An Empirical Analysis of the Relationship Between FPI and Nifty Returns

This study is an attempt to evaluate and analyze the relationship between Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs) and the Indian stock market returns. With the stable economy, better growth prospects, liberal government policies and many more profitable opportunities, India has become a hot destination for FPI investments. Thus there is a need to study the impact of these investments on the market returns. Daily data of foreign net investment and Nifty returns, for the period starting from April 2004 to December 2015, has been used for evaluating the presence of feedback trading among the foreign investors. Vector autoregression and Granger causality have been used to test the presence of feedback trading hypothesis and establish the cause and effect relationship among the variables. The results suggest that FPIs are influenced by the Nifty returns but the opposite relationship does not hold. Also it is found that feedback trading is present in the short run with FPI getting influenced even by the Nifty's last 12 days returns. As the frequency of the data is changed to monthly, the feedback trading hypothesis does not hold true. In other words, it can be said that FPIs' net investment is positively influenced by Nifty returns