Disclosed Quantity in Indian Markets: Rules, Broker Steps and a Worked Example

What disclosed quantity actually means

Disclosed quantity, often shortened to DQ, is a field on the order ticket that tells the exchange how many shares of a large limit order you are willing to show publicly at any one time. Suppose you place a buy order for 5,000 shares of Reliance with a disclosed quantity of 500. The exchange shows just 500 shares in the public order book at your price. The other 4,500 shares sit in the matching engine but stay invisible to other traders. As soon as those 500 shares are filled, the next 500 are revealed automatically, and this repeats until the whole 5,000 is done or you cancel the order.

The reason this feature exists is market impact. If a retail or institutional trader dumps a single visible order for 5,000 shares of a mid cap stock, other participants instantly see a large buyer and may pull their offers higher, or front run the order. By breaking the visible footprint into small slices, DQ lets a big order trade quietly. It is sometimes called the manual cousin of the iceberg order, where the slicing is automated by the broker rather than disclosed to the exchange as a single parent order.

It is important to be precise about what DQ does and does not do. It does not hide your order from the exchange itself, nor does it give you any price priority. It only changes what other members of the public can see in the depth window. Your full quantity is still committed and can match against incoming orders. The hidden portion simply does not advertise itself in the visible bid and ask depth.

The exact NSE minimum disclosure rule

This is where most explanations get sloppy, so here is the precise rule. On the NSE equity segment, the disclosed quantity you enter must be at least 10 percent of the total order quantity and cannot be greater than the total order quantity. The exchange front end and the broker risk system reject any order where the disclosed quantity is below this 10 percent floor. There is no concept of disclosing less than a tenth of your order. The same 10 percent minimum applies on the BSE.

There is a second, easy to miss detail. The disclosed quantity must also respect the market lot. For most NSE equity scrips the market lot in the normal market is 1 share, so any whole number that is at least 10 percent of the order works. The rounding matters when the 10 percent figure is not a whole number. If you enter 1,005 shares, then 10 percent is 100.5, and you must round up to a valid value such as 101, because a fractional disclosed quantity is not accepted.

Placing a disclosed quantity order on Zerodha Kite, step by step

Because traders learn this best by doing it, here is the exact order entry flow on Zerodha Kite, which is the most used retail platform in India. The disclosed quantity field is hidden by default and lives under the advanced options of the order window. Follow these steps for a cash market delivery buy in a liquid stock such as HDFC Bank.

• Open the order window by clicking Buy on the HDFC Bank quote. The blue buy ticket opens.
• Set the product type to CNC for delivery, or MIS for intraday. Disclosed quantity is supported on the regular equity order, not on a plain market order.
• Change the order type from Market to Limit. The disclosed quantity field is greyed out until you choose Limit, because the exchange does not accept DQ on market orders.
• Enter your total quantity, for example 2,000 shares, and your limit price, for example 1,650.
• Click the small Advanced or More options link at the bottom of the ticket. This reveals the Disclosed Qty field along with Validity options like Day and IOC.
• Enter your disclosed quantity. For a 2,000 share order the minimum the exchange accepts is 200, since that is 10 percent. Enter 200 or any value up to 2,000.
• Review and click Buy. Kite forwards the order to the NSE. In your order book the order shows your full 2,000 quantity to you, but the public depth shows only 200 at a time.

If you type a disclosed quantity below the 10 percent floor, the order is rejected with a message similar to disclosed quantity cannot be less than 10 percent of quantity, and the order never reaches the exchange. On Upstox the flow is almost identical. Open the buy or sell window, switch to a Limit order, expand the advanced section, and the Disclosed Quantity field appears next to trigger price and validity. Angel One, Groww and Dhan all place this field in a similar advanced or additional options drawer, and all enforce the same 10 percent minimum at the back end.

A fully worked example with real rupees

Let us walk through a concrete, illustrative trade so the mechanics are clear. These numbers are for explanation only and are not a prediction or a promise of returns. Assume you want to accumulate 2,000 shares of Reliance Industries at a limit price of 2,950 per share on the NSE cash segment, taking delivery (CNC). The full order value is 2,000 multiplied by 2,950, which is 59,00,000 rupees. You decide to use a disclosed quantity of 200 shares, the minimum the exchange allows for this order size.

When you submit, the public order book shows only 200 Reliance shares bid at 2,950. The other 1,800 stay hidden. Say 200 shares fill against incoming sellers. The exchange immediately reveals the next 200, but here is the catch that matters for your fill. Each newly revealed tranche is treated as a fresh order at that price and joins the back of the queue. If other buyers are also resting at 2,950, your next 200 sit behind them. In a fast moving or thinly traded name, the price can move away from 2,950 before all ten tranches fill, leaving part of your order unexecuted.

Now the costs, assuming the full 2,000 shares fill at 2,950 as delivery. The dominant statutory cost on equity delivery is the Securities Transaction Tax, which is 0.1 percent on both buy and sell. On the buy leg, STT is 0.1 percent of 59,00,000, which is 5,900 rupees. A typical discount broker charges zero brokerage on delivery, while exchange transaction charges, SEBI fees, stamp duty of 0.015 percent on the buy, and 18 percent GST on brokerage and transaction charges add a small amount more. Using disclosed quantity does not add any extra charge. Brokers do not bill you for the DQ field, so your cost is identical to a normal limit order of the same size.

Suppose you later sell all 2,000 shares at 3,100 after holding for five months. Your gross gain is 2,000 multiplied by 150, which is 3,00,000 rupees before costs. Because the holding period is under 12 months, this is a short term capital gain, taxed at 20 percent under the post July 2024 rules, so roughly 60,000 rupees of tax plus 4 percent cess, again before adjusting for charges. Had you held for more than 12 months, it would be a long term gain taxed at 12.5 percent on the amount above the 1.25 lakh annual exemption. The disclosed quantity choice has no effect on any of this tax math. It only shaped how visible your order was while it was being filled.

Where disclosed quantity does not apply

A frequent point of confusion is whether DQ works in the futures and options segment. In practice retail traders use disclosed quantity almost entirely in the equity cash segment. In index and stock derivatives, large participants more commonly rely on iceberg or slicing facilities offered by the broker rather than the classic DQ field, and many broker order tickets do not expose a disclosed quantity input on an options order. So if you are buying a Nifty weekly option, do not expect the same DQ box you see on a cash equity ticket.

DQ also does not exist on market orders, on after market orders that the broker holds overnight, or on order types where partial visibility makes no sense. It is fundamentally a limit order tool. If you ever see the field greyed out, it is the platform correctly telling you that DQ is not valid for the product and order type you have selected.

• Allowed: equity cash segment limit orders, both delivery (CNC) and intraday where the broker supports it.
• Not allowed: market orders, because there is no resting price at which to hide quantity.
• Usually not exposed: options buy or sell tickets, where iceberg and slicing tools are used instead.
• Always enforced: the 10 percent minimum disclosure on every order that does support DQ.

Disclosed quantity versus iceberg orders

Traders often confuse disclosed quantity with iceberg orders because both hide part of a large order. The difference is in how the slicing happens. With a classic disclosed quantity order, you place a single large order and the exchange reveals it in tranches of your chosen DQ size. With an iceberg facility offered by brokers like Zerodha and Upstox, the broker splits your large quantity into several smaller child orders and releases them one after another, often letting you choose how many legs to break it into.

The practical effect is similar, your visible footprint stays small, but the queue behaviour and the way each slice is priced can differ. With DQ the parent order stays intact at the exchange and the unfilled hidden portion keeps its commitment. With a broker iceberg, each leg is technically a new order, so you may get more flexibility in setting per leg behaviour but also more moving parts to manage. For most retail traders placing a single large limit order in a liquid cash stock, the plain disclosed quantity field is simpler and does the job.

How DQ affects your place in the queue

This is the single most important practical drawback to understand. The Indian exchanges follow strict price time priority. When your first disclosed tranche fills and the next tranche is revealed, that new tranche enters the queue at the current time, which means it sits behind every other order already resting at your price. You lose the time priority you would have had if your full quantity were visible from the start.

In a deeply liquid name like a Nifty 50 stock during active hours, this rarely hurts much because fills are fast. But in a less liquid mid cap or small cap, repeatedly going to the back of the queue can leave your order half done and force you to chase the price. This is the real trade off. You gain stealth, but you can pay for it with slower and sometimes worse fills. A trader who needs certainty of execution should weigh whether the market impact they are avoiding is actually larger than the slippage they may suffer from queue resets.

Who actually uses disclosed quantity

The heaviest users are institutional desks, mutual funds and portfolio managers who routinely move tens of thousands of shares and cannot afford to telegraph their intentions. For them DQ, alongside iceberg and algorithmic execution, is a standard tool to reduce market impact on a large position. A fund accumulating a stake over several days will keep its visible footprint small precisely so the price does not run away before the position is built.

Retail traders use it far less often, simply because most retail orders are small enough that visibility does not matter. If you are buying 50 shares of Infosys, hiding 45 of them serves no purpose. DQ starts to matter when your single order is large relative to the typical depth at the touch, for example several thousand shares in a stock that usually shows only a few hundred at the best bid and ask. If your order is a meaningful fraction of visible liquidity, DQ is worth considering. Otherwise it just slows you down for no benefit.

Common mistakes traders make with DQ

• Entering a disclosed quantity below 10 percent of the order and then wondering why the order was rejected. The exchange floor is absolute.
• Trying to set DQ on a market order. It is a limit order only feature, so switch the order type to Limit first.
• Using a tiny DQ in an illiquid stock and ending up with a half filled order as the price moves away after each queue reset.
• Assuming DQ hides the order from the exchange or gives some tax or cost advantage. It does neither. It only changes public visibility.
• Forgetting that fractional disclosed quantities are not allowed, so 10 percent of 1,005 must be rounded up to a whole number like 101.

The thread running through all of these is the same. Disclosed quantity is a narrow, specific tool for reducing the visible footprint of a genuinely large limit order. Used in the right situation, a sizeable cash order in a stock where your size would otherwise move the market, it is genuinely useful. Used reflexively on small or illiquid orders, it just creates friction.

Sources and further reading

For authoritative rules and current contract specifications, refer to NSE India, SEBI and Zerodha Varsity. Always confirm the current minimum disclosure rule, charges and tax rates on the official source before you trade, since exchange circulars and tax rules change over time. Related reading on this site includes iceberg orders, the order book and market liquidity.

Sources and Further Reading

For authoritative data and further reading on this topic, refer to NSE India, SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India) and Zerodha Varsity. Always confirm current rules, rates and contract specifications on the official source before you trade.