Delivery percentage explained

Every trading day, for every stock, the NSE publishes a number most screeners treat as a footnote: delivery percentage — the fraction of that day's traded volume that was actually transferred between demat accounts, rather than bought and sold back within the session.

It is the closest thing retail traders get to seeing intent. Volume tells you how much changed hands; delivery tells you how much of it stayed changed.

What the number separates

Two stocks each trade 10 lakh shares and close up 4%.

• Stock A: delivery 22%. Nearly four-fifths of the volume was intraday churn — positions opened and squared off before close. The move was a game of pass-the-parcel, and the parcel-holders at 3:30 are the only ones committed.
• Stock B: delivery 71%. Seven of every ten shares traded went home in somebody's demat account overnight. The buying was investment. Someone wanted the stock, not the day's volatility.

Same price move, same volume, opposite information. This is why delivery-blind screeners systematically overrate flashy moves: the churn profile and the conviction profile look identical until you read this column.

Read it against the stock's own norm

The classic beginner error is an absolute threshold — "delivery above 60% is bullish." Liquid large-caps routinely run 40–60% delivery on ordinary days; some F&O-heavy names live near 20%. The signal is deviation from the stock's own baseline:

where delivery_pct > 1.5x avg(delivery_pct, 20)

A jump from a stock's usual 35% to 70% means something regardless of the absolute level. Every serious scan below is built on this relative form.

The four patterns worth scanning

Delivery surge with a price move — the day's move was owned, not rented. The confirmation pattern: Delivery surge.

Rising delivery under a quiet price — someone is steadily taking size home while the chart says nothing. This is what accumulation looks like while it is happening, before the breakout announces it: Quiet accumulation.

High delivery at institutional size — 70%+ of a ₹50-crore day cannot be one trader. Size and conviction in the same session: Institutional-grade delivery.

The warnings. High delivery is conviction, not direction — determined selling also delivers. Heavy delivery on a down day is the distribution profile: Distribution warning. And a price spike on unusually low delivery is the churn signature that tends to retrace: Low-delivery spike.

Caveats worth knowing

• F&O distortion. In stocks with liquid derivatives, cash-market delivery is a smaller window into activity — arbitrage and hedging flows pass through it. Delivery signals read cleanest outside the F&O universe or against the stock's own baseline.
• Reporting lag and gaps. Delivery data arrives with the exchange's end-of-day reports and is unavailable for older history. It is an end-of-day signal by nature; there is no intraday version.
• One buyer ≠ a trend. A single high-delivery day is an event. The tradable patterns are sustained — which is why three days of rising delivery or five days above 55% beat any single print.

Test the folklore

Delivery analysis is full of received wisdom and short on published evidence — which makes it the perfect subject for replay. Every scan above carries a hit-rate panel: each session of the past year it matched, and what followed. Whether "quiet accumulation" actually precedes markups in current NSE conditions is not a debate; it is an afternoon's check. The full family lives at the delivery scans hub.