# Home Bias

_Systematic Investing . 2026-07-18 . By Tanmay Kurtkoti. Educational, illustrative, not advice._

Friend showed me his portfolio yesterday. Eight funds. Large cap, mid cap, small cap, a little gold on the side. He was proud of it, and rightly.

So I asked how many countries were in it.

Long pause. One. Every rupee he owns is a bet on the same economy that pays his salary, prices his house and signs his bonus cheque.

That is home bias, and every textbook has the same fix. Own some of the rest of the world. Here is what the textbooks skip: in India that counter is rationed.

Of the 66 international funds on the shelf, 54 will not accept fresh money today. Twelve still take a SIP. One takes a lump sum. Not one of those closures is a verdict on the fund behind it.

The reason is a ceiling. Indian mutual funds may hold 7 billion dollars in foreign securities between all of them, plus 1 billion for overseas ETFs. Those numbers were set in 2008 and have not moved since. The industry crossed the line in January 2022 and every house has been frozen at whatever room it held that February. A fund reopens only when its own investors leave, or when global markets fall far enough to shrink what it holds.

So the doors still open ration you. Several cap a fresh SIP at Rs 5,000 a month. A 10 percent sleeve on a 50 lakh book works out to 100 months of that. Eight years to place one fifth of a decision.

Honest version: I am not telling you to fix this, because mostly you cannot. And home bias is not automatically a mistake. Your rent and your liabilities are in rupees. There is a real case for owning rupee assets.

But there is a difference between a concentration you chose and one you found out about. Diversification is not how many funds you own. It is how many different ways you are allowed to be wrong. On most Indian portfolios, mine included, that number is smaller than the app makes it look