What missing its biggest up days did to the Nifty 50's record
How much of the Nifty 50's rise came from a handful of days, and how close those days sat to the worst ones. Recomputed from NSE closes.
Figures as of 26 Oct 2026 (end of day) · 4 min read · first published 27 Oct 2026
From January 2021 to October 2026, the Nifty 50 rose 62% on price alone, over 1,440 trading days. That rise was not spread evenly. A small number of days carried a large share of it.
The experiment is simple: take the index's real daily changes and replace its largest rises with days of no change. Leaving out just the 10 largest rises, about 0.7% of the days, turns a 62% rise into a 7% rise. Leave out 20 and the result is a 15% fall.
The largest rises sat next to the largest falls
Of the 10 largest daily rises in this period, 7 came within a month of one of the 10 largest daily falls. The biggest up days tended to arrive in the middle of the most turbulent stretches, not in calm ones.
- 6 Nov 2023+9.53%
- 5 Jun 2023+5.65%
- 1 Feb 2021+4.74%
- 12 May 2025+3.82%
- 8 Apr 2026+3.78%
- 4 Nov 2023−7.84%
- 4 Jun 2024−5.93%
- 4 Jun 2023−5.04%
- 24 Feb 2022−4.78%
- 26 Feb 2021−3.76%
What this record can't tell you
Nobody can know in advance which days these will be, and no real investor would miss exactly these days and no others. The comparison only shows how concentrated the index's past movement was. It covers one index over one period, uses prices without dividends, ignores costs and taxes, and says nothing about what comes next.
Related reading: volatility and drawdowns in Learn, and the deepest falls and recoveries on the blog.
A description of past data, not a view on any company or index, a forecast or investment advice. Past patterns do not tell you what will happen next. Disclaimer