Fund managers do not announce their trades, but the law makes them reveal the result. Every Indian mutual fund publishes its complete stock portfolio once a month, and stock exchanges separately disclose within two working days whenever any single investor's stake in a listed company crosses 5% or changes by 2% or more. Both are public, free, and mostly ignored by retail investors who assume this kind of information is hidden.
September 2026 gave two clean examples of the second route working in real time. SBI Mutual Fund raised its stake in EID Parry India Ltd from 7.11% in June to 9.14% by 8 September 2026, a jump of two full percentage points, disclosed on the exchanges within days of the purchase. Around the same time, Bandhan Mutual Fund crossed the 5% disclosure threshold in Mastek on 15 September, triggering the same rule for a different reason, a fresh position large enough to require disclosure for the first time.
The three places to actually look
The slowest but most complete source is the monthly AMC factsheet. Every fund house publishes a full list of every stock it holds, the percentage of the portfolio each one represents, and how that has changed from the prior month, usually on its own website within the first two weeks of the following month. This shows you the whole portfolio, not just what changed.
The fastest source is the SAST Regulation 29 disclosure. Under SEBI's Substantial Acquisition of Shares and Takeovers Regulations, any acquirer, mutual funds included, must tell the stock exchanges within two working days once their holding in a company crosses 5%, and after that, every further move of 2% or more in either direction. This is how the EID Parry and Mastek moves became public within days rather than weeks.
The broadest source is AMFI's own monthly data, published at amfiindia.com, which aggregates buying and selling across the entire mutual fund industry. It will not tell you which stock a specific fund bought, but it shows the direction of the whole industry's money, which is the context any single stock-level disclosure sits inside.
Why September's record buying matters for this
The individual disclosures make more sense against the macro backdrop. Domestic institutional investors, overwhelmingly mutual funds, bought a record Rs 64,758.56 crore of Indian equities in September 2026, part of 38 straight months of net buying worth Rs 20.19 lakh crore since August 2023, as our how to read FII and DII activity piece explains. That was also the month the Nifty 50 had its worst calendar month in 25 years, which means fund managers were adding stakes into weakness rather than only chasing strength.
Stock-level disclosures like EID Parry and Mastek are individual data points inside that larger flow, not proof of a coordinated theme. A single fund raising one stake by two percentage points tells you what one manager decided, not what the industry believes, which is why the AMFI aggregate and the factsheet-level portfolio both matter alongside any single SAST filing.
What this signal is not
A disclosed stake increase is a lagging indicator, not a live feed. By the time a 2% crossing appears on the exchange, the fund has typically been buying for days or weeks already, often building the position gradually to avoid moving the price against itself. Reading the filing as a buy signal at the current price misunderstands what it is showing you, which is a completed decision, not an ongoing one.
It also sits alongside other tools in the same cluster rather than replacing them. A stake disclosure is most useful read together with delivery percentage, bulk and block deal data, and promoter holding changes, the signals our how to spot institutional accumulation, bulk deal vs block deal and promoter holding pieces cover, since no single data point is reliable alone. The broader distinction between domestic and foreign institutional money is covered in our FII vs DII explainer, and if a stock you are watching is moving sharply on one of these disclosures, our how circuit breakers work piece explains the rules that kick in.
Risks to monitor
The paper trail exists because the regulator wants it to. Reading it consistently, across factsheets, AMFI data and SAST disclosures, tells you far more about what professional money believes than any single headline about a fund's latest trade, and it is sitting in public view the whole time.