Indian stocks fell on Thursday, snapping a two-day climb, as investors booked profits and braced for Sunday’s federal budget. By 10:08 a.m. IST, the Nifty 50 was down 0.61% at 25,183.75 and the Sensex had dropped 0.71% to 81,763.07. Foreign portfolio investors have sold $4.56 billion of Indian equities in January so far, after a record $19 billion outflow in 2025. The selloff matters now because the budget is the next big domestic trigger for growth expectations and corporate earnings, and it lands after a rally driven by trade-deal optimism. Dr. VK Vijayakumar, chief investment strategist at Geojit Investments, said there was “no change in the short to medium-term strategy of FIIs, which is ‘sell India’,” referring to foreign institutional investors, a term widely used in India for overseas portfolio money.