New Delhi: Markets regulator Sebi on Tuesday proposed introducing a uniform time lag of 30 days for both sharing and use of stock price data for educational and investor awareness activities, seeking to strike a balance between preventing misuse of market data and keeping educational content relevant. The proposal is also aimed at removing inconsistencies in Sebi's circulars issued in May 2024 and January 2025.
The markets regulator, in May 2024, had restricted the sharing of live market data by stock exchanges exclusively for trading and allied activities, allowing educational and awareness programmes to use such data only with a one-day lag to curb misuse. The framework was further tightened in January 2025, when the regulator stipulated that entities engaged solely in education could use market data only with a three-month lag.
Under the existing system, educational institutes could access price data with a one-day delay for preparing content, but were permitted to use only three-month-old data while conducting classes or disseminating material through any medium. While the one-day lag was a technical requirement for market infrastructure institutions and intermediaries, the three-month rule functioned as a content-based safeguard to ensure material remained purely educational, Sebi noted in its consultation paper.
However, Sebi said it received stakeholder feedback that a one-day lag was "too short and vulnerable to misuse, while internal deliberations suggested that the three-month lag was too long, and that the educational input could be more efficient if the period were to be reduced. Accordingly, the regulator has proposed "a uniform 30-day time lag for both the sharing and usage of price data" for educational and awareness activities. This 30-day uniform time lag, Sebi said, would "suffice the purpose of protecting against misuse of exchange data as well as keeping the education content relevant".
The Securities and Exchange Board of India has invited public comments on the proposal till January 27. In December, Sebi chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey stated that the markets regulator will soon change the rules to prohibit the usage of current live market data for investor education. He, however, had admitted that there has been "inconsistency" in two Sebi circulars dealing with the usage of live data for educational purposes.
"It is true that there has been an inconsistency in two of our circulars dealing with live data. We will get the consistency on it. Only past market data will be used for educational purposes; current data should not be used," Pandey had stated.
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