Every term is defined twice: once the way a filing would put it, and once the way somebody would explain it to you across a table. The second one is usually the one that sticks.
Showing 51 terms
An account number identifying your holding with a particular mutual fund house.
One person can accumulate a dozen folios across fund houses and distributors. Consolidating them is how forgotten investments get found.
The outright sale of a loan portfolio to a buyer — often a bank meeting its priority sector obligations — with the seller retaining a prescribed minimum share of every loan and continuing to service them.
Where the transfer qualifies, the loans leave the balance sheet and the future spread is recognised now. The borrower never notices: the same branch, the same collections, a different owner of the interest.
Securities received after the death of the holder and transmitted to a nominee or legal heir.
Take three to six months — there is rarely urgency and decisions made during grief are poor. The cost basis generally carries over, so a decades-old holding can carry a very large embedded gain.
The rate at which holdings are replaced over a period.
High churn is the visible symptom of boredom. Across every market studied, the most active accounts underperform the least active.
Total capital at risk across all open positions if every stop is hit.
The number that actually binds, not the 1% you set per trade.
The headline figure of the fund liquidity stress test — the days needed to sell 25% and then 50% of the portfolio, computed pro-rata against trailing traded volumes.
Driven mostly by fund size measured against the volumes of what it owns, so the numbers cluster by size rather than by skill. The least liquid fifth of the portfolio is excluded before the figure is calculated, which is the single most important thing to know about it.
Running several strategies with separate records and a single combined risk budget.
Two or three is the practical limit. Beyond that you are managing systems rather than trading them.
The extent to which two funds hold the same securities.
Four funds with the same top ten is one portfolio and four expense ratios.
How much of a fund’s portfolio was bought and sold during the year.
A cost paid from the fund’s assets before the NAV you see. 200% means the whole portfolio changed twice.
A side pocket created on a credit event, carving the affected security into separate units issued to everyone holding on that day.
It exists so that whoever redeems first cannot exit at a NAV still valuing a bond nobody can sell, leaving the loss with whoever stayed. Any later recovery is paid to the segregated units.
The registration number identifying a mutual fund distributor, recorded against the folio it sold.
Striking it off stops that distributor being credited and redirects fresh money, but it does not move units you already hold out of the regular plan.
The split of a portfolio across asset classes such as equity, debt, gold and cash.
Matters more than which stocks you pick. It determines how much a crash actually costs you.
The index or standard against which portfolio performance is measured.
Only meaningful if it reflects what you would otherwise have done. Use total return versions.
Holding a large share of a portfolio in few positions or one theme.
It raises both the best and worst outcomes. Size it so several going wrong at once is survivable.
Holding most of a portfolio in broad index funds with a smaller actively chosen portion.
Lets you find out whether you can pick stocks without your outcome depending on it.
The risk that a borrower in a portfolio fails to pay.
Sudden and usually permanent. This is the risk that has caused real Indian debt fund accidents.
The bank account details held for you — by your depository participant for demat holdings, or on the folio at the registrar — into which dividends and redemptions are credited.
It does not follow you when you change banks, and it lives in a different place for every folio. A dividend that fails to arrive is usually this record rather than the company.
The decline from a portfolio’s peak value to its subsequent trough.
Know your system’s worst historical drawdown before trading it, because you will live through it.
How large a fall in portfolio value can be absorbed without forcing a sale or altering your plans.
Equity does not become riskier as you age; this falls. The same 40% fall is a few months of saving at 25 and a permanent reduction in what can be spent at 58.
A bond portfolio’s sensitivity to changes in interest rates.
Longer duration means bigger swings — but those losses reverse with time, unlike credit losses.
A schedule, set in advance, for reducing the equity share of a portfolio as a goal date approaches.
It lowers the expected amount and narrows the range of amounts. Written down years ahead it is a rule; decided in the moment it is a market call.
The value of your remaining lifetime earnings, counted as an asset alongside the portfolio.
At 25 it is by far the largest holding and it is largely uncorrelated with the market, which is the real reason a young person can carry a high equity share. By 55 the ratio has inverted.
A monthly disclosure by small cap and mid cap funds, in a format standardised by AMFI, showing how long the portfolio would take to liquidate alongside concentration, valuation and composition data.
Read it as an evacuation plan rather than a weather forecast. It does not say a fire is coming; it says how long the building takes to empty, which is a fact about the building and was measurable the whole time.
A pooled vehicle that collects money from many investors and buys a portfolio of securities on their behalf, priced daily at NAV.
Its expense ratio is charged annually on your whole balance whether the fund wins or loses — the one completely certain variable in investing.
Portfolio Management Service — discretionary management of a portfolio held in your own name.
A full fee structure needs roughly three to four points of annual outperformance just to match an index fund.
Restoring a portfolio to target weights on a schedule.
Sells strength and buys weakness automatically, without requiring you to predict anything.
The firm a company appoints to maintain its register of members and to process folio-level requests — dividends, transmission, dematerialisation and corporate action entitlements.
For anything held in physical form this is your counterparty, not your broker. A handful of these firms maintain the registers of most listed Indian companies.
A fixed schedule for looking at a portfolio.
Read the written plan first, then the portfolio. The other order means the plan stops being a check.
Allocating so that each holding contributes equally to portfolio risk.
Equal rupees is measuring by spoons. This measures the heat.
The share of a portfolio's total open risk concentrated in a single sector.
Four banks and two NBFCs are not six positions. They are one bet on Indian credit conditions, and a single RBI decision stops all of them out in the same session.
A mechanism that adjusts the price at which units are transacted during heavy flows, so that the cost of trading the portfolio falls on the investors causing it rather than on those who stay.
Not available to an Indian equity scheme meeting redemptions. Its absence is why a manager under liquidity pressure reaches instead for the blunter tool of limiting the money coming in.
How much a portfolio’s returns deviate from its benchmark.
A concentrated portfolio will deviate a lot in both directions. That is the point, and the cost.
Closing a mutual fund scheme: redemptions stop and the portfolio is sold down, with cash returned in instalments as it is realised.
Not the same as the money being lost. In a liquidity failure the bonds are sound and cannot be sold this week; in a credit failure the borrower cannot pay at all. On the day, both look like a blocked redemption.
The return a bond portfolio would deliver if every holding were held to maturity.
A noticeably higher YTM means weaker credit, not a better manager.
A single statement covering mutual fund and demat holdings across providers.
The most useful document most Indian investors have never opened. It finds the folios you forgot.
Consumer price inflation, published monthly; the RBI targets 4% with a 2–6% band.
Above the band the RBI raises rates, and that is the channel that reaches your portfolio. Consumer companies take a second hit through input costs they cannot always pass on.
A mutual fund version with no distributor commission built into the expense ratio.
Same fund, same manager, same portfolio — typically 0.5–1% cheaper every single year.
The order under which the central government controls medicine prices in India, fixing ceiling prices for formulations in the National List of Essential Medicines and capping the annual increase on non-scheduled ones at 10%.
It is why the essential half of an Indian pharmaceutical portfolio behaves nothing like the rest, and why revising the essential medicines list moves products into and out of control without the company doing anything at all. Extraordinary powers to fix prices exist and have been used at short notice.
Money decisions that involve relatives as well as markets.
Tips, portfolio requests and loan requests are three different problems arriving as one conversation.
The sequence of clearing costly debt, building a buffer and insuring before investing.
The foundation under the portfolio. Skip it and the first emergency dismantles what you built.
The tendency to hold far more of your own country's equity than its share of global market value would justify.
Partly rational, since you earn and spend in rupees. The problem is that a wholly domestic portfolio stacks your job, your property and your savings on one economy, one currency and one regulatory regime.
The self-image an investor brings to decisions, often formed long before any analysis.
Every portfolio contains beliefs about money learned before anyone was analysing anything. Naming them is what stops them deciding for you.
Offering shares you own as collateral to receive trading margin against them.
Borrowing against your portfolio. You keep the shares; the broker gets a claim on them.
A periodic check of whether your approach is actually working, measured against a broad index over a sample long enough to mean something.
The failure is not underperforming; it is continuing for years without ever measuring. Ten hours a week for 1% of outperformance on a small portfolio is a poor hourly rate.
Checking statements against a single list of what you believe you own.
One afternoon a year. It reliably catches Regular-plan folios and untransferred EPF.
The benchmark against which a gain or loss is subjectively judged.
Change what you compare against and the same portfolio feels like success or failure. Choose it deliberately.
The version of a mutual fund scheme whose expense ratio includes a commission paid to the distributor who sold it.
Same scheme, same manager, same portfolio as the direct plan, typically 0.5–1% dearer every year. The extra is charged whether or not any advice is ever given.
Sustained shortage of sleep, which measurably reduces impulse control and degrades the evaluation of risk.
It shows up as the trade you would otherwise have skipped and the stop you abandon. Checking a portfolio last thing at night pairs the worst state with the worst available actions.
Risk from the whole market that diversification cannot remove.
Beta measures your exposure to it. A high-beta portfolio carries it without borrowing.
Changing the order in which joint holders’ names are recorded against a holding, without changing who the holders are.
One of the few things still done on a physical folio, and a routine reason a dematerialisation request is rejected when the demat account lists the same two names the other way round.
A loan the lender has removed from its own books as unrecoverable — an accounting decision, not a release of the borrower.
The debt survives it, the lender may still pursue it, and such portfolios are routinely sold on. Which is why a demand arrives years later from a firm you have never dealt with.