Learn Lesson 6 of 6 6 minutes
What can your own statement say that a fund page cannot?
A fund's return is a property of the fund. Your return is a property of the fund and of every date on which you bought, sold, paused or waited. The two are rarely the same number, and the difference is usually the larger story.
Built on The CAS X-ray — behaviour gap, cash drag, the Direct-plan leak.
Every lesson before this one has been about a fund: what it costs, what its record decomposes into, whether anything about it forecasts, what its disclosures hide, whose work its numbers are. None of them can tell you the one thing you actually want to know, which is what happened to your money.
Only a statement can. A consolidated account statement lists every purchase, every redemption, every switch and every instalment across every fund house, with dates. That turns a set of fund records into a record of decisions — and decisions, unlike funds, can be measured against the alternative of having done nothing.
Why the interesting numbers are about timing, not choosing
Start from the finding in lesson three. Over ten years, 646 funds and 33,299 observations, nothing we can measure separated the funds that went on to beat their peers from the ones that did not; the best ranking in the sample delivered a median of about half a percentage point a year over the median fund, with a one-in-ten chance of trailing it by more than ten.
If selection is worth roughly nothing on average, then the differences between two households holding similar funds have to come from somewhere else. They come from when and from how much: money that sat in a bank account for eight months before being deployed, an instalment paused in the worst quarter and never restarted, a fund sold in a drawdown and bought back higher, a winner trimmed early and a loser held for years. None of that is visible on a fund page. All of it is on a statement, with dates.
And the one leak that is pure arithmetic
Measured across every equity fund in this build with both plans
1.35% points a yearthe middle fund's Regular-plan mark-up over its own Direct twin, across 606 funds — with the middle half running from 1.03 to 1.64
This is the number from lesson one, applied to the whole shelf rather than one fund. A statement says which of your folios are in a Regular plan and since when, which turns a shelf-wide figure into an arithmetic question about your own units.
Computed from the measured divergence of each fund's two NAV series. Our study found the same thing across the industry: a median of 1.21% points a year over 33,028 fund-dates.
What the X-ray measures
Upload a statement to the CAS reader and it works out, from your own dates and amounts:
- The behaviour gap — your money-weighted return against the same funds' own time-weighted returns. The distance between them is what the timing of every contribution and withdrawal cost or earned.
- Cash drag — money that arrived and waited, priced against the market over the exact days it sat.
- Panic exits — redemptions that landed inside a drawdown, and what the units would have been worth had they stayed.
- The Direct-plan leak — the figure above, run folio by folio against your own holding periods rather than as an average.
- Look-through overlap — how much of one fund you already own inside another, which is the commonest way a portfolio of eight funds turns out to be a portfolio of three.
Every one of those is a counterfactual on a finished period: what did happen, against what would have happened had a date been different. That is a description, which is why it can be computed and shown at all. None of it is a recommendation, and none of it says what to do next.
What happens to the file
The statement is parsed in memory and is not stored — not by Anveshan and not by the API behind it. The findings come back, and nothing persists beyond that response. The fuller analysis, and any keeping of it, belongs to Wealth Governance, which is a different application with its own terms and its own multi-factor sign-in, and which you reach by choosing to.
When you want it: Read your CAS · back to the lessons
The argument against this lesson
An X-ray of a finished decade is a post-mortem, and post-mortems flatter the reader who reads them. It is easy to look at a paused instalment from 2020 and call it a mistake; it was not obviously a mistake at the time, and the same caution that cost money in one drawdown protected it in another that never came. The counterfactual — "had you simply held" — is the one path out of thousands that we can price, and pricing it is not the same as proving it was available to anybody in the moment. The behaviour gap is also a description of a period that is over: it tells nobody what to do with the next one, it is not advice, and neither Anveshan nor Lineage Money is a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst.
Everything above is a description of what has already happened, measured from what fund houses, AMFI and the exchanges publish. It is not advice, not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything, and not a forecast — neither Anveshan nor Lineage Money is a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst.