Beware! Blind investing in smallcaps won’t make you money as 148 of 250 stocks tumble in 2026
A quarterly results development with market-wide reach.
· Economic Times Markets, ET Stocks
More than half of the Nifty 250 stocks have delivered negative returns in 2026 despite the index gaining over 7%. Experts flag elevated valuations and persistent FII selling, stressing selective stock picking as earnings growth and performance diverge across market segments.
The analysis
This is an Index / institutional flows event. Passive and institutional flows move price independently of fundamentals, and around rebalancing dates they dominate it.
Because the driver here is macro rather than company-specific, the read-through is to index-level positioning rather than to any single name — correlations tend to rise when the whole market faces the same signal.
Market context
- This is a market-wide development — its reach goes beyond any single stock.
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