New Features at BSEPlus

Over the last few years of investing in Indian stock market, I had observed that an Indian investor had a pretty hard time getting data related to companies. The sources of data has increased in the last two years and that has helped investors like me to get more information about a company. One of the sources of this is the oldest stock exchange in Asia, i.e. BSE. BSE launched BSE Plus in 2009 which has improved the data visibility of companies.

Let's take an example of a company VGUARD. Some of the good features of BSEPlus include:

• SHP (shareholding pattern) in the lower right corner. This shows a clear trend as to whether the promoter shareholding is increasing or decreasing. Earlier, an investor had to open five different documents from here. Clicking on more gives an idea that the promoter shareholding in the company has increased from 67.31% in December 2008 to 68.12%, 69.91%, 70.56% and 71.07% in the quarter ended March 2009, June 2009, September 2009 and December 2009 respectively. Click X in the upper right and you are back to the Advanced Stock Reach of VGUARD.
• Click on Filing & Other Info and upper right corner shows "Insider Trading". It is easy to see that the promoters have bought 90,104 shares between 15 December 2009 and 24 February 2010. Clicking on more gives a complete list of all the insider trading of a particular scrip since April 2009.
• The SAST (Substantial Acquisition of Shares and Takeovers) in the lower right corner shows that the promoter bought 2.11% shares of the company on 8 May 2009, when the price hovered around INR 50. 
• In the middle of the upper segment is shown the dividend history. This also was tedious to find earlier by going through all the announcements.
• If you click "Peer Group", the page shows comparison of the company with other companies in the sector like, Havells India, Bilpower and Halonix by default. Click on "Annual Trends" and you can see that the company's OPM is highest at 11.06% compared to 9.27% for Havells, 7.46% for Bilpower and 7.64% for Halonix. RONW is also highest and the P/E is second best after Bilpower. I have seen that sometimes the peer group is not what it should be but most of the time it is a good comparison. But you can change the companies for comparison too. Click on "Select Peers to Compare" in the upper right corner which gives a list of around 66 companies in the same sector.
• Last but not the least, if you click "Charting", four different charts are shown. The most useful one is the one in the upper right corner (Performance Chart) but is the most difficult to understand.

Overall, I would say that BSE has at last entered the 21st Century.

 Two roads diverged in the wood, and I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference. - Peter Lynch