Sensex
The Sensex is older than the Nifty by almost a decade, and it still moves in near lockstep with it most days. Short for “Sensitive Index,” the Sensex tracks 30 large companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, Asia’s oldest exchange, founded in 1875. It was India’s original benchmark index, launched in 1986.
Sensex and Nifty rarely disagree, because most of the companies inside them are the same.
The two indices are calculated separately and track different exchanges, but their overlapping members mean they usually rise and fall together within a fraction of a percent. When a headline reports “the market” without naming an index, the move is almost certainly true of both.
The Sensex first crossed 1,000 in 1990 and 10,000 in 2006. It passed 85,000 for the first time in September 2024. Its long climb, with crashes along the way in 2008 and 2020, is the clearest picture of how Indian company profits have compounded over three decades.