Weekly Market Update 20-26 July 2026 (India): Why Did HDFC Bank Crash Right After a Record Profit?

Monday morning, 20th July, I open my trading app before I’ve even had my chai bad habit, I know and HDFC Bank is sitting there down more than 5%. My first thought wasn’t “there goes my portfolio.” It was “wait, didn’t they just report a record profit number?”

That one contradiction pretty much sums up the entire week.

Profit numbers went up. The stock price went down. Oil went up. The rupee went down. And by the time Friday’s closing bell rang, both the Nifty and Sensex had closed lower for five sessions in a row, something we hadn’t seen in months.

This is my Weekly Market Update 20-26 July 2026 India edition the same kind of recap I put together most weekends over on Stock Charcha. Except this week, I had to read a few headlines twice before they actually made sense to me.

One quick housekeeping note before we get into it: Indian markets only trade Monday through Friday, so the real action here happened between the 20th and 24th. The 25th and 26th were the weekend, which, conveniently, is exactly when most people search for a weekly market update today instead of piecing together five days of headlines themselves.

So What Actually Happened to Nifty and Sensex This Week?

If you just want the numbers first:

• Nifty 50 closed the week at 23,767.45 down about 567 points, or 2.33%
• Sensex closed at 76,059.77 down roughly 2,092 points, or 2.68%
• Every single one of the five trading days closed in the red
• India VIX, the index that basically tracks how nervous options traders are feeling, jumped over 4% to close near 14

Here’s how the week actually unfolded, because the “why” matters a lot more than the headline number.

Monday started the damage. HDFC Bank had reported its results over the weekend, and the market didn’t like what it saw once people read past the headline (more on this in a second). The stock fell over 5% and dragged Axis Bank down with it Axis was off around 5.5% the same day. ICICI Bank was the one bright spot among the big private banks, actually gaining after its own numbers came in stronger.

By Wednesday, the Nifty had slipped below the psychologically important 24,000 mark, closing at 23,996. Thursday brought Infosys results into the mix, along with a sharp jump in crude oil prices that rattled global markets overnight. Friday capped it off with the Sensex down another 332 points and the Nifty down 102 points, both closing right around the 0.43% mark.

Individually, none of these were crash days. It was more of a slow, steady grind lower, where the market found a fresh reason to dip a little further almost every single day.

Why Did HDFC Bank Fall Right After Reporting a Record Profit?

This is the one that genuinely tripped me up on Monday morning, so let me walk through it the way I eventually worked it out for myself.

HDFC Bank reported a net profit of about ₹19,060 crore for the April-June quarter that’s Q1 of FY27 in Indian accounting terms, since Indian companies run their financial year from April to March. On paper, that’s roughly a 5% jump over the same quarter last year. Sounds fine, right?

Except the market wasn’t looking at the profit number. It was looking at something called Net Interest Margin, or NIM basically the gap between what a bank earns on the loans it hands out and what it pays on deposits. Think of it as the bank’s core profit margin on its main business.

HDFC Bank’s NIM slipped to 3.26%, down from 3.38% the quarter before, and several analysts flagged it as the lowest level since the bank’s merger with HDFC Ltd. Net interest income grew only about 6.7%, missing what most analysts were expecting. The bank’s share of low-cost deposits (called CASA) also slipped, meaning a bigger chunk of its funding is now coming from pricier fixed deposits.

None of this means HDFC Bank is in trouble. Loan growth was still a healthy 15.4%, and asset quality barely moved. Brokerages like Jefferies, Bernstein, and Nomura all kept their “Buy” and “Outperform” ratings on the stock even after the fall that’s their call, not something I’d take as gospel, but it does tell you the fall wasn’t seen as a red flag on fundamentals.

The market simply cared more about the direction of profitability than the size of the profit number. That’s the whole story in one line, and it’s a lesson I keep relearning: a record profit figure means nothing until you check what’s actually driving it.

Why Is Everyone Suddenly Talking About Crude Oil and the Rupee?

If you scrolled through any market news this week, you probably saw “Brent crude,” “Strait of Hormuz,” and “rupee at record lows” mentioned more times than you could count. Here’s the simple version of why that matters to your portfolio, even if you don’t own a single oil or currency-linked stock.

Tensions in the Middle East escalated through the week, including reports of attacks on oil tankers in the Red Sea, which raised fears about disruptions to shipping routes that a huge share of the world’s oil moves through. Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil prices, spiked as high as $100-102 a barrel at one point before easing back to around $96.78 by Friday on hopes that talks involving the US and Iran might cool things down.

Here’s the chain reaction that actually hits Indian markets: India imports close to 90% of the crude oil it uses, and that oil is paid for in dollars. When oil prices rise, India’s import bill goes up, which puts direct pressure on the rupee. This week the rupee slid to around 96.5 per dollar, not far from its weakest levels in months, and there were reports of the RBI stepping in through state-run banks selling dollars to slow the fall. On top of that, fresh US tariffs of 10-12.5% on imports from around 60 economies, including a 10% duty on Indian goods, added another layer of pressure on the rupee and on India’s export outlook.

A weaker rupee makes foreign investors nervous about holding Indian stocks, since their eventual returns get eaten into once they convert back to dollars. That’s a big part of why Foreign Institutional Investors turned net sellers again this week, even though they had actually been net buyers earlier in July.

Global markets weren’t spared either. US markets had a genuinely rough Thursday, with the Dow down over 500 points and the Nasdaq falling more than 2% as oil surged and Alphabet and Tesla both sold off hard after their own earnings. Asian markets tumbled on Friday too, with Japan’s Nikkei falling over 3%.

One more thing worth flagging: gold and silver had a strong week, which isn’t surprising given everything above. 24-karat gold in India climbed from around ₹1,42,250 to roughly ₹1,43,780 per 10 grams over the week, and silver jumped even more, crossing ₹2.2 lakh per kilogram. When uncertainty piles up like this, money tends to rotate into gold as a safety net, and this week was a textbook example of that.

Which Sectors Actually Held Up This Week?

With almost everything in the red by Friday, it’s worth pointing out what didn’t fall apart, because that tells you where the market still had some confidence left.

Auto stocks had a genuinely good stretch through the middle of the week Bajaj Auto, Mahindra & Mahindra, and Eicher Motors were all among the stronger performers for a few sessions. But even Auto got pulled into the broader selloff by Friday, when energy and metal stocks led the final day’s decline alongside it.

IT was the sector that actually held its ground the best across the week. HCL Technologies stood out as one of the stronger names, and Infosys’s Thursday results despite a cautious guidance cut kept IT relevant in a week when most other conversations were about banks and oil. Nifty Realty and Nifty Pharma were among the weaker sectors through the week.

A few individual stock stories stood out too. IndusInd Bank fell around 6% after the market realized its recent “beat” a few days earlier was mostly driven by lower provisions rather than genuine core business strength worth remembering next time a stock jumps on a results day. HPCL slipped on a weak quarter of its own. On Friday specifically, Eternal (formerly Zomato), Bajaj Finance, and M&M were the sharpest fallers on the Nifty.

And then there was the odd, slightly funny story of the week: SpiceJet jumped close to 10% purely on reports that the Adani Group might be looking at entering the airline business, even as Adani Enterprises and Adani Ports themselves fell on the very same news. Markets can be strange like that.

Were FIIs Running Away, or Did DIIs Save the Day?

Quick explainer if these terms are new to you. FIIs, or Foreign Institutional Investors, are the big overseas funds pension funds, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds putting money into Indian stocks. DIIs, or Domestic Institutional Investors, are the Indian equivalent: mutual funds, insurance companies, and so on, largely fuelled by our own SIP money every month.

This week, FIIs were net sellers on most days, pulling out somewhere between ₹3,000 and ₹3,900 crore on individual sessions as global risk appetite dropped along with the oil price spike. That’s a real reversal, because earlier in July, FIIs had actually turned buyers again after months of heavy selling.

DIIs did what they’ve been doing for most of this year: buying almost exactly what FIIs were selling. On Friday alone, DIIs bought over ₹5,450 crore worth of shares even as FIIs sold close to ₹3,900 crore. That’s not a coincidence domestic mutual funds have been sitting on steady monthly SIP inflows, reportedly averaging more than ₹30,000 crore a month across the industry, which gives them the firepower to keep buying even when foreign money heads for the exits.

Honestly, this is the part of the market story that doesn’t get talked about enough. If you’ve ever wondered why Indian markets haven’t fallen off a cliff despite months of on-and-off FII selling, this tug-of-war is your answer. Domestic ownership of Indian equities is reportedly at an all-time high right now, and a good chunk of that is just regular people like us continuing our SIPs through the noise instead of pausing them.

What Happened With IPOs This Week?

A few interesting things going on in the primary market too, if that’s something you track.

Cube Highways Trust InvIT, a ₹5,000 crore infrastructure trust offering, opened for subscription on Wednesday and had a genuinely rocky start subscribed only about 5% of the issue on day one. It picked up momentum through the week and closed at 2.55 times subscription by Friday. What stood out to me was the grey market premium, or GMP the unofficial, unregulated indicator of where an IPO might list sitting flat at ₹0 through most of the week. That’s a useful reminder that GMP is not a promise. It’s just chatter with a number attached to it.

Lohia Corp, a maker of machinery for technical textiles, opened its ₹1,101 crore mainboard IPO on Wednesday as well, with the issue set to close on the 27th. Indo-MIM also opened a ₹3,811 crore offering the same day. A handful of smaller SME IPOs were active in the background too, though those carry their own, much higher risk profile and deserve extra caution before jumping in.

If you’re new to tracking IPOs, my honest suggestion is to actually read the price band and the business model on the exchange website before getting excited about a GMP number you saw on Telegram or X.

How Do I Actually Track All This Every Week?

I get asked this fairly often, so here’s my actual Sunday routine, using tools that are genuinely free or near-free:

1. Start with the official numbers. I check nseindia.com and bseindia.com directly for the week’s closing levels, rather than trusting a random screenshot doing the rounds online.
2. Check FII/DII activity. Sites like Trendlyne or 5paisa publish this data daily, and it takes about two minutes to see who was actually buying and who was selling.
3. Skim quarterly results for anything I actually hold. I use Screener.in for the numbers and read the earnings call commentary when a company posts one, instead of just reacting to the headline profit figure like I almost did with HDFC Bank.
4. Check global cues before assuming a move is “just India.” A quick look at how the Dow, Nasdaq, and Asian markets closed usually explains half of what happened here at home.
5. Glance at currency and commodities. The rupee, Brent crude, and gold prices are all one search away on most broker apps like Kite, Groww, or Dhan, and they explain a surprising amount of sector-level movement.
6. Write it down. This is honestly the most useful step. The act of typing up this recap every week is what forces me to actually understand the “why,” instead of just remembering the “what.” It’s basically how every weekly market update India readers see on Stock Charcha gets put together nothing fancy, just consistency.

None of this takes more than 30-40 minutes once it becomes a habit.

What Mistakes Do People (Including Me) Make in Weeks Like This?

A few things I’ve either done myself or watched other people do during weeks like this one:

Panic-selling on the first red day. HDFC Bank falling 5% on Monday spooked a lot of people into selling immediately, before actually reading why it fell. Reacting to a headline number instead of the reason behind it usually costs more than it saves.

Trusting GMP like it’s guaranteed. Cube Highways Trust’s ₹0 GMP this week is a perfect example of why grey market chatter isn’t a listing-day promise.

Ignoring the oil-rupee-FII connection. When people see “auto up, banks down” without understanding the oil and currency backdrop behind it, they end up chasing sector rotation without ever knowing why it’s actually happening.

Over-trading options during high-VIX weeks. When India VIX jumps the way it did this week, options premiums get expensive and unpredictable fast. This is exactly the kind of week where oversized F&O bets do the most damage to a portfolio.

Not separating “the market fell” from “my thesis was wrong.” A five-day losing streak driven by geopolitics and oil prices is a very different situation from a stock falling because its own business is deteriorating. Mixing the two up leads to selling perfectly good long-term holdings at exactly the wrong time.

So What Should You Actually Do Next Week?

Honestly? I’m not going to pretend I know exactly where the Nifty goes from here, and anyone who tells you they do with total confidence is usually just guessing louder than the rest of us.

What I can tell you is what’s actually on the calendar: the US Federal Reserve has its policy meeting coming up, several more Q1 results are still due over the next couple of weeks, the Lohia Corp IPO closes on the 27th, and however the Middle East situation develops will keep driving crude oil, and by extension the rupee, for at least another week or two. A fair bit of the technical commentary I read this week pointed to the 23,600-23,450 zone as a support area to watch on the Nifty, for whatever that’s worth.

If you’re a long-term investor, weeks like this are usually more about staying calm than doing something clever. If you’re actively trading, this is exactly the kind of environment where position sizing matters more than being right about direction.

One disclaimer before I wrap up, because I’d rather say it upfront than have someone act on this the wrong way: I’m not a SEBI-registered investment advisor, and nothing in this piece is a buy or sell recommendation. These are numbers pulled from exchange data and public reporting, plus my own observations from tracking markets every week. Please do your own research, or speak with a registered advisor, before making any investment decision especially around IPOs and F&O, where GMP rumors and social media “calls” genuinely cost people real money.

That’s this week’s Weekly Market Recap from my side my Weekly Market Update 20-26 July 2026 for Indian markets, wrapped. This is a regular thing over on Stock Charcha (stockcharcha.in); I put one of these together most weekends, partly because writing it down forces me to actually understand what happened instead of just doom-scrolling headlines on a Sunday. If you found this useful, that’s really the only goal here. See you next week.

Written by Hasanraza Ansari

Founder of Stock Charcha · Simplifying investing for India

Finance & Operations Specialist, helping beginners invest smarter through Stock Charcha.

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Educational content only. Investing in the stock market involves risks. Please do your own research or consult a SEBI-registered financial advisor before investing.