Everyone, at the same moment.

The price of being listed

A private company tells its owners what it likes. A listed company is on a schedule, because its shares are being bought and sold by people who have no other way of knowing anything. Listing brings money (01.02.01); the continuing obligations are the bill.

Three kinds of thing must be disclosed. Periodic: results every quarter, the shareholding pattern every quarter, the annual report every year. Event-based: anything material, the moment it happens — a board decision, an acquisition, an auditor resigning, a fire at a plant. Corporate actions: the dividends, bonuses, splits and buybacks of chapter 01.07, with their record dates.

All of it goes to the stock exchange first. Not to a newspaper, not to a fund manager, not to a television channel. The exchange publishes it on its own website, where anybody can read it for free, and only then does it reach anyone's screen.

The clock, and where it starts

The deadlines are short, and they differ by where the news came from. A decision taken in a board meeting — Bharat Foods' hypothetical ₹4 dividend, say — must reach the exchange within thirty minutes of the meeting ending. Something that happens inside the company gets twelve hours. Something from outside it, such as an order from a court or a regulator, gets twenty-four hours.

The clock starts when an officer of the company learns of the event through a credible channel, not when the company decides it is ready to talk about it. That distinction is the entire point of the rule.

The periodic filings run on a slower clock: quarterly results within 45 days of the quarter ending, annual results within 60 days of the year ending, and the shareholding pattern within 21 days of each quarter — the document 01.03.01 read to find out who owns what.

"Material" is partly a number

Some events are material by definition, whatever their size: a change of managing director, the auditor resigning, a fraud, a default, action by a regulator, an acquisition. No test applies — they are disclosed.

Everything else is measured. An event is material if its likely effect crosses a threshold, and the threshold is the lowest of three numbers: 2% of turnover, 2% of net worth, or 5% of the average profit or loss of the last three years. Whichever of those is smallest is the line the company must use.

That is why a company's own materiality policy, approved by its board and published, matters. It fixes in advance what will be disclosed, so the decision is not made in the moment by whoever finds it inconvenient.

Reading it yourself

Every filing lands in the same place: the corporate announcements section of the exchange's website, searchable by company. The company must also keep it on its own website, and the results and the shareholding pattern are there alongside the annual report.

This is the quietest advantage a beginner has and the least used. The announcement is the primary document — the same words a fund manager reads, at the same minute, for nothing. Everything you will later see quoted in an app, a video or a headline is a summary of it, written by somebody with their own reasons.

It is also how you check a story. A rumour that a company is being acquired either has a filing behind it or does not.

Disclosure decides when everyone learns a thing. The other half of the same rule decides what the people who already knew are allowed to do in the meantime.