Seven Down Weeks: How to Read a Losing Streak Without Letting It Read You

For the seventh week in a row, the Indian stock market closed lower than it did the week before.

That is the longest such run for the Nifty 50 since February and March 2020, when Covid closed the world. You will see the comparison in headlines, and it is accurate. It is also the kind of accurate statement that can make you do something you later regret, so it is worth taking apart carefully.

The count and the size

A losing streak is a count. It tells you how many weeks in a row ended lower. It says nothing about how much lower.

Here are the seven weeks for the Nifty, in order: −0.83%, −0.47%, −0.31%, −1.15%, −2.09%, −0.22%, −0.88%. Add them up and the index has fallen from 24,570.65 on 7 August to 23,140.50 on 25 September — 1,430.15 points, or 5.82%.

No single week of the seven lost as much as 2.1%. Four of them lost less than 1%. The last time the Nifty fell for this many weeks in a row, it was the Covid crash, and the decline was many times larger.

Both statements are true at once: this is an unusually long decline, and it is a modest one. Your portfolio does not experience the count. It experiences the size.

Where this week’s fall actually came from

The shape of the latest week is worth looking at, because it shows how concentrated a decline can be.

On Monday the Nifty rose 67.90 points. On Tuesday it fell 85.30. On Wednesday it rose 117.80. By Wednesday evening it stood 100 points higher than the previous Friday.

Then on Thursday 24 September it fell 383.70 points — 1.64% — and the Sensex 1,247.71. That one session was larger than the whole week’s eventual loss. Friday recovered 77.40.

Three things arrived together on Thursday. The US 10-year Treasury yield closed at 5.18%, its highest since 2007. Brent crude settled at $106.60 a barrel. And it was the first full trading session after India’s insurance regulator published a consultation paper proposing lower limits on insurers’ expenses and caps on distribution commissions, which sent PB Fintech, the company behind Policybazaar, down 36% in a single day and HDFC Life down 6.16%.

None of those three was on anybody’s calendar a month ago as the event that would decide a week. That is the ordinary condition of markets.

A consultation paper is not a rule

The insurance story deserves one more line, because it will generate anxious questions. The regulator’s paper is a set of proposals. Public comments are open until 25 October 2026, and the final version may differ, with a multi-year glide path.

Nothing about any policy you already hold changes. And a fall in the share price of an insurance company or platform tells you nothing about whether your own cover is adequate. That question has the same answer it had last week.

In fairness to readers: the Trustner Group includes an IRDAI-licensed insurance broker, so this proposal concerns our own business. We report it factually and offer no view on its merits here.

Who was buying

Over the five sessions, foreign institutional investors sold a net ₹11,490 crore of Indian shares, on four days out of five. Domestic institutions — mutual funds, insurers and pension funds, much of it money arriving through monthly SIPs — bought a net ₹16,398 crore, on all five days.

Domestic buyers absorbed about 1.4 times what foreigners sold. That is why a seven-week streak has not become a collapse. It is also worth noticing whose money that is. If you run a SIP, part of that ₹16,398 crore was yours.

The same week, somewhere else

Over the same five days, the S&P 500 rose 1.2% and the Nasdaq 2.1% — in the same week the US 10-year yield reached its highest close since 2007. The yields that weighed on India did not stop America rising.

This is not an argument that one market is better than another. It is a reminder that the explanation offered for any single week is usually partial. Bond yields were real. So were oil and the insurance paper. But markets fall and rise on the balance of many things, and the story that gets told afterwards is always tidier than the week was.

Three checks worth doing

First, measure the streak before you react to it. Set 5.82% against the number of years your money is actually invested for, and against what your plan already assumed about ordinary declines. Most long-term plans assume several falls of this size along the way.

Second, look at your mid- and small-cap weight rather than the headline. This week the Nifty Midcap 100 fell about 2.1%, more than twice the Nifty’s 0.88%. If your equity allocation has drifted towards smaller companies after a good year, a conversation with your Relationship Manager about whether it still matches the risk you signed up for is time well spent.

Third, let the SIP do the job it was set up to do. A monthly instalment bought each of these seven weeks at a lower price than the one before. It did not need to know when the streak would end, and neither do you.

The one line to keep

Sir John Templeton once observed that the four most dangerous words in investing are “this time it’s different.” A seven-week streak invites exactly that thought. The arithmetic says this one is, so far, an ordinary correction that happens to be long.

Disclaimer: This article is investor education and market commentary; it is general in nature and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security, sector, commodity, category or fund. Trustner Asset Services Pvt. Ltd. is an AMFI-registered Mutual Fund Distributor (ARN-286886) and earns distribution commission on Regular plans. Mutual fund investments are subject to market risks; read all scheme-related documents carefully, including the riskometer. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Market figures are as of the close on 25 September 2026.