six funds, three apps, one portfolio you have never seen in one place

A friend told me last week he was well diversified. Six funds, three different apps, everything green. I asked him to do one thing before he bought a seventh. Pull his CAS.

He had never heard of it. That is the part that gets me every time, because the Consolidated Account Statement is free, it is mandated, and it shows every mutual fund folio sitting on your PAN in one place. The reason nobody pulls it is that no single app wants to. Each platform shows you its own slice and its own green number. The CAS shows you the whole book, and the whole book usually tells a different story.

His did. Start with the overlap. Six funds, but once you lined up the holdings, about 62% of the money sat in the same twelve stocks. The big private banks, the same two energy names, the usual index heavyweights. Six funds, one bet, five extra labels.

Then the cost. None of his apps printed a rupee figure anywhere. His blended expense ratio was around 1.6%, which on a Rs 8L book is roughly Rs 12800 a year. Six expense ratios stacked on what was really one portfolio. Put a number on a drag and it stops being abstract.

Last one surprised him most. He called himself fully aggressive, all equity. Two of the six were hybrid funds he had forgotten were hybrid, and between them they were parking about Rs 72000 in debt. His real mix was not the one in his head.

Nothing here was hidden. It was all on one statement he could have pulled any morning, for free, in twenty minutes. The cheapest research you will do all year is reading the book you already own.

If you want to see your whole book against a systematic alternative on one page, that is what we built at