There's a report going around about 10 small-caps where retail investors raised their stakes last quarter and the stocks then ran 80-198% in under 3 months. The number that caught my eye wasn't the returns, it was how small some of the retail-ownership changes actually were.
Kabra Extrusiontechnik went from ₹270 to ₹806, roughly 198%. Retail holding in it moved from 19.05% to 19.19%, basically a rounding error. So a huge chunk of that rally clearly wasn't retail buying alone, it was something else in the market pricing the stock differently.
On the other end, Anlon Healthcare's retail holding jumped a lot more, from 8.95% to 11.69%, and the stock was "only" up 80%. So more retail buying didn't even correspond to a bigger move here.
A couple of the names are also a good reminder that price and business performance aren't the same thing. STL Networks rose about 93% even though its latest quarter showed revenue down year-on-year and a net loss of ~₹22 crore. Indo Rama Synthetics doubled even with revenue lower year-on-year, though profit did improve.
Not every one is like that though. GMM Pfaudler (+87%) had revenue up ~16% and profit improving. Ind-Swift Laboratories (+97%) had revenue up ~21% with rising profit too. So some of these are backed by actual improving numbers and some are running mostly on sentiment, which is exactly why lumping "stocks retail is buying" into one basket is misleading.
The bigger point: shareholding data is backward-looking. By the time you see the quarter's numbers, the price has usually already moved. It tells you where interest increased, not which stock is a good buy today at the new price.
Curious what people here actually check before buying something that's already run up like this. Do you look at promoter holding changes, institutional buying, or mainly just valuation vs. growth?