Research and Tracking Systems for the Nepali Investor

First published 23 Aug 2026 · Last verified 29 Aug 2026

Aamod Sharma kept two notebooks on his desk in Kathmandu. One was full of numbers — buy prices, sell prices, dates. The other was empty except for a single line written eight months ago: "Bought NABIL because everyone at the tea shop was buying NABIL." He could not remember what he had actually thought that day. Had he checked the bank's capital adequacy ratio? Had he looked at the dividend history? Had he even opened the annual report? He could not say. All he had was a memory that had already been rewritten by everything that happened afterward — the price went up, so surely he had been smart. The price went down on another stock, so surely he had been careless. His memory was not a record. It was a story he kept editing.

Across town, his cousin Sunita ran a small trading business and treated her NEPSE (Nepal Stock Exchange) portfolio the same way she treated her shop's ledger. She had a spreadsheet with tabs for her watchlist, her holdings, and a running log of every decision she made and why. She had a calendar reminder for every company's annual general meeting (AGM — the yearly meeting where a company reports to its shareholders and proposes dividends). She checked NEPSE's own daily trading report before she believed any rumour from a WhatsApp group. When a stock she owned dropped 8 percent in a week, she did not panic — she opened her file on that company, checked whether anything in the business itself had changed, and only then decided whether to act.

Sunita was not smarter than Aamod. She did not have inside information. She had something more ordinary and more powerful: a system. This chapter is about building that system — not a personality trait, not a gift, but a set of habits and tools that any Nepali investor can set up in an afternoon and maintain in a few minutes a week. Every strategy covered in Chapters 67 through 69 — long-term value investing, dividend income investing, IPO and rights allotment strategy, sector rotation — depends on good information arriving on time and being remembered honestly. A brilliant strategy run on stale data or hazy memory is not a brilliant strategy. It is a guess wearing a strategy's clothes.

Lesson 70.1 — Where to Find Reliable Data: Official and Third-Party Sources

Before an investor can research anything, they need to know where information actually lives. In Nepal, financial information for listed companies comes from a small number of places, and it helps to sort them into two categories.

A primary source is information that comes directly from the company or the regulator — the original document, not someone's summary of it. A secondary source is a person, website, or news outlet that has read the primary source and is now telling you about it, often with commentary, simplification, or (occasionally) error mixed in. Both are useful. But an investor who only ever reads secondary sources is like a student who only reads book reviews and never opens the book. They will sound informed. They will not be as informed as they sound.

NEPSE — the exchange itself. The Nepal Stock Exchange operates the trading platform where all listed shares change hands, and its official website (nepalstock.com.np) is the first primary source every Nepali investor should know. It publishes the day's closing prices for every listed company, the daily floorsheet (a public record listing every single trade executed that day — buyer broker, seller broker, quantity, and price), market indices, and notices from the exchange itself, including trading holidays and circuit-breaker events (the automatic trading halts triggered when a stock or the whole market moves too far too fast in one session). If you want to know exactly what happened in the market today, with no one's opinion attached, NEPSE's own site is where that record lives.

SEBON — the regulator. The Securities Board of Nepal (SEBON) is the government body that regulates the securities market — it licenses brokers and merchant bankers, approves IPOs (initial public offerings — a company's first sale of shares to the public) and rights issues, and requires listed companies to disclose material information. SEBON's website (sebon.gov.np) carries regulatory notices, circulars, and the list of registered securities. SEBON also runs an electronic filing system, sometimes referred to by the acronym ERRS, where companies submit disclosures and where some of these become publicly searchable. When you want to know the actual rule behind a market practice — how rights issue pricing is supposed to work, what a company is required to disclose and by when — SEBON's own publications are the primary source, not a forum post explaining what someone thinks the rule is.

CDSC and meroshare — the record of what you own. The Central Depository System and Clearing Limited (CDSC) is the institution that maintains the electronic record of who owns which shares in Nepal — this is called a demat account (short for dematerialized account, an electronic record replacing paper share certificates). meroshare is the online portal, built on top of CDSC's system, that individual investors use to view their own share holdings, apply for IPOs and rights issues, and receive share allotments electronically. For an investor, meroshare is not just an application form — it is your own personal, authoritative record of exactly what you own, as of today, verified by the depository itself rather than by your own memory or a broker's statement. When Sunita wants to know precisely how many shares of a company she holds, right down to shares received from a bonus issue (additional free shares issued to existing shareholders, usually funded from a company's reserves) she may have forgotten about, she checks meroshare, not her notebook.

Company annual reports and AGM disclosures. Every listed company is required to publish an annual report — a yearly document covering its financial statements, the board's remarks, and its dividend proposal — and to hold an AGM where shareholders vote on that proposal. Annual reports are typically available from the company's own website, sometimes from SEBON's filings, and increasingly through NEPSE's and the third-party portals' company pages. The AGM notice itself — announcing the date, the agenda, and the book closure date (the record date used to determine exactly which shareholders are entitled to a dividend or bonus share, explained further in Lesson 70.3) — is one of the most important documents a dividend-income investor will read all year, because it is where the company's proposed cash dividend and bonus share percentages are formally announced.

Third-party financial portals. Alongside these official channels, a handful of privately run websites have become part of the everyday toolkit for Nepali retail investors. ShareSansar (sharesansar.com) and Merolagani (merolagani.com) are two of the most widely used, offering live and historical price data, floorsheet mirrors, company announcement archives, sector-wise summaries, portfolio tracking tools, and investor discussion forums, with ShareSansar also offering a paid analytics product for more advanced charting and screening. Other newer platforms have entered this space as well, offering similar live-data dashboards and AI-assisted summaries of market activity. These portals are mentioned here neutrally, as commonly used resources — not as endorsements, and not as a claim that any one of them is more accurate or reliable than another. Their genuine value is convenience: they aggregate data that would otherwise require checking several official pages separately, and they often make it easier to browse a company's announcement history or compare sectors at a glance.

The table below summarises where to go for what.

Lesson 70.2 — Organising a Personal Company Research File

Once an investor knows where information lives, the next problem is keeping it somewhere useful. A research file is a single, organised record for one company — everything you know about it, gathered in one place, so that six months from now you do not have to start from zero.

Think of it like a family doctor's patient file. A good doctor does not rediscover your medical history at every visit. They open your file, see your past test results, your known conditions, your medication history, and build on that. A company research file works the same way for an investor: it lets you build understanding over time instead of re-researching the same company from scratch every time you think about buying or selling it.

This connects directly to the Canon Score spreadsheet introduced in Chapter 66. The Canon Score gave you a structured way to score a company on the fundamentals that matter — profitability, governance, growth, valuation, and so on — producing a single comparable number for each company you track. The research file is the supporting evidence behind that score. The score is the summary; the file is the detail that justifies it. When you re-score a company (covered further in the next lesson), you should be pulling updated numbers from your research file, not guessing them from memory.

A practical research file, whether kept as a folder of documents or as a dedicated tab in your spreadsheet, should hold at minimum:

• Business description. A few sentences, in your own words, on what the company actually does. For a bank, this might note its balance sheet size, its branch network, and its niche, if any, in remittance handling or SME lending. For a hydropower company, it would note installed capacity, project status, and power purchase agreement terms.
• Financial history. Revenue, net profit, earnings per share, and dividend history for at least the last five years, pulled from annual reports, not estimated.
• Dividend and bonus history. A simple year-by-year list of what was actually paid — cash dividend percentage and bonus share percentage — because this history is the backbone of dividend income analysis (Chapter 68) and it is far easier to check off a running list than to reconstruct it from old news clippings.
• Governance and management notes. Who runs the company, any related-party transactions or promoter share pledges you have noticed, and any regulatory findings from NRB (Nepal Rastra Bank, the central bank that regulates banks and financial institutions) or SEBON.
• Sector notes. Where this company sits relative to its sector peers — useful raw material for the sector rotation thinking introduced in Chapter 69.
• News and disclosure log. A running list of material announcements — the date, a one-line summary, and where you read it (with a note on whether it was confirmed through a primary source).
• Your Canon Score history. The score you gave the company at each re-scoring date, so you can see the trend, not just the latest number.

You do not need to build a file for every company on NEPSE. Build one for every company you own, and for every company on your watchlist (the shortlist of companies you are seriously considering, introduced conceptually in earlier chapters). A file with ten well-maintained companies is worth far more than a spreadsheet listing all 200-plus listed companies with a single stale number next to each name.

Lesson 70.3 — Building Your Tracking Calendar: Re-Scoring, AGMs, and Dividends

Research is not a one-time event. A company you scored well eighteen months ago may not deserve that score today — its management may have changed, its sector may have shifted, its balance sheet may have weakened. A tracking calendar is simply a schedule of dates on which you commit, in advance, to revisit specific things. It turns "I should check on this sometime" — which usually means never — into "I will check on this on this date," which usually happens.

There are three kinds of dates worth tracking.

Re-scoring dates. The Canon Score from Chapter 66 is only useful if it is kept current. Most Nepali listed companies report quarterly, in line with the fiscal year that runs roughly mid-July to mid-July (Shrawan to Ashadh in the Nepali calendar). A sensible rhythm is to re-score each holding once a quarter, shortly after its results are published, and to do a fuller re-score once a year, after the annual report and AGM. Put these dates on a calendar the moment a company announces its results schedule or AGM date — do not rely on remembering to check back later.

AGM and dividend calendar. In Nepal, AGM season for many banks and financial institutions tends to cluster in the months following fiscal year-end — commonly stretching from around Poush through Falgun (roughly mid-December through mid-March), though the exact timing varies by company and by year, and other sectors follow their own timelines. The AGM is where a company's board formally proposes its cash dividend and bonus share for the year, subject to shareholder approval. Around the AGM, the company also announces a book closure date — the specific date used to determine exactly which shareholders on record are entitled to receive the dividend or bonus. If you are not a shareholder of record as of that date, you do not receive that year's dividend, even if you buy the shares the very next day.

For a dividend-income investor following the approach built in Chapter 68, this AGM and dividend calendar is arguably the single most valuable piece of the whole tracking system, because dividend income strategy lives or dies on knowing exactly when payments are proposed, approved, and distributed — and on catching any year where a company quietly cuts its dividend, which is itself an important re-scoring signal.

Portfolio review triggers. Not every review should be calendar-based. Some should be triggered by events. A sensible investor sets rules in advance for what counts as a trigger, so that reviewing a holding is a disciplined response to a defined event, not an emotional reaction to a red number on a screen. Reasonable triggers include:

• A price move of a defined size in either direction (for example, a stock moving more than 15 to 20 percent from your last review point) — a trigger to re-check the fundamentals, not an automatic instruction to sell.
• A company disclosure that touches something material — a change in senior management, a regulatory action from NRB or SEBON, a related-party transaction, a change in dividend policy.
• A macro event relevant to the sector — a change in NRB's monetary policy affecting bank liquidity, a change in hydropower tariff rates, a shift in remittance inflow trends that affects banking sector deposits.
• The scheduled re-scoring and AGM dates already discussed.

The purpose of writing these triggers down in advance is to remove your future emotional state from the decision of whether a review is warranted. Markets move investors' feelings around constantly; a predefined trigger list keeps you reviewing for the right reasons.

Lesson 70.4 — Choosing the Right Tools: Spreadsheets and Beyond

None of this requires expensive software. For the overwhelming majority of Nepali retail investors, a spreadsheet — whether a free tool like Google Sheets or a copy of Microsoft Excel — is entirely sufficient to run the whole system described in this chapter. The strategies in this book do not depend on speed. They depend on discipline, and a spreadsheet is more than fast enough to support discipline.

A practical setup uses a small number of tabs inside one workbook:

• Watchlist tab. Every company you are seriously considering, with your latest Canon Score, target entry conditions, and the date you last reviewed it.
• Portfolio tab. Every company you actually hold, with quantity, average cost, current Canon Score, and links or notes pointing to that company's research file.
• Calendar tab. A simple running list of upcoming dates — re-scoring dates, AGM dates, book closure dates — sorted chronologically, so that opening this one tab tells you everything coming up in the next month.
• Research journal tab. Covered in the next lesson — a chronological log of decisions and reasoning, separate from the company-by-company research files.

There is a point at which more sophisticated tools genuinely help — but it is a later point than most beginning investors assume. Paid analytics products, such as the more advanced screening and charting tools offered by some of the financial portals mentioned earlier, can be useful once you are actively comparing many companies across a sector and want faster filtering than manually scanning annual reports allows. Dedicated portfolio-tracking apps can be convenient if you hold a genuinely large number of positions and want automatic price updates rather than manual entry. None of this is necessary to start, and none of it replaces the actual thinking — the re-scoring, the reading of disclosures, the honest journal entry — that a tool cannot do for you.

The right test for any tool is simple: does it make it easier for you to do the actual work — finding real data, recording it accurately, and reviewing it on schedule — or does it just make the process feel more sophisticated? A well-organised free spreadsheet that you actually update every week beats an expensive tool that you open once a month.

Lesson 70.5 — Keeping an Investment Research Journal

Chapter 53 introduced the investment journal as an exercise — a habit of writing down your reasoning at the moment you make a decision, before you know the outcome. This chapter's tracking system is where that habit becomes permanent infrastructure rather than a one-time exercise.

It helps to be precise about the difference between the research file from Lesson 70.2 and the research journal. The research file is about the company — its facts, its history, its numbers, updated and overwritten as new information arrives. The journal is about you — a chronological, append-only record of the decisions you made and the reasoning behind them at the time, never edited afterward. The research file answers "what do we currently know about this company?" The journal answers "what did I think, and why, on the day I acted?"

This distinction matters because of a very ordinary and very powerful trap called hindsight bias — the tendency, once you know how something turned out, to unconsciously believe you always knew it would turn out that way. If Aamod's bank stock from the opening of this chapter had gone up 40 percent, his memory would likely tell him he had been confident and well-researched. If it had fallen 40 percent, his memory would likely tell him he had always had a bad feeling about it. Neither memory would be reliable, because memory reconstructs itself around outcomes. A journal entry written before the outcome was known is the only honest record of what you actually thought at the time.

A useful journal entry, whether for a buy, a sell, or a decision to hold through a stressful period, should record:

• The date and the action — what you bought, sold, or decided not to touch, and at what price.
• Your reasoning at the time — in your own words, why. Not a polished essay — a few honest sentences. What did the Canon Score say? What did the research file show? What specifically convinced you?
• Your conviction level — how confident were you, on a simple scale, and what would it take to change your mind?
• What you expect to happen, and by when — a genuine forecast, not vague hope. This is the part that lets future-you check whether past-you's reasoning process was actually sound, independent of whether the price happened to move favourably.
• What would make you sell, or change the score — writing this down before you are emotionally invested in the outcome makes it far easier to act on later, when fear or excitement might otherwise cloud judgment.

The discipline of the journal is precisely that it is not edited after the fact. You do not go back and tidy up an old entry to make it sound smarter once you know the ending. If your reasoning turns out to have been wrong, the honest response is a new entry, dated today, noting what you got wrong and why — not a quiet revision of the old one. Over years, this journal becomes the single most valuable document an investor owns, because it is the only record of your actual decision-making process, unpolluted by hindsight. It is where you will find your own recurring mistakes — a pattern of buying too early into hype, perhaps, or selling too fast on bad news — patterns that are completely invisible if all you have is a memory that keeps rewriting itself to make past-you look better or worse than they actually were.

Lesson 70.6 — Putting It All Together: A Complete Personal System Walkthrough

It helps to see the whole system running together, the way Sunita actually runs hers, rather than as a list of separate pieces.

Weekly (roughly fifteen minutes). Sunita opens NEPSE's own site to check closing prices for her holdings and watchlist companies, and skims Merolagani's or ShareSansar's announcement list for anything material she should know about. She glances at her spreadsheet's calendar tab to see if anything is coming up in the next seven days — a re-scoring date, an AGM, a book closure. If a portfolio review trigger has been hit — a price move past her threshold, a disclosure worth reading in full — she notes it and schedules time to look properly, rather than reacting on the spot.

Monthly (roughly an hour). She reviews her full watchlist and portfolio tabs together, checking that every company's information is current. She logs into meroshare to reconcile her actual holdings against what her spreadsheet says she owns, catching any bonus shares or corporate actions she might have missed. She reads through her research journal entries from the past month and asks, honestly, whether her reasoning at the time still looks sound with a month's more information — not whether the price moved favourably.

Quarterly (a longer, deliberate session). As each company's quarterly results are published, she pulls the new financial figures into the relevant research file, updates the Canon Score, and writes a fresh journal entry if anything material has changed in her thinking. This is also when she checks whether any company's slow, quiet trend — like that gradually rising non-performing loan ratio — has continued or reversed.

Around AGM season (event-driven, roughly Poush through Falgun for many of her holdings). She reads each company's AGM notice as soon as it is published, records the proposed dividend and bonus figures in her dividend-history record, and marks the book closure date immediately, well ahead of time, so she never risks missing a dividend by trading too close to the deadline. After each AGM, she updates the full annual research file with the year's complete financial statements from the annual report.

Annually. She steps back and looks at her whole system rather than any single company — has her Canon Score history for each holding trended up or down over the year? Has any sector she is overweight in, per the sector rotation thinking from Chapter 69, shifted in a way her file didn't yet reflect? Has her journal revealed a recurring behavioural pattern worth correcting?

None of this is complicated, and none of it takes more than a few focused hours a month once it is set up. What makes it powerful is not any single piece — it is that the pieces reinforce each other. The research file gives the Canon Score something real to stand on. The tracking calendar makes sure the score actually gets refreshed instead of going stale. The journal makes sure that when you look back, you are learning from what you actually thought, not from a story your memory invented afterward. Put together, this is the infrastructure that turns any of the strategies from Chapters 67 through 69 from a good idea on paper into something you can actually execute, quarter after quarter, year after year, without depending on luck, memory, or the mood of the tea shop.