Your Portfolio Balance Is Up 96%. You Actually Lost 18%. Here's How Both Are True.
5 min read
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5 min read
Open your portfolio app and the balance is bigger than it was in January. That feels like good news. Sometimes it is not news about your investments at all. It is news about your bank transfers.
Every rupiah you deposit sits in the same account as every rupiah your holdings actually earned. Unless something separates the two, a growing balance and a growing gain look identical, and they are not.
There are two different questions a portfolio app can answer, and most only answer one:
(Current balance − Starting balance) ÷ Starting balance
This treats every deposit as if it appeared out of thin air as profit. It did not. It appeared out of your paycheck.
(Current value − Total invested) ÷ Total invested
This is cost-basis return: it nets out everything you put in, on top of what you started with, and only counts what is left as gain or loss. It is a stricter question, and in a falling market it gives a very different answer.
Say you start 2026 with Rp 50,000,000 in an IHSG-tracking index fund, then add another Rp 10,000,000 every month from January through July.
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Starting balance (Jan 2) | Rp 50,000,000 |
| Deposits, 7 months × Rp 10,000,000 | Rp 70,000,000 |
| Total invested | Rp 120,000,000 |
| Balance in early August | Rp 98,000,000 |
Your balance grew from Rp 50,000,000 to Rp 98,000,000. Read the naive way, that is +96%. It looks like a very good year.
Now read it the other way. You put in Rp 120,000,000 in total. It is worth Rp 98,000,000. That is a loss of Rp 22,000,000, or −18.3% on invested capital. The balance grew because you kept feeding it money faster than the market was taking it away, not because the investment performed.
Both numbers are true at the same time. Only one of them describes what your money did.
This is not a hypothetical stress case. IHSG (the Jakarta Composite Index) closed 2025 at 8,646.93, its 24th all-time high of the year. By August 4, 2026 it had fallen to 6,319.12, a year-to-date decline of roughly 27%. An investor who kept dollar-cost-averaging into an IHSG-tracking fund through that stretch would see exactly the pattern above: a balance still climbing from fresh deposits, sitting on top of a real loss on every rupiah invested earlier in the year.
Dollar-cost averaging into a falling market is not a mistake by itself, buying more units at lower prices is the whole point of the strategy. The mistake is reading the rising balance as proof it is working before the market has actually turned.
This is exactly the split NetWort's Gain Insights page runs on your real transaction history, not a spreadsheet exercise. The hero card shows three numbers side by side: Invested capital (everything you put in, at cost), Gain (current value minus that invested capital), and Now worth (the balance you would actually see). The gain figure is never the naive balance-growth number. It is computed the cost-basis way, the same arithmetic as the worked example above, applied automatically to every deposit on the date it happened.
If you have been dollar-cost-averaging through a rough patch, that is the number worth checking before you draw any conclusion about how the year has gone.
This is the same distinction XIRR draws from simple return: a number that accounts for when and how much you put in beats a number that only looks at the two endpoints. It also compounds with why an unrealized gain isn't real money yet: a positive gap on paper still has to survive contact with a sale before it is yours, and a negative one, like the example above, is a real loss whether or not you have "locked it in" by selling.