Who are the three major institutional investors? Foreign investors, investment trusts and dealers

The “three major institutional investors” are foreign investors, investment trusts and dealers. The exchanges publish their net buying and selling every day after the close; it describes fund flows and does not predict anything.

Updated：2026-11-15

Who they are

Taiwan’s “three major institutional investors” are three types of institutions:

• Foreign institutional investors (including mainland Chinese): overseas funds, pension funds and asset managers.
• Investment trusts: domestic fund companies that issue and manage mutual funds and ETFs.
• Dealers: securities firms trading with their own capital, plus hedging operations for products such as warrants. Data is therefore often split into “proprietary” and “hedging”.

What net buy and net sell mean

For one day, the shares (or value) an investor type bought minus the shares (or value) it sold is the net buy or net sell:

• Buying more than selling is a net buy.
• Selling more than buying is a net sell.

For example, if foreign investors bought 1,000 lots and sold 700 lots in a day, that is a net buy of 300 lots. It can be viewed per stock or as a market-wide total.

When the data is published

The exchanges publish it after the close each trading day, so a day’s figures appear only after the market closes. The TWSE publishes listed stocks and the TPEx publishes OTC stocks.

How to read the numbers

• It shows fund flows, not direction. A net buy only means they bought more than they sold that day, not that the price will rise.
• The three types are different. Foreign investors and investment trusts are investing institutions, while dealers include hedging; do not simply add the three together and interpret the sum.
• A single day is noisy. People commonly look at several consecutive days, cumulative amounts, or the share of trading volume.
• Net figures hide the process. The same day may include large buying and selling that cancel out.
• Every buyer has a seller. One side’s net buy is another side’s net sell; it does not mean “the market is bullish”.

On this site

• Market → Rankings has net buy and net sell rankings, including consecutive days, for foreign investors, investment trusts and dealers.
• The Chips tab of a stock page shows its institutional net buy and sell trend.
• The home page and the weekly report show the combined market-wide amounts for the three institutional investors and foreign investors.
• The Screener’s chips conditions can filter by consecutive days or cumulative amounts of institutional net buying.

This article only explains terms and how to read the data. Tenmizu does not provide investment recommendations and this is not investment advice.