Top Stocks Where Mutual Funds Are Booking Profits While Retail Investors Keep Buying

Synopsis: Fund houses trimmed holdings in more than 60 listed companies for a fourth straight quarter in June 2026, even as record SIP inflows kept domestic mutual funds net buyers of Indian equities overall. Rather than a broad sector dump, fund managers appear to be making deliberate, stock-specific profit bookings amid growing valuation concerns.

Domestic mutual funds have soaked up a lot of the foreign institutional selling this past year, but that number hides a more selective story underneath. A Moneycontrol analysis of June-quarter shareholding data found mutual funds cutting stakes for the fourth quarter running in over 60 companies spread across capital goods, industrials, financials, consumer and infrastructure. That spread is the interesting part. It doesn’t look like fund managers are dumping one sector; it looks like a lot of individual calls happening at once, across very different kinds of businesses.

What’s the news?

Names on the list include Cummins India, NTPC, Grasim Industries, LIC, GE Vernova T&D India, Apollo Pipes, TeamLease Services and Stanley Lifestyles. PSU power, financials, staffing, consumer lifestyle, there’s no common thread except that funds have been quietly reducing across four straight quarters. 

Some of the cuts run deep even for large, well-tracked names: TeamLease Services has gone from 47.12 percent mutual fund ownership a year ago to 39.12 percent now, and GE Vernova T&D India from 23.53 percent to 14.70 percent. These aren’t small, illiquid stocks where a single fund’s exit skews the numbers; they’re names with broad institutional coverage, which makes the sustained direction harder to wave off as noise.

The sharpest cuts by percentage points:

Financial impact and the “so what”

Here’s the part that actually explains a good chunk of this: several of these stocks have had a massive year. GE Vernova T&D India is up 109.6 percent, Aeroflex Industries 121.7 percent, Wheels India 119.6 percent, Ramco Systems 104.7 percent, Cummins India 66.4 percent, and Dee Development Engineers 101.6 percent. 

Trimming a stock after it’s more than doubled isn’t a red flag on its own it’s just position sizing. When a holding grows to several times its original weight in a fund, managers cut back to stay within mandate, win or lose. Cummins India is a clean example of this: the stake cut is modest (-4.23 percentage points) against a 66.4 percent one-year gain, which reads as ordinary profit-taking on a stock that’s simply grown too large a slice of the portfolio.

But that explanation doesn’t cover the whole list, and it’s worth being direct about where it breaks down. A cluster of names have seen both meaningful stake cuts and sharp price declines over the same year a combination that looks a lot less like profit booking and a lot more like funds losing patience. 

Route Mobile is down 49.34 percent alongside a 4.85 percentage-point cut. Happiest Minds Technologies is down 48.04 percent with a 3.89-point reduction. Laxmi Dental has fallen 48.19 percent while mutual funds trimmed 3.78 points. KNR Constructions is down 40.42 percent against a near-7-point cut, one of the largest on the list. SpiceJet, RK Swamy and H.G. Infra Engineering show the same pattern: falling stakes paired with steep one-year declines of 68.9 percent, 46.37 percent and 47.14 percent respectively.

Stanley Lifestyles sits at the extreme end of both columns, the single largest stake reduction on the entire list (-10.18 percentage points) and a 56.41 percent price decline over the year. Shivalik Bimetal Controls is the second-largest cut by percentage points, though its stock is actually up 36.06 percent, which muddies a clean read on that one name specifically even as the broader pattern around it holds.

Sector read

Splitting the list by sector sharpens the picture a little further. In industrials and capital goods For Cummins India, Wheels India, GE Vernova T&D India, and Ramco Systems the cuts mostly sit alongside strong one-year returns, consistent with profit booking after a re-rating. 

In IT services and staffing, TeamLease Services, Happiest Minds Technologies, and Unicommerce eSolutions, the picture is mixed to negative, with Happiest Minds and Unicommerce both down more than 30 percent over the year despite the reductions. Infrastructure and construction names, including KNR Constructions and H.G. Infra Engineering, show some of the sharpest combined stake-cut-and-price-decline pairs on the list, which is worth flagging given how order-book-driven that sector’s earnings visibility already is.

What to watch

A stake cut on its own doesn’t mean much. Funds rebalance for all sorts of reasons: redemptions, benchmark shifts, and house-view changes that have nothing to do with the company. Four quarters of consistent cuts are a stronger signal, but they still need context: was the fund locking in a big gain or heading for the exit on a stock that’s already struggling? 

The Cummins-versus-Stanley-Lifestyles contrast above is a useful template for that check of the same direction of institutional flow, but a completely different story underneath. Anyone holding one of these names should look at where their stock falls on that same two-axis test stake trend against price trend before treating this list as one uniform bearish call, because it clearly isn’t.

Disclaimer: The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts/broking houses/rating agencies on tradebrains.in are their own, and not that of the website or its management. Investing in equities poses a risk of financial losses. Investors must therefore exercise due caution while investing or trading in stocks. Trade Brains Technologies Private Limited or the author are not liable for any losses caused as a result of the decision based on this article. Please consult your investment advisor before investing.