FIPI and LIPI: who is buying PSX, who is selling
NCCPL's foreign and local investor portfolio flows, the eleven client types behind them, how to read a net figure, and what the last 90 days of data show.
FIPI is the net amount foreign investors bought or sold on PSX in a session; LIPI is the same figure for local investor categories. Both come from the National Clearing Company, which sees every settled trade tagged by the buyer’s and seller’s client type. The two always sum to zero, because every share sold by a foreigner was bought by someone local, and vice versa. Over the 57 sessions from 8 June to 31 August 2026, foreign investors were net sellers of Rs 45.4 billion, but Rs 43.8 billion of that came in a single session on 23 June; strip that day out and foreign flows over the period were close to flat at minus Rs 1.6 billion.
Where the numbers come from
Every PSX trade settles through the National Clearing Company of Pakistan (NCCPL). Because every account carries a UIN linked to a CNIC, NICOP, or company registration, NCCPL knows which category each side of a trade belongs to. It publishes daily “Portfolio Investment” figures splitting the market into foreign and local participants and, within each, into client types. The figures are net values in rupees (buys minus sells), published after settlement, which is why the latest date in a 90-day pull is usually a few sessions behind today.
The data is public and free on NCCPL’s site. Equivest’s flow feed reads the same source, so the numbers here are NCCPL’s, cited as of 6 Sep 2026.
The eleven client types
Foreign and local are umbrella terms. The categories underneath are what carry information.
| Side | Client type | Who this is |
|---|---|---|
| FIPI | Foreign corporates | Overseas funds, institutions and companies. The bulk of foreign activity. |
| FIPI | Foreign individuals | Non-Pakistani individuals with PSX accounts. Tiny. |
| FIPI | Overseas Pakistanis | Non-resident Pakistanis, largely via Roshan Digital Accounts. Counted as foreign. |
| LIPI | Individuals | Resident retail investors. The largest group by head count. |
| LIPI | Mutual funds | Asset management companies’ equity and balanced funds. |
| LIPI | Banks / DFI | Commercial banks and development finance institutions trading on their own books. |
| LIPI | Insurance companies | Life and general insurers’ investment portfolios. |
| LIPI | Companies | Non-financial companies investing surplus cash, and corporate groups. |
| LIPI | NBFC | Non-bank finance companies. |
| LIPI | Other organisations | Provident funds, trusts, and anything that fits nowhere else. |
| LIPI | Broker proprietary trading | Brokers trading their own capital, not client orders. |
The pattern most readers care about is foreign corporates versus mutual funds versus individuals: the offshore money, the institutional local money, and retail. Banks and insurance companies tend to be steadier holders, though as the 31 August figures below show, they can dominate a single day.
How to read a net flow
Three rules keep flow data honest.
First, net is not gross. A day showing foreign corporates at minus Rs 1.08 billion could be Rs 1.1 billion of selling and near-zero buying, or Rs 6 billion of selling against Rs 4.9 billion of buying. Net tells you the direction of the residual, not the intensity of activity.
Second, the categories are a closed system. If mutual funds sold Rs 17.7 billion, someone bought Rs 17.7 billion. On 31 August 2026 the NCCPL breakdown showed mutual funds at minus Rs 17.67 billion and banks and DFIs at plus Rs 17.36 billion, with the remaining categories close to zero. A figure that large and that symmetrical is characteristic of a negotiated block changing hands between two institutions, not thousands of small orders. It moved the flow tables enormously and the index barely at all.
Third, flows describe who traded, not why. A foreign outflow can be a fund rebalancing, a redemption at the fund level, a currency view, a dividend being repatriated, or one large seller exiting a single stock. NCCPL does not publish the reason and neither does anyone else. Treat the number as context for what you see in prices, not as a signal on its own.
The last 90 days
Equivest’s flow feed, queried on 6 Sep 2026 for the trailing 90 days, returned 57 trading sessions of NCCPL data running from 8 June to 31 August. Here is the foreign side by month.
| Period | Sessions | Net FIPI |
|---|---|---|
| June (from 8th) | 15 | minus Rs 49.49 bn |
| July | 23 | plus Rs 9.57 bn |
| August | 19 | minus Rs 5.52 bn |
| Whole window | 57 | minus Rs 45.44 bn |
| Whole window excluding 23 June | 56 | minus Rs 1.61 bn |
The June number is dominated by one session: on 23 June 2026 NCCPL recorded net foreign selling of Rs 43.83 billion, roughly forty times a typical day’s figure. The largest foreign inflow in the window was Rs 2.53 billion on 16 July. Across all 57 sessions, foreigners were net buyers on 29 days and net sellers on 28, which is about as balanced as it gets.
The most recent stretch is the part worth watching. The last five sessions in the data (24, 25, 27, 28 and 31 August) were all net foreign selling, totalling about Rs 4.0 billion, with 31 August at minus Rs 1.05 billion. Within that day, foreign corporates were the sellers at minus Rs 1.08 billion while overseas Pakistanis were small net buyers at plus Rs 34 million. Whether five sessions is a trend or a rebalancing is exactly the question the data cannot answer; the next fortnight of prints will.
On the local side, the same 31 August breakdown had individuals at minus Rs 51 million, companies plus Rs 277 million, broker proprietary trading plus Rs 910 million, insurance plus Rs 95 million, and the bank-versus-mutual-fund cross described above.
What flows are useful for
The honest use of FIPI and LIPI is as a second axis on price. If the KSE-100 falls 2% and the flow table shows foreign corporates selling heavily while individuals bought, you have learned something about who was on each side. If it falls 2% with foreigners flat and mutual funds selling, that is a different story, usually about local redemptions. Neither tells you what happens tomorrow.
Foreign ownership of PSX free float is modest compared with regional markets, so foreign flows matter less to index direction than the attention they get suggests. Local mutual funds and banks are the larger pools of capital day to day. If you benchmark against a Shariah index rather than the KSE-100, the KSE-100 versus KMI-30 comparison explains how the client-type mix differs between the two universes.
Two habits help. Look at a rolling ten or twenty session sum rather than one day, which smooths the block-trade noise. And when a single day looks extraordinary, as 23 June did, go to NCCPL’s site and read the per-category breakdown for that date before drawing a conclusion.
How Equivest helps
Equivest’s Whales screen reads the NCCPL portfolio-investment data daily and shows it as a running net-flow chart for the foreign side and each of the eight local client types, with the day’s per-category breakdown one tap away. Outlier sessions are flagged so a one-off block trade does not read as a trend, and the same chart sits next to the index and sector moves for the day so you can see who traded against what the market did, and against your own holdings on the tracker.
This is education, not investment advice.