Sebi revises norms to allow 30-day lag for market data use for educational purposes

Sebi on Friday revised rules to allow a uniform time lag of 30 days for sharing and using stock price data for educational and investor awareness activities to strike a balance between preventing misuse of market data and keeping educational content relevant.

Sebi on Friday revised rules to allow a uniform time lag of 30 days for sharing and using stock price data for educational and investor awareness activities to strike a balance between preventing misuse of market data and keeping educational content relevant. The new framework will be applicable from July 1, Sebi said in its circular. 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. ''Based on feedback received from various stakeholders that the lag of one day for sharing of price data is very short and there is possibility of mis-use of the same, and lag of three months for usage of the price data being too long for educational purposes; ... it has been decided to prescribe a time lag of 30 days for both sharing and usage of price data for educational purposes,'' Sebi said. Since the National Institute of Securities Markets (NISM) is a capacity building initiative of Sebi and has an important role in imparting training and certification programmes and training Sebi's officers and market intermediaries, the regulator said that NISM have access to market price data with a lag of one day for the purpose of usage in its simulation lab.