Sensex & Nifty
✓ Last verified 14 Sep 2026
The short version
Sensex and Nifty are India's two most-followed stock market indices, tracking the performance of 30 and 50 large, established companies respectively - used as a general barometer of how the Indian stock market is doing, not investable products themselves.
The Sensex (BSE) tracks 30 large, established Indian companies; the Nifty 50 (NSE) tracks 50. Both serve as headline barometers for the Indian stock market's overall direction - a rising index broadly means large-cap Indian equities are doing well, and vice versa. Neither index is something you invest in directly - you invest in an index fund or ETF that's built to track one of them, or in individual stocks that happen to be included in the index. They're also used as benchmarks to judge whether an actively managed large-cap fund actually outperformed the broader market it's being compared against.
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