tell us whether retail investors put money in, or took it out.

For the 2,194 companies for which end-December shareholding patterns have become available, the value of shares held by retail investors and by high net worth individuals (HNIs) remained almost unchanged between September and December 2010 at about Rs 450,000 crore and Rs 125,000 crore, respectively.

End-December 2010 levels of the Sensex and the S&P CNX 500 were almost the same as end-September levels .

Shares of the top 5 and top 20 companies in total holdings of retail investors and HNIs also remained unchanged, at about 22 per cent and 42 per cent. Even in the ranks of the top 20 companies there was a little change (though the preferences of retail investors and HNIs continue to be very different), except in the case of Castrol in which HNIs acquired an additional 25 million shares during October-December 2010, thus, propelling it from 113th to 15th place in their portfolio.

Coal India does not figure in the top 20 for either retail investors or HNIs, because, by December 2010, individual investors had already encashed almost 60 per cent of the 281.85-million shares allotted to them.

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