01. Concept Definition
Dark pools are private, off-exchange venues where institutions cross large orders without showing a public quote. Intermarket sweep orders (ISOs) are a US order type that takes displayed liquidity on several exchanges at once. Both exist because US equities trade across many competing venues.
India has neither. There is no off-exchange equity venue: every equity trade prints on the NSE or BSE order book, and NSE option chains report traded volume per contract, not individual trades or which side initiated them. So no Indian data source can show a "dark print" or a "sweep" — anything labelled that way on an Indian tape is inferred, not observed.
02. What NSE Actually Discloses
Bulk deals: a trade in which one client buys or sells more than 0.5% of a company's listed shares in a session. NSE publishes the client name, side, quantity and average price after the close.
Block deals: large trades executed in NSE's separate block-deal window, published the same way.
Delivery %: delivered quantity divided by traded quantity, end of day. A stock whose delivery % jumps well above its own norm on heavy turnover is changing hands for holding, not intraday trading.
All three are end-of-day disclosures. They tell you who held size yesterday, not who is buying right now.
03. Reading the Data Without Over-Reading It
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Net, don't count: a client whose buys and sells in one stock net to within 10% of its gross was trading intraday (market making, HFT). That is churn, not accumulation.
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Watch for related vehicles: a block where buyer and seller are sibling funds of the same manager is a transfer, not one institution buying from another.
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Judge delivery against the stock itself: index heavyweights routinely deliver 45–65%; momentum names far less. A raw "highest delivery" list just repeats the stocks that always have it.
04. Common Mistakes
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Misconception: Indian option volume shows institutional "sweeps" hitting the ask.
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Reality: The chain carries no trade-level side. A large volume print can be buyers, writers, or both; OI change and price change together (the buildup read) are the closest observable proxy.
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Misconception: A big block deal means the stock will rise.
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Reality: Every block has a seller of the same size. Without netting and context it says nothing about direction.
05. Arkenwell Terminal Integration
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Institutional Flow (type
INST): the Institutional Footprint panel lists the latest session's block and bulk deals netted per symbol, tags intraday churn and possible related vehicles, and ranks delivery % spikes against each stock's own 20-session median, with price change alongside. Nothing is labelled bullish or bearish.•
Unusual Activity (type
UA, Professional+): for options, flags contracts whose volume is far outside their own history, with OI change and the buildup read.06. Professional Takeaways
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Dark pools and ISOs are US concepts; India's equivalent evidence is the bulk/block deal file and delivery %.
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All of it is end-of-day: use it to frame the next session, not to time an entry.
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Net deals, discount related-party transfers, and read delivery against the stock's own history.
07. Next Reading
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Unusual Activity Detector
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Pre-Market Auction Mechanics
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