‘BSE is dead’ is just an attractive title I could come up with. This piece could easily be called the ‘Bullish Case for National Stock Exchange (NSE)‘. First, let’s look at the history of stock market in India.
History
In 1850s, five stock brokers gathered together under a Banyan tree in front of Mumbai Town Hall, where Horniman Circle is now situated. A decade later, these brokers moved their location under another set of banyan trees – this time at the junction of Meadows Street and what was then called Esplanade Road, now Mahatma Gandhi Road.
With a rapid increase in the number of brokers, they had to shift places repeatedly. At last, in 1874, the brokers found a permanent location, the one that they could call their own. The new place was called Dalal Street (Brokers’ Street). 1 year later in 1875, BSE – then known as the Bombay Stock Exchange was founded.
More than 8 decades later, in 1957 BSE became the first stock exchange to be recognized by the Indian Government. Nearly 3 decades after that, in 1986 the famous Sensex (Sensitive Index) was created which tracks the top 30 well-established and financially sound companies in India.
Monopoly
BSE slowly started to become a monopoly without any competition and its brokers were a closed group of merchants. There was very little technology, transparency or openness. Then Indian Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao understood that it was not good for a country that was just opening up to retail & foreign investors.
Competition
He then encouraged a bunch of government companies such as LIC, IDBI and SBI to create a new stock exchange with the best of technology available and with a much more open system of accepting brokers. Anyone with expertise could become a broker in this new company, not just some relative or family member of a powerful Dalal street merchant.
With this, National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) was founded in 1992 (Remember this year) with key domestic investors including LIC, SBI, IFCI, IDFC and Stock Holding Corporation of India Limited. They also included global investors like Gagil FDI Limited, GS Strategic Investments Limited, SAIF II SE Investments Mauritius Limited etc.
Adoption
In 1992 (Already told you to remember this year) Harshad Mehta stock market scam surfaced. Traders/investors didn’t trust the stock market and it was BSE who lost its credibility. NSE was a fresh face. No judgments were attached to it, thus it was the only choice for investors.
BSE used floor-trading method. Brokers gathered in a ring inside the exchange and shout-out the stock prices. NSE used technology and introduced screen-based trading. No more shouting and chaos inside the stock exchange. Trading became very professional and transparent.
In BSE, investors who used to take delivery – get the share certificate in a physical paper format at their mentioned address. NSE removed all the problems attached to physical certificate delivery by introducing National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) as the first depository in India. Now share certificates were in dematerialized (demat) form or electronic form.
This is how NSE started to compete, and inefficiencies inside BSE as well as Harshad Mehta to some extent helped NSE gain momentum. We went through the past, now let’s look at the future.
Website Visitors
During a time when 99% of all stock transaction happens online, website visitor is an important metric to judge the particular platform’s relevance.
As per SimilarWeb – a website that provides web analytics services, during the time of writing this piece BSE had around 6.17 Million visitors.
While during the same time, NSE had 15.9 Million visitors which is more than double the amount of BSE.
Volume
If you are active in the stock market i.e. direct buying & selling of stocks – not mutual or index funds, you would have noticed that most of the time volume of a particular stock is higher in NSE than BSE. That means there are more buyers and sellers effectively executing trades in NSE than BSE.
UI and UX
If you are into coding stuffs, you would be aware of UI and UX i.e. User Interface and User Experience. Basically, it means how a website or app looks and feels. Now, if you look at the website of both the exchanges you can easily determine NSE has a way better look & feel with easier navigation and font style. It looks like it is modern, smooth and capable of attracting the youth. BSE’s website looks & feels so old and out of place. You check it yourself – NSEIndia.com and BSEIndia.com.
Number of ETFs, Index Funds
Look at the number of index funds and ETFs that track Nifty indexes i.e. indexes made by NSE – it is significantly higher. There are very few index funds like HDFC Sensex and ETFs like ICICIB22 which tracks an index made by BSE. So it is very clear that the majority of money & volume is flowing towards NSE.
Social Media
When I am writing this, BSE has more followers on Twitter than NSE. Could be because BSE started their account a year earlier than NSE. But as a guy who makes most of the money online, mainly through social media platforms – I can easily say that NSE’s Twitter account is more well run. It has more Twitter-specific dimensions of posts, with more exciting graphics and content to engage with. And that shows on data. As per SocialBlade, monthly average follower increase during the time of writing this piece
NSE: +6,722
BSE: +5,828
Clearly, during last few months more people have followed NSE than BSE. Now on YouTube, the data itself shows that despite BSE starting their channel a year earlier than NSE – BSE has 23k subscribers while NSE has 53k subscribers.
Google Searches
If you look at the number of Google searches made by the term “NSE” and “BSE” worldwide, you will easily get the idea that which exchange is more talked about. Below is a 5-year chart from Google Trends where Blue represents BSE and Red represents NSE
Stock Price
BSE Limited (Bombay Stock Exchange) is listed on NSE. And just from its stock price alone, you can judge what the investors think about the future of this company or more appropriately the exchange
Now, this whole piece isn’t to cast a negative light on BSE. We can never forget its contribution to the development of the stock market in India. But if you personally ask me, whom would I vote for if BSE and NSE were human and decided to run for the Prime Miniter of India’s seat – It will be NSE.
As always, please don’t take this as investment advice; am in no way a certified investment advisor. This is just a talk between me & you – about helping you to know about the stock market and its culture in India.
If you have any questions or feedback, tweet them at @InvestRepeat. Also, you can join my private Telegram channel (Username: InvestRepeat).
Your man,
SIR
