NSE: Is It a Wonderful Stock at ₹1,785? Merging Financial Analysis with Vedic Astrology to predict its future!

By: Karnvir Mundrey. Inputs by Acharya Vedant Shastri.

Nine years ago, BSE listed on NSE’s platform and said it looked forward to NSE returning the favour. Now NSE is doing exactly that. This is the story of a homecoming, a fortress with one cracked wall, and why the price still matters.

Prologue: two ceremonies

On 3 February 2017, Asia’s oldest stock exchange listed on its young rival’s platform. It had no choice, because SEBI’s rules don’t allow an exchange to list its own shares. BSE shares opened at ₹1,085, nearly 35% above the issue price, and closed the day up almost 33%. At the ceremony on NSE’s premises, BSE’s chief executive promised the exchange would stay focused on compliance. Its chairman said he now looked forward to NSE listing on BSE.

On 24 September 2026, he gets his wish. The executive leading NSE onto BSE’s platform is the same man who stood there as BSE’s CEO in 2017: Ashish Chauhan.

His career is the story of Indian market infrastructure in miniature. He was part of the five-member IDBI team that set up NSE. He helped build India’s first screen-based trading system and created the Nifty index. He left NSE in 2000 for Reliance, then returned to exchanges as BSE’s deputy CEO in 2009 and its CEO in 2012. In July 2022 he came home to an NSE weighed down by governance lapses, a co-location scandal, technical glitches and a phone-tapping probe. Above all of it hung the IPO, which had been in the works since 2016.

Now it is here, and at scale. The ₹22,569-crore issue is India’s second-largest public offering after Hyundai Motor India’s, and it was subscribed 5.71 times. Anchor investors included the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and LIC. The price band of ₹1,700–1,785 values the exchange at up to ₹4.42 lakh crore.

The business being sold is extraordinary. It handles about 93% of India’s cash-equity turnover and almost all of its equity futures. It has more than 129 million registered investors, normalised operating margins above 76% and no conventional borrowings.

That is exactly why the first rule of investing is worth repeating: a wonderful business can still become an ordinary investment if you pay an extraordinary price.

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NSE is an exceptional company at a fair-to-full price. At ₹1,785, a reasonable base case points to roughly 10% annual total returns, not an effortless 15-20%. A genuine margin of safety begins closer to ₹1,450-₹1,650.

To see what that price is asking of investors, I followed the money through nine forces with Vedant Shastri, a Vedic astrologer, one for each graha in the navagraha of Jyotish. In India, beginnings are read in both the balance sheet and the panchang. The fundamentals carry this story. The stars get their turn at the end, along with the evidence on whether they deserve it.

I. Mercury: a fortress with one cracked wall

Mercury rules commerce, and NSE is commerce at industrial scale. Think of it as a fortress with several walls.

The walls around cash equities and futures are nearly impossible to breach. Liquidity attracts traders, traders attract market makers, market makers tighten spreads, and tighter spreads attract more liquidity. Once that loop becomes dominant, even a cheaper rival struggles to pull the market away.

One wall is different, and it happens to guard the treasury. Weekly index options are mobile. Trading can move when a rival builds a liquid contract, recruits market makers, picks a better expiry day or benefits from a change in SEBI’s calendar. That is the wall that is cracking. NSE’s share of equity-options premium turnover has gone from:

96.9% in FY24
87.4% in FY25
74.7% in FY26
68.5% in the June 2026 quarter

August data put BSE’s share of index-options premium at about 34.7%. In 2025, NSE’s management had told analysts the share loss had run its course. It hadn’t.

This wall matters more than the others because of what it protects. Transaction charges made up 78.6% of FY26 operating revenue, and options alone 60.2%. NSE earns about 7 basis points on options premium turnover, against about 0.6 basis points in the cash market. BSE doesn’t need to storm the fortress. It only needs to keep chipping away at the wall that guards the gold.

Whether the crack becomes a breach comes down to one equation:

Indian options premium turnover × NSE market share × NSE’s effective fee rate

The industry report in NSE’s prospectus projects options premium turnover growing 9–11% a year through FY30. Starting from NSE’s 68.5% share, here is how NSE’s own options turnover would grow each year through FY30 under different combinations:

Options-market growth	NSE ends at 50% share	55%	60%	65%	70%
5%	−2.9%	−0.6%	1.6%	3.6%	5.6%
10%	1.7%	4.1%	6.4%	8.6%	10.6%
15%	6.3%	8.9%	11.3%	13.5%	15.6%

If the market grows near 10% and NSE settles at 60–65%, NSE’s options activity still grows 6–9% a year. The real bear case needs two things at once: market growth slowing toward 5% and NSE’s share sliding toward 50–55%.

The third variable, the fee, has already done its rescue work. In FY26, options premium turnover fell about 8%, but revenue fell only about 2%, cushioned by a 7.1% improvement in price realisation. By Q1 FY27, revenue and turnover were growing in step again.

Price isn’t even the main weapon. NSE charges ₹35.03 per lakh of options premium on each side of a trade, while BSE charges ₹3,250 per crore for Sensex options, a gap of under 10%. The battle is over calendars: which day of the week traders want to place their bets.

That raises the obvious question: who is actually paying these tolls?

II. The Moon and Rahu: the crowd and the professionals

The Moon is the crowd, and the crowd has grown enormously. NSE’s unique registered investors rose 41% in two years. Revenue didn’t follow:

Metric	FY24	FY26	Change
Registered investors	91.75 million	129.09 million	+41%
Operating revenue per investor	₹1,611	₹1,286	−20%
Transaction revenue per investor	₹1,322	₹1,011	−24%

Now picture the typical individual trader in SEBI’s latest study. In FY26, 87.7% of them lost money. Their combined losses came to about ₹91,685 crore, and transaction costs took roughly ₹25,000 crore of that. The typical trader was also young: under-30s made up 43% of the individual trader base. That is the moral weight behind every SEBI circular in this story.

The crowd isn’t what drives the volume, though. Rahu, the shadow planet of amplification, is a better guide. As of mid-2025, proprietary trading firms generated about 60% of derivatives turnover and nearly half of options. It’s clear what happens when one of them leaves: after SEBI barred Jane Street in July 2025, F&O volumes fell nearly 20% the following week. NSE’s customers are concentrated too. The ten largest trading members supplied 46.78% of FY26 operating revenue, and the single largest supplied 7.96%.

Rahu has one more lever: volatility. NSE charges options fees on premium value, and option premiums rise with expected volatility. On 20 August, India VIX stood at 10.69, near the bottom of its 52-week range of 8.72 to 28.91. Calm markets mean thinner premiums, which is worth remembering when NSE reports Q2, its first quarter as a listed company. The calm may not last. In mid-September, Brent crude was around $105 a barrel and the US 10-year Treasury yield was above 5%, the highest since 2007. Renewed turbulence would lift NSE’s revenue even as higher rates weighed on its multiple.

A business this dependent on one product and one kind of customer naturally wants to become something broader.

III. Jupiter: the promise

Jupiter is expansion, and management has a credible expansion story: market data, index licensing, colocation, clearing, GIFT City, commodities, electricity futures, electronic gold receipts and a proposed national coal exchange. The seeds are real:

Passive funds: Nifty-linked domestic passive funds held ₹8.95 lakh crore in June 2026, about 73% of India’s passive AUM.
Colocation: racks doubled from 934 in FY24 to 1,868 by June 2026.
GIFT City: NSE International Exchange handled about 99.6% of equity-derivatives contracts traded in GIFT IFSC in the latest quarter.

The harvest is still small. Index licensing and data revenue was just ₹151.85 crore in FY26, up 26%. Taken together, listing, racks, connectivity, data, licensing and clearing made up about 15.4% of FY26 operating revenue. That combined basket grew 5.7% in FY26 and 11.1% in Q1 FY27.

One detail shows the ceiling. Connectivity revenue fell about 10% in Q1 FY27 even as more members connected, because annual charges were revised. In a regulated exchange, customers can grow while permitted prices fall. For diversification to change NSE’s risk profile, this basket probably needs to grow 15% or more a year and reach 25–30% of revenue.

Until then, shareholders are buying today’s earnings. So what are those earnings, really?

IV. Venus: what actually reaches the shareholder

Venus is the wealth that actually reaches your hand, and three illusions stand between the headline numbers and that hand.

The first illusion is the profit figure. FY26 reported profit of ₹10,302 crore included a ₹1,362.57 crore pre-tax gain from cutting the NSDL stake from 24% to 15%. It also absorbed a ₹1,391.21 crore settlement provision. Before tax, the two roughly cancel. After normalising, I estimate about ₹10,590 crore of post-tax earnings. Around ₹2,078 crore of that is investment income, leaving roughly ₹8,512 crore from the core franchise. Value the investment stream at 20 times and it accounts for about ₹41,600 crore. The remaining ₹4 lakh crore is being paid for core earnings, a multiple close to 47. “Cheap at 35 times” is too casual.

The second illusion is the cash. NSE reports ₹68,198 crore of treasury investments, and it is tempting to subtract that from the market value. It would be a serious mistake. An exchange holds other people’s money: settlement obligations, member margins and guarantee funds. The Core Settlement Guarantee Fund alone was about ₹13,392 crore in June 2026. Settlement obligations and member margin money came to about ₹26,012 crore. Even the cash-flow statement misleads. Operating cash flow was about ₹23,836 crore in FY26 and only about ₹4,091 crore in FY25, despite higher profit that year. Those swings track member funds, not the business itself.

The third illusion is the dividend. The FY26 payout of ₹35 included a ₹10 one-time special, so ₹25 is the real recurring base. That works out to about a 58% payout on normalised earnings, and a yield of only about 1.4% at the IPO price. Retaining 42% at a 33% return on equity implies sustainable growth of about 13.7%. Raise the payout to 70% and let ROE drift to 25%, and that figure falls to 7.5%. NSE can compound at 12–15%, or it can become a high-payout utility. It will struggle to do both indefinitely.

Every number so far assumes the rules stay the same. In NSE’s story, the rules are the plot.

V. Saturn and the Sun: the referee and the king

In NSE’s listing chart, Saturn is the yogakaraka, the planet of greatest fortune, and it sits in the house of disputes. No better description of SEBI exists.

The referee has been busy:

Weekly expiries: since November 2024, each exchange may offer them on only one benchmark index.
Contract size: the minimum rose from ₹5 lakh to ₹15 lakh.
Expiry days: all expiries now fall on Tuesdays or Thursdays.
The old cases: NSE paid ₹1,491 crore to settle the co-location and dark-fibre cases, the largest settlement in SEBI’s history.

The consultation open today is technical, covering how expiry-day settlement prices are set, with comments due by 3 October. The real question is weekly expiries. Reports in 2025 floated a gradual move to monthly contracts and a single expiry day across exchanges. SEBI’s chairman called them speculative while agreeing that reform was needed.

Those two ideas point in opposite directions for NSE. A common expiry day would likely win back share from BSE, whose gains rest on having its own day. Abolishing weekly contracts would shrink the very market that has been covering NSE’s share loss.

The referee also sits inside the fortress. Most investors can’t own more than 5% of an exchange, and certain institutions can hold up to 15%. Total foreign ownership is capped at 49%. Public-interest directors don’t need shareholder approval, and board quorum requires at least as many of them as shareholder directors. The prospectus says plainly that they may put the securities market ahead of shareholders’ commercial interests. The power that keeps competitors out also keeps NSE from charging what a true monopoly would.

Being critical infrastructure is also expensive. NSE’s margin cuts both ways. I estimate the incremental normalised EBITDA margin in Q1 FY27 at about 71%, so most returning revenue reached profit. In FY26 the reverse happened: normalised EBITDA fell by more than revenue, as employee costs rose about 18% and technology spending about 29%. That spending isn’t optional, and SEBI’s September consultations on cyber-security and business continuity point toward more of it.

Then there is the king. In Jyotish the Sun is sovereign authority, and the State has more riding on NSE’s volumes than NSE’s own shareholders do:

FY26: STT collections reached ₹57,522 crore. By my calculation, that is about three and a half times NSE’s operating revenue of ₹16,601 crore.
The April hike: from 1 April 2026, STT on futures rose from 0.02% to 0.05%, and on option premiums from 0.1% to 0.15%.
So far this year: collections from 1 April to 17 September rose 52.9% to ₹40,214 crore, against a full-year target of ₹73,700 crore.

That is a quiet floor under NSE’s business. Killing weekly options would punch a hole in the Budget, which makes gradual tightening more likely than a shutdown.

These rules also explain why BSE’s comeback happened when it did.

VI. Mars: the rival’s comeback

This is where the story turns. BSE’s IPO was priced at ₹806 in 2017, and after that first-day pop the stock went nowhere through 2018 and 2019. Then it erupted: roughly 200% in 2021, 308% in 2023 and 140% in 2024, multiplying more than 30 times since listing. The 2023 surge had a precise trigger. BSE relaunched Sensex derivatives with smaller lots, weekly expiries and fees at a fraction of NSE’s.

The irony is hard to miss. BSE’s revival came in 2023, the year after Chauhan left BSE for NSE. The man who ran BSE for a decade now leads NSE’s defence against BSE’s comeback.

Today the two exchanges look like this:

Metric	NSE	BSE
Market capitalisation	₹4.42 lakh crore	₹1.33 lakh crore
Annualised Q1 profit	₹12,480 crore	~₹3,491 crore
P/E on Q1 run-rate	35.4×	~38.2×
Latest quarterly profit growth	~7%	~62%
Latest quarterly net margin	~59%	~51%

NSE has the stronger fortress; BSE has the momentum. BSE also isn’t the last challenger:

Metropolitan Stock Exchange: it has raised about ₹1,240 crore since 2024 from Zerodha, Groww and Peak XV, backers that control close to 40% of India’s retail demat accounts.
NCDEX: it has raised capital to enter equity derivatives, with Citadel Securities and Tower Research reported among its investors.

Two twists keep the fortress standing. SEBI’s Tuesday/Thursday rule derailed MSE’s derivatives plans, so the rule that limits NSE also protects the duopoly. And NSE can’t simply start a price war to defend itself: the Competition Commission previously ruled against it on a predatory-pricing complaint from MSE.

That brings us back to the listing itself, and to what happens once the shares start trading.

VII. Ketu: the release

Ketu governs release and separation, which is exactly what the next six months hold. The IPO is a pure offer for sale, and only about 5.1% of the company is changing hands. That starts four clocks:

Listing day: scarce supply can produce a premium unrelated to intrinsic value.
30 days after allotment: the first half of the anchor shares unlocks.
90 days after allotment: the second anchor release tests demand again.
Six months: a much larger pool of pre-IPO shares becomes legally sellable.

The subscription numbers show who was keen. Qualified institutions subscribed 12.68 times; retail investors, only 1.39 times.

Now picture someone who bought NSE’s unlisted shares at the June 2025 peak of ₹2,400. They are sitting about 26% above the IPO’s upper price and can’t sell for six months. Nearly 1.78 lakh shareholders held NSE before the IPO, and some of them are in that position. The big institutions seem content to stay: the four largest sellers trimmed their holdings by only about 7% on average, and LIC, NSE’s largest shareholder, sold nothing. When the six-month clock runs out, pressure is more likely to come from those retail and HNI holders than from the institutions. There is room for foreign buyers to absorb some of it, with foreign ownership at 27.88% against the 49% cap.

Ketu also marks what NSE can never have:

A takeover premium: the ownership caps make control impossible to buy.
A place in the Nifty: Nifty 50 members must trade on NSE and have F&O available on NSE. NSE lists only on BSE, so the index Chauhan created shouldn’t be able to include the company he is taking public.
Certainty about its own leadership: Chauhan’s five-year term began in July 2022, and under SEBI norms an exchange CEO must reapply and compete for the job. The homecoming has a deadline.

Climax: what the price is asking

Everything so far comes together in one question: what return does ₹1,785 actually embed? I built a five-year model starting from annualised Q1 FY27 EPS of ₹50.4 and a recurring ₹25 dividend.

Scenario	EPS growth	Exit P/E	Dividend growth	FY31 price	Annual total return
Bear	6%	26×	4%	₹1,755	1.2%
Low base	9%	30×	7%	₹2,328	7.0%
Base	11%	32×	8%	₹2,720	10.3%
High base	13%	35×	10%	₹3,253	14.2%
Bull	17%	38×	12%	₹4,202	20.1%

Ordinary success delivers about 10% a year. Earning 14–15% requires something close to the high-base case. India’s 10-year government bond yield rose to around 7.1% in mid-September, so the base case pays roughly three extra percentage points a year for taking on single-stock, regulatory, technology, competitive and valuation risk.

The entry price changes that arithmetic sharply. Using the base-case assumptions:

Purchase price	Approximate annual return
₹1,400	15.9%
₹1,500	14.3%
₹1,600	12.8%
₹1,700	11.4%
₹1,785	10.3%
₹1,900	8.9%
₹2,000	7.7%
₹2,200	5.6%

This isn’t a forecast that NSE will fall; the scarce float may well push it higher. It’s a reminder that a stock can rise while its prospective return gets worse. My framework:

Below ₹1,500: highly attractive, if the thesis is intact.
₹1,500–₹1,650: a rational zone to build a position.
₹1,650–₹1,800: fair value, suited to a starter position or an IPO allotment.
₹1,800–₹1,950: little margin of safety.
Above ₹2,000: requires high-base or bull-case execution.

BSE’s 30-fold run makes a ten-bagger tempting to imagine. The arithmetic is less kind. At 30 times earnings, ₹17,850 requires EPS of about ₹595, up from ₹50.4. That means roughly 64% annual earnings growth for five years, 28% for ten years or 18% for fifteen. A realistic ten-year path at a 30× exit multiple looks like this:

10% annual growth: about ₹3,925.
12% annual growth: about ₹4,700.
15% annual growth: about ₹6,120.

That’s the arithmetic of a durable compounder, not an automatic multibagger.

Coda: the sky over Dalal Street

Every Diwali, the exchanges open for an hour of Muhurat trading, a reminder that Indian markets have always kept one eye on the sky. So I cast NSE’s listing chart: the Swiss Ephemeris, the Lahiri ayanamsa and whole-sign houses, timed to 10:00 IST on 24 September 2026 in Mumbai.

The chart reads almost like the story you’ve just read:

The trading engine: Mercury, the planet of commerce, is exalted and the chart’s strongest planet.
Stature: Jupiter is exalted in the 10th house of standing, alongside a debilitated Mars whose weakness is cancelled. Tradition reads this as high stature, with wealth arriving after struggle.
The crowd and the professionals: the Moon and Rahu sit together in the 5th house, which Jyotish assigns to speculation.
The referee: Saturn, the planet of greatest fortune for this chart, sits in the house of disputes.
Timing: an 18-year Rahu period begins on 23 November 2026. NSE is “born” in the last phase of Sade Sati, which ends fully on 24 February 2028. Tradition points to August 2029 to December 2031 as the expansion window.

The other charts add their own echoes. BSE’s 2017 chart reads like a challenger’s, and its planetary periods match its history, flat until March 2020 and then a surge. But March 2020 was also the COVID market bottom, when nearly everything rallied. NSE’s rising degree sits within 0.6° of India’s natal Jupiter, though a few minutes’ difference in the listing time would break that. SEBI’s 1992 chart places Saturn next to the Sun, the archetypal regulator. All four charts converge on 3 June 2027, when Saturn enters Aries.

Then there’s the evidence, which is where honesty matters most:

The Moon’s phase: returns around new moons were roughly double those around full moons across a century of US data and 24 other markets. But later work using control days found no full-moon dip. And the original research found no lunar effect on volatility or volume, the two things NSE’s revenue depends on.
Superstition itself: it moves money, usually the believer’s. Chinese firms with “lucky” listing codes underperformed by about 10.8% a year over three years. Indian firms incorporated on Tuesdays in the Hindi heartland, a pattern linked to devotion to Hanuman and beliefs about Mangal (Mars), turned out less profitable.
The astrologer’s settings: switching the ayanamsa from Lahiri to Raman shifts every dasha date. Switching from Vimshottari to Yogini dasha turns 2026–29 from turbulent Rahu into Dhanya, meaning “wealth”. The same sky can produce a bullish or a bearish forecast.

Here are the two calendars, side by side:

When	Fundamentals	Jyotish
3 Oct 2026	SEBI settlement-price consultation closes	No comments!
Late Oct–Nov 2026	First anchor unlock; Q2 results	Mercury retrograde on NSE’s ascendant
8 Nov 2026	Muhurat trading	Moon transits NSE’s ascendant sign
23 Nov 2026	—	Rahu mahadasha begins
Late Dec 2026	Second anchor unlock	Rahu enters Capricorn
Feb–Mar 2027	Six-month pre-IPO lock-in ends	Eclipse season; Mercury retrograde over natal Moon
Mid-2027	CEO term ends	Saturn enters Aries; total solar eclipse in the 10th house
24 Feb 2028	—	NSE’s Sade Sati ends; BSE’s peaks
Aug 2029–Dec 2031	—	Rahu-Jupiter expansion window

Almost every astrological window lands next to a real event. That isn’t prophecy; the calendar is simply crowded. It’s also why these readings so often feel right in hindsight.

Epilogue: seven numbers

NSE is one of the finest institutions India has built, with scale, trust, liquidity, technology and licences that would be almost impossible to recreate. But that greatness is already visible, and what is visible is usually expensive. At ₹1,785, investors aren’t being asked whether NSE will survive. They’re being asked to assume that the cracked wall holds and the promise of diversification is delivered, while the referee stays predictable and the king keeps a light hand.

At ₹1,785, NSE is a hold or a small starter position. Between ₹1,500 and ₹1,650, it becomes an attractive long-term accumulation. Below ₹1,500, assuming the thesis has not broken, the valuation begins to offer the kind of margin of safety that can turn an excellent company into an excellent investment.

From here, seven numbers will tell the story better than any opening price:

Options premium share: above 64% is reassuring; below 58% for two quarters is a warning.
Options premium turnover: it should grow at least in the mid-to-high single digits.
Normalised profit before tax: growth above 12% supports the valuation; 6–8% or less undermines it.
Non-transaction revenue: it needs to grow faster than 15%.
Normalised EBITDA margin: above 75% means the model is intact; below 70% matters.
Fee realisation: price cuts driven by competition would show up here first.
Technology and regulatory events: outages, cyber failures and a decision on weekly expiries.

If the price falls while those numbers hold, accumulate. If it falls because they break, don’t average down blindly. If it rises on strengthening fundamentals, hold. If it rises while they weaken, trim.

In 2017, BSE’s chairman said he looked forward to this day, and he got his wish. Whether NSE’s new shareholders get theirs depends less on the first trade on BSE than on those seven numbers.

If you’d like to give the stars a fair trial too, write down their predictions today, and in two years you’ll know which calendar earned its place!

Disclaimer: This article is for information, education and entertainment only. It is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell securities. Forecasts and valuation scenarios are inherently uncertain. Astrological readings are presented as cultural interpretation, not forecasts. Readers should do their own research and consult a qualified adviser where appropriate.

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Karnvir Mundrey is a narrative strategist and media entrepreneur who helps founders, institutions and international businesses turn complex ideas into influential public stories. He is the Founder of Atharva Lifesciences Consulting Pvt. Ltd. , Atharva Marcom and Founder Editor of TheFutureOfPR.com. He has also authored a book on Nutraceuticals (available on Amazon). Karnvir Mundrey is also the producer and host of 4 YouTube channels. Finest Fintalk brings you the latest in Finance, LitInMin for Books, The Health Tips Podcast for health and Atharva Marcom for leadership talks He is also recognized as India’s longest running podcast host, continuously running since 2006!