Every trading day, Signal Desk pulls the closing level of every sectoral index on the NSE — banking, IT, auto, pharma, FMCG, metals, realty, energy and the rest — and ranks them from the day's strongest performer to its weakest. That ranking is the sector heatmap. It is not a prediction and it is not a recommendation; it is simply what happened, ordered so you can see it in five seconds instead of scanning a dozen index tickers one by one.
What actually drives a tile's position
Each sector's position comes from its index's percentage change for the session, compared against the same index's previous close. Nothing fancier than that — no smoothing, no weighting by how much you personally care about a sector. The index that moved up the most sits at the top; the one that fell the most sits at the bottom. Signal Desk also tracks five-session sector momentum separately, so a sector that has been quietly climbing for a week shows up differently from one that spiked on a single news day.
Reading one day vs reading a pattern
A single day's top sector tells you what happened today, which is useful but narrow — a sector can lead for one session purely because two or three heavyweight stocks in that index had strong results. A sector that keeps appearing near the top across several consecutive Signal Desk reports is a different, more durable signal: money is rotating into it, not just one stock having a good day. This is why the report is published daily rather than as a one-off snapshot — the real value shows up when you compare today's tile order against the last several days'.
Pairing the heatmap with breadth
A sector heatmap on its own can't tell you whether a sector's gain was broad-based or concentrated in one or two large constituents. That's what the market breadth section directly below the heatmap on Signal Desk is for — it counts how many individual stocks advanced versus declined across the whole exchange that session. A sector at the top of the heatmap alongside broad positive breadth is a healthier signal than the same sector leading while breadth overall is weak.
- Check the top and bottom sector first — that's the day's clearest signal.
- Scan the last few days' reports together, not just today's, to separate a real rotation from a one-day spike.
- Cross-check the leading sector against the breadth numbers on the same report before reading too much into it.
Signal Desk updates once per trading session and archives every past report, so you can always go back and see exactly how a sector's ranking evolved over the days around a specific move.
Open today's Signal Desk report →Common questions
Does the sector heatmap update during the trading day?
No. Signal Desk is a once-per-session report built from a day's closing data, not a live intraday feed, so the heatmap reflects the most recently completed session until the next one settles.
What's the difference between the daily rank and the 5-session momentum figure?
The daily rank is a single session's order from strongest to weakest sector. The 5-session momentum figure smooths that over a run of days, which is the better way to tell a real rotation apart from one sector having a single strong day.
Do I need any market data subscription to read it?
No -- Signal Desk is a page on NexImpera itself, free to read, built from the same end-of-day market data the rest of the site's tools use.
The heatmap is a ranking, not a recommendation: it tells you which sectors moved the most that session, best to worst, so you can see the day's shape in seconds instead of checking a dozen index tickers one by one. Read it daily and the five-session momentum view starts doing real work, separating genuine rotation from a single strong session.
