Market capitalisation
Market capitalisation is a company's share price multiplied by its shares outstanding, the market's total valuation of the business. It is the standard measure of size, from large-cap through mid-cap to small-cap.
`marketcap` is the day's close times the latest filed share count, in rupees. Sift takes the Indian-scale suffixes directly, so `marketcap > 20000cr` and `marketcap between 5000cr and 20000cr` are the natural way to write the size bands. The share count is restated onto the adjusted-price basis, so a split or bonus does not appear as a change in size, and it updates when a new count is filed rather than daily.
In scans it does two jobs. As a floor it is the simplest quality filter there is: a company above twenty thousand crore has institutional holders, analyst coverage and a business that has survived scrutiny, which is why the Mega-cap dip scan pairs it with an oversold reading. At that size a low RSI is more often a pullback than a collapse. As a band it selects a population. Mid-caps between five and twenty thousand crore behave differently from either neighbour, with enough liquidity to trade and enough room to re-rate, and a breakout scan run on that band is a different scan from the same query on the large-caps.
The mechanical caveat is that market cap moves with the price, so a size threshold is not fixed: a stock that falls through the floor drops off a scan at the moment it becomes most oversold, and one that rallies through it appears at the top. Free-float market cap, what the index providers actually use for weighting, is smaller than the full figure by the promoter and locked-in holdings, and is not the number here. Coverage follows the fundamentals backfill, so stocks without a share count on file are NULL and never match.
The nearest sibling is `turnover`, which measures size of trade rather than size of company and defines the site's universe tiers. The two disagree in informative ways. A large-cap with thin turnover is closely held. A small-cap with heavy turnover is where the speculative money is.
In Sift
Written as marketcap — rupees; write it with a suffix, marketcap > 5000cr. A working scan — Mid-caps closing at a fresh 52-week high:
where marketcap between 5000cr and 20000cr and close is highest in 52w1
of the 500 most-traded NSE stocks match today, as of 6 Oct 2026
Scans that use it
Prebuilt scans in the library whose query reads this value — each with a hit-rate replay over the last 250 sessions.
Common questions
What counts as large-cap, mid-cap and small-cap in India?
SEBI's definition for mutual funds ranks listed companies by full market cap: the top 100 are large-cap, 101 to 250 mid-cap, and the rest small-cap. In rupee terms the boundaries move with the market, and in recent years the mid-cap band has sat roughly between twenty and a hundred thousand crore. Scans take whatever threshold you write, so use the band that matches the question.
How do I write market cap in a Sift query?
In rupees with a scale suffix: `marketcap > 5000cr` for five thousand crore, `marketcap > 500L` for lakh. Ranges work with between, so `marketcap between 5000cr and 20000cr` selects a mid-cap band, and the field combines with any technical condition in the same where clause.
Is market cap the same as free-float market cap?
No. Full market cap counts every share outstanding; free-float market cap excludes promoter and other locked-in holdings, and is what index providers use for weighting. The `marketcap` field here is the full figure. For a float question, `public_pct` and `promoter_pct` carry the ownership split.