Market breadth — what's actually happening under NIFTY.
The McClellan / David Keller / IBD breadth stack — standard kit on stockcharts.com for US markets, missing almost everywhere in India. A/D Line, McClellan Oscillator + Summation, % above 50-DMA and 200-DMA, new 52-week highs vs lows. Rebuilt daily from NIFTY 50 constituent closes. This is the single dashboard every serious trader should check before the open.
Why breadth matters more than price
NIFTY is a market-cap-weighted index. Just 5 stocks — Reliance, HDFC Bank, ICICI, Infosys, TCS — drive ~40% of its move. A day where those 5 rally 1% while 30 others quietly bleed looks identical on the NIFTY print. Breadth strips the mask off: it tells you how many of the underlying names are actually going along for the ride.
The classic failure-mode this catches: price making new highs while breadth diverges lower. Every major NIFTY top in the last 20 years — Jan 2008, Sep 2010, Nov 2021, Sep 2024 — had breadth divergence weeks before the price rolled over.
Reading the stack — a quick manual
19-day EMA minus 39-day EMA of (advances − declines). Oscillates around zero. Classic zones: >+100 deeply overbought (exhaustion risk), >+50 bullish tilt, −50 to +50 neutral, <−50 bearish tilt, <−100 deeply oversold (mean-reversion setup). Best used for short-term timing (5-10 days out).
Cumulative sum of the Oscillator. Much slower, captures trend regime. Rising Summation = uptrend intact. Crossing zero from below is a major bull trigger; from above is a major bear trigger. Summation above +1000 is mature bull territory; below −1000 is historical bottoming zone.
The cleanest single-number gauge of participation. 50-DMA is tactical (healthy trend should see 60%+ above), 200-DMA is strategic (bull markets spend most time with 60-80% above). Readings <20% above 200-DMA are historically close to major bottoms. >85% is late-cycle froth.
Count of names making a new 52-week high versus a new 52-week low today. When highs dominate, leadership is broadening (healthy). When lows swamp highs even as NIFTY holds up, the index is being propped by a narrowing group — a classic late-cycle tell.
The DK morning-coffee routine, for India
David Keller's famous pre-open routine on stockcharts.com runs a fixed chart pack of ~15 breadth indicators. This page collapses the essentials into one view, sequenced the way he reads them:
- 1. Regime first. Summation Index sign + % above 200-DMA. Are we in a bull or bear regime?
- 2. Tactical next. McClellan Oscillator + % above 50-DMA. Within the regime, are we overextended or washed out?
- 3. Divergence check. Is NIFTY making a new high while Summation / % above 200-DMA lags? That's the warning bell.
- 4. Leadership breadth. New highs vs new lows tells you whether new leadership is emerging or the existing leadership is the only thing holding up.
Related trader tools
Read today's breadth against this week's setup
Axel pulls live breadth, overlays it on NIFTY's last 100 sessions, flags divergences, and tells you what it historically means for the next 5-20 sessions. Research analysis, not a trade recommendation.
Research tool · not investment advice.
Axel Markets is an information + analytics product. We are not a SEBI-registered Research Analyst (RA) or Investment Adviser (IA). Nothing on this page is a buy, sell, or hold recommendation. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Verify all data against the authoritative source (NSE, BSE, AMFI, SEBI, company RHP / factsheet) before acting. Today's breadth snapshot is computed from NSE's public equity-stockIndices endpoint (the same advance/decline numbers NSE publishes on its live market-data page). Per-constituent %-change, 52-week-high/low proximity, and 30-day / 1-year returns are pulled from the same feed. Historical time-series breadth (McClellan Oscillator / Summation) uses Yahoo Finance daily closes when the cache is warm. Constituent set = current NIFTY 50 composition; historical reshuffles are not backtested. Educational analysis only, not an investment recommendation.