Bulk deal data from the website of the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) suggests Graviton Research Capital LLP could be India’s largest high frequency trading firm, and it seems to be doing extremely well.
Some stats for the month between 21-06-2024 to 21-07-2024:
- Graviton accounted for 21% of bulk deals on NSE, far ahead of the next firm HTRI Pvt Ltd, which had a 10% share of all bulk deals in this period.
- In terms of value of bulk deals, Graviton accounted for as high as 33% of total bulk deal amount in the last one month, while HRTI accounted for 15%.
- In this period, Graviton’s total value of bulk deals done was Rs 13,828 crore (USD 1.7B). It made a profit of round Rs 5.9 crore or $710,000.
- Of the around 300 bulk deal transactions done in this period, Graviton was right 74% of the time, while only 26% of the time it lost money.
- Its biggest win was in Exide Industries, where it made a profit of Rs 59m in a single intra-day trade on 25th
- In its top 10 winning trades, the amount invested was a few multiples more than the average trade size. For example, in the Exide deal, the amount of the ‘Buy’ order was Rs 263 crore, while the average deal size is around Rs 45 crore.
- The biggest loss seems to have been an outsized one in fertiliser company GNFC, where Graviton seems to have lost over Rs 11 crore. However, this is truly an outlier. In other losing deals, its losses are much less. If this outsized loss wasn’t there, the period would have looked much better for Graviton.
Overall, the firm seems to be doing astonishing well. A 74% success rate on trades is amazing.
Graviton will complete 10 years of existence in Aug, it was setup in Aug’14. It seems to have a partners’ capital base of Rs 75M (Rs 7.5crore). Its closest peer, HRTI was set up in Sep’18, and has a paid up capital of Rs 1350M (Rs 135 crore).
Like most HFT firms, Graviton talks about ‘low latency’ as one of its competitive strengths. From its website: “What gives us an edge over our competitors is our low latency trading platform. Backed by some of most promising programmers, we are working on the latest technologies to create a fast, low latency and robust trading infrastructure which can handle transactions worth millions on a daily basis”. No doubt in the coming years we will hear much more of this amazing firm in the business media.
We should point out that the above is a limited analysis. Graviton may be doing hundreds of other trades that are too small to figure in the bulk deal data. Also, we have not checked data from BSE, the other large exchange in India. Also, this is data for only a one-month period, Graviton may have been less active earlier. The NSE site has data for earlier periods also, those interested can do further analysis using that data.