NSDL CAS Statement Gets Better!

I believe in tracking my networth closely as I march along towards retirement.  In the past, I have always had to use a spreadsheet based method to keep track.  Others have used online apps and financial service providers.  Typically I only need to track the total networth, on maybe a quarterly basis (4 times a year is more that enough!), and I would like to put in minimal effort into this activity. The NSDL CAS statement is an excellent resource that does all of the hard work for me! I had written about this in the link above in early 2015, but since then the format of the NSDL CAS statement has changed in one significant aspect.  They have now started tracking and reporting the monthly trend of your total investments, so in one snapshot you can see the overall performance of your portfolio (with absolutely no effort required on your part!)

Before we look into the tracking bit however, I must remind that NSDL CAS only represents your financial networth.  If you have stashed away your fortune into other avenues like real estate, physical gold/jewelry, art etc, you will obviously not be able to track it here.  Another key gap I notice is that PPF/EPF contributions are not covered/linked into the NSDL CAS (not sure why that is, since with the PAN number it should be straight forward to do that.  Also bank accounts do not seem to get listed, which is a minor issue for me, since i don't keep much money in SB accounts.  Typically most of my cash is in a growth debt short term liquid fund, which is tracked in NSDL CAS since it reports all investments in MF folios.  If you hold significant assets in FDs or RDs then they will not be covered in NSDL CAS (of course I do not recommend this strategy, but that is a whole other story)

So lets get back to the tracking bit.

The NSDL CAS statement now provides a graph and a table showing your total financial assets for every month for the last 12 months.  So in effect, it helps to track the change in your networth month to month for the last 1 year.  I find this feature VERY useful, since it gives me a good idea of how my networth is performing relative to my goals.

My table for the last 12 months looks like this:

The wild swings in  networth are simply a reflection of the fact that my overall financial portfolio is heavily tilted towards equity.  As a result my networth typically fluctuates in line with the performance of the SENSEX/NIFTY.  Since my EPF/PPF is not included in this table, in reality the variation will be a little less that what is shown here.  I have talked in detail about the volatility in my investment strategy in this post Stomach Churning Volatility.  The NSDL statement also provides a histogram depicting the graphical representation of the same data (in case you prefer graphs over tables)

For comparison I have reproduced the same table below, but this time alongwith the % change in the NIFTY and SENSEX indices.

The first thing you notice in the table is that my %NETWORTH change closely tracks the performance of the NIFTY/SENSEX.  In few months I seem to do better than the index, but that needs to be taken with a grain of salt!  Firstly since EPF/PPF is not included, my %NETWORTH change is probably a little less than what is listed here (particularly in the good months) Also remember that I am constantly adding to my NETWORTH through additional investments per month, so this comparison is not really apples to apples.  Having said that, at this time, my monthly investments are much smaller than my total networth. Finally, I need to take into account that I have not used the total returns index here for comparison, which makes my %NETWORTH numbers look better in comparison to %NIFTY or %SENSEX.  Bottomline, I seem to be simply keeping up with the market index as far as total networth performance goes!  Not too good or not too bad, depending on how you want to look at it!  How are you faring by the same metric?  Do you want to share your NSDL % performance table?