Your Fund Factsheet Says -30%. Your Own Return Could Be -8%. Here's Why.
6 min read
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6 min read
Open a mutual fund's factsheet and it reports one return for the whole fund, the same number for every investor who ever held it. Open your own portfolio tracker and the return it shows you is a different calculation entirely, one that depends on exactly when you put money in. Both numbers can be correct at the same time. IHSG's 2026 crash and partial recovery make the gap between them unusually large, and unusually easy to see.
A previous piece on this site covers the first layer of this confusion: a broker's simple percentage ignores when you deposited money, and XIRR does not. This is the layer underneath that one. XIRR itself is what is called a money-weighted return: it answers "given exactly my deposits, on exactly my dates, what constant annual rate explains my ending balance?" It is inherently personal. Two investors in the identical fund can post very different XIRR figures if they added money at different times.
Time-weighted return answers a different question: "how did this fund's assets actually perform, independent of who was invested and when?" It is what a factsheet reports and what a fund manager is judged on, because it is built to strip out the effect of investor cash flows entirely. If every investor who ever held a fund had contributed the same amount on the same day, time-weighted and money-weighted returns would be identical. In practice they almost never are, because real investors add and withdraw money on their own schedule, not the fund's.
IHSG closed at a record 9,133.87 on 19 January 2026, its all-time high. Nine days later, on 28 January, it fell 7.34% in a single session, its worst one-day drop in roughly two and a half decades, after MSCI announced a temporary freeze on the valuation process for Indonesian stocks over share-ownership transparency concerns. The decline continued through the first half of the year: by 30 June 2026 IHSG had closed at 5,643.19, down almost 35% since the start of the year. July brought a real recovery, up 10.28% for the month, and by 7 August 2026, the most recent close before this piece was written, the index stood at 6,409.65, still about 30% below January's peak.
That full round trip, record high to crash to partial recovery, inside a single year, is exactly the kind of stretch that makes the gap between time-weighted and money-weighted returns visible rather than theoretical.
Say two people each put Rp 100,000,000 into an IHSG index fund over this period. To keep the arithmetic simple, treat the fund as tracking the index one-to-one, ignoring fees and tracking difference, and use Rp as if it bought index "units" directly.
Investor A put the full amount in on 19 January 2026, at the peak of 9,133.87, and never added or withdrew anything. By 7 August 2026, at 6,409.65, that position was worth roughly Rp 70,175,000, a loss of about 29.8%.
Investor B put in the same total, but split it: half on 19 January at the same peak, and half on 30 June at 5,643.19, well into the crash. By 7 August, that position was worth roughly Rp 91,880,000, a loss of about 8.1%.
| Deposit 1 | Deposit 2 | Value, 7 Aug 2026 | Return | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Investor A | Rp 100,000,000 on 19 Jan (index 9,133.87) | none | ≈ Rp 70,175,000 | ≈ -29.8% |
| Investor B | Rp 50,000,000 on 19 Jan (index 9,133.87) | Rp 50,000,000 on 30 Jun (index 5,643.19) | ≈ Rp 91,880,000 | ≈ -8.1% |
The fund itself has exactly one time-weighted return for this stretch: about -29.8%, the index's own move from 9,133.87 to 6,409.65. That is the number that would appear on the fund's own performance report, unaffected by either investor's decisions. Investor A's money-weighted return happens to match it exactly, because a single lump sum with no other cash flow means money-weighted and time-weighted collapse to the same figure. Investor B's money-weighted return is nowhere close, because half of her money never experienced the January peak at all.
Depends what you are trying to answer. Judging whether a fund or a manager is worth holding, independent of your own contribution timing, is a time-weighted question: that is why factsheets and fund comparisons use it, and why comparing a fund's official return to a benchmark's official return is a fair like-for-like check. Judging how your own money actually did, given the decisions you actually made about when to add or pull cash, is a money-weighted question, which is what XIRR and NetWort's IRR answer.
Confusing the two produces a specific, avoidable mistake: reading a fund's advertised -29.8% and assuming your own account should show the same thing, then treating any difference as a tracking problem or an error. It usually is not. It is the same fund answering two different questions for two different audiences.
NetWort computes IRR from your actual transaction history, which makes it money-weighted by construction: it already has every deposit and its date, so it is built to answer the personal question, not the fund-level one. That is also why comparing your IRR against an index's own published return needs a like-for-like check first, covered in is your return actually good?. And if the gap between your number and a fund's headline figure looks unusually wide, deposits are not gains covers the other common way cash-flow timing distorts how a portfolio's performance reads.