Capital Stress Index.
Where the cracks are forming: leverage, pledges, down-rounds, and insolvency in one fragility gauge.
The headline index
The stress is migrating. Promoter pledges and corporate leverage sit at multi-year lows, yet the index has climbed to 108, driven by private markets: down-rounds at a decade high and LP stakes clearing at ~21% discounts. Healthy balance sheets, fragile cap tables.
The 8 fault lines
Latest reads anchor to official 2025 releases (cited per fault line).
Share of promoter holdings pledged: the classic margin-call fragility. Higher is riskier.
Source ↗ Business Standard, Feb 2025How geared corporate balance sheets are. Falling leverage = lower systemic stress.
Source ↗ Fitch / Business Standard, 2025Share of venture rounds priced below the last mark: private-market valuation stress.
Source ↗ PitchBook / TechCrunch, Dec 2025What non-bank lenders pay to fund themselves: the canary for shadow-credit strain.
Source ↗ Gravitywell estimate (CCIL / RBI)Fresh corporate insolvency admissions: distress crystallising into the courts.
Source ↗ IBBI / KNN India, Mar 2026Discount on LP-stake secondary sales: the price of forced liquidity in private markets.
Source ↗ IVCA / 360 ONE–VCCEdge, 2025Intensity of foreign-portfolio selling: external funding stress feeding into local asset prices. Higher = worse.
Source ↗ NSDL / Business Standard, Jun 2026How deep private credit has grown: fast expansion adds latent, lightly-regulated shadow leverage. Higher = more latent stress.
Source ↗ Moody's / Business Standard, Jul 2026Smoothed, rebased, winsorised, weighted.
How it's built
Pledges, leverage, down-rounds, NBFC spreads, insolvency, secondary discounts, FPI-flow stress, and private-credit penetration: public, private, and external stress in one gauge.
Every pillar is oriented so that rising = more fragile. A climbing CSI is a warning, not a win: the colour coding flips accordingly.
3-month average, rebase to mid-2024, clamp to [50, 180]. A single quarter of insolvencies or one discounted block can't define the read.
Read against the Formation Index. CFI hot + CSI rising = late-cycle fragility building beneath the boom: the bubble-watch corroboration.
The composite can rise even as public balance sheets heal, because the cracks have moved to private markets. The pillar mix shows exactly where.
- · Direction matters: all pillars point the same way (up = stress); none is inverted, so the read is unambiguous.
- · Public vs private: improving corporate health can mask private-market strain; the pillar split keeps both visible.
- · Flow vs stock: insolvency is shown as a monthly flow, not cumulative, to avoid a permanently rising line.
- · Discount distortion: thin secondary volumes can exaggerate the discount; winsorisation caps its pull on the composite.
Data vintage June 2026. Latest reads anchor to official 2025 releases: Business Standard (pledging), Fitch (leverage), PitchBook / TechCrunch (down-rounds), IBBI / EY (insolvency), and IVCA / 360 ONE–VCCEdge (secondary discounts). The NBFC funding spread is a Gravitywell estimate (CCIL / RBI). Insolvency is shown as a monthly flow; the within-period path reconciles to the cited sources.
Methodology v3.2 (2026-07). Built to the OECD/JRC composite-indicator handbook and disclosed toward the IOSCO Principles for Financial Benchmarks: distance-to-reference normalisation, 3-month smoothing, a flagged contribution cap, weighted aggregation, plus a drop-one-pillar uncertainty band, an equal-weight robustness cross-check, and a data-coverage ratio (all shown above). Known limitation: the 24-month panel is too short for robust seasonal adjustment; India's March fiscal-year-end spikes are not yet removed. Series are point-in-time; published values are not silently restated.
Where the cracks form, monthly.
The Capital Stress Index flags fragility across public and private markets: counter-cyclical to formation, every month.