Record Date & Ex-Date

The record date is the cut-off on which a company checks its shareholder register to decide who receives a corporate action (dividend, bonus, split, rights). The ex-date is the first trading day on which buying the share no longer earns that benefit. Under India's T+1 settlement, the ex-date and record date now fall on the same day.

The rule that matters: to be eligible, you must buy the stock before the ex-date — buy on or after it and the benefit goes to the seller. Because trades settle the next working day (T+1), shares bought one day before the record date land in your demat account exactly in time to be on the register.

On the ex-date the price adjusts mechanically for the action: down by roughly the dividend amount, halved for a 1:1 bonus, and so on. Exchanges mark such stocks with ex-benefit annotations, and the adjusted price is not a 'fall' in any economic sense.

Companies announce record dates in exchange filings, typically alongside the board-meeting outcome that approves the action — which is exactly the kind of filing a real-time alert saves you from missing when eligibility windows are short.

How stocks tend to react

Stocks sometimes see buying interest in the run-up to attractive record dates (dividend-capture and bonus-eligibility trades) and corresponding supply after, layered on top of the mechanical ex-date price adjustment. These flows are usually short-lived relative to moves driven by the underlying business.

MarketPing measures this instead of guessing: every analysed announcement carries the stock's actual price reaction across 14 horizons, and the Reaction Lab aggregates how each category of announcement has historically moved stocks.

Related terms

Educational content, not investment advice. Regulations and tax rules change — verify current rules before acting.