How to track mutual funds and stocks together
It is twenty to nine on a Sunday evening in Pune. Meera has her broker app open on her phone. Arun has two mutual-fund statements on the laptop. Their four-year-old has finally stopped asking for water. The question sounds small: how much money do we actually have invested? Every screen in the room gives a slightly different answer. The answers do not add up. What follows is their evening. What fixed it was not a smarter app or a bigger spreadsheet. It was one simple habit: describe every holding the same way, so the numbers can finally be added together.
11 min read · Reviewed 2026-08-17
The Sunday three screens disagreed
Meera’s broker app showed ₹4,12,000 across nine shares and one exchange-traded fund. An ETF is a fund that trades on the stock exchange like a share does. Arun’s fund-house app showed ₹6,80,000 across four schemes. A third app, installed during a rushed tax season two years earlier and never opened since, showed ₹11,40,000. It had not refreshed a single price in months. None of the three screens was wrong about the holdings it knew. Each one was simply blind to everything else the household owned.
That gap has a real cost. It is not only messy. When Arun said, “we are roughly sixty-forty, equity to debt,” he was describing whichever screen he happened to be holding. His wife’s nine shares were not in that sentence at all. The couple were not short of data. They were short of one place where the data agreed on a single date, a single currency, and a single definition of what counts.
So they stopped trying to match the screens. They started again from a blank page, one line per holding, in the order they remembered buying them.
Give every holding the same two numbers
The method is plain. For each holding, write down the quantity or number of units, the average purchase cost, and the latest available price or NAV. NAV, net asset value, is simply the per-unit price of a mutual fund on a given day. It is the fund equivalent of a share price. From those three inputs, two numbers come out for every asset you own, whether it is a small-cap scheme, a gold fund, or one share of a cement company.
Invested value is what you put in. Current value is what the holding is worth now. Every asset class can produce both. That is why they can share one summary line. A mutual fund and a listed share become directly comparable the moment they are both shown as rupees on the same day. You do not need anything more complex than that to build a household total.
- Invested value shows what you have actually committed so far
- Current value shows what the holding would be worth on today’s prices
- Gain or loss is the gap between those two numbers, in rupees before costs and taxes
- Use the same valuation date for every line, or the total will be wrong
Meera and Arun’s first honest total
Written out line by line, the couple’s real invested total came to ₹10,92,000. That was ₹4,12,000 in the shares and exchange-traded fund, and ₹6,80,000 across the four schemes. The third app’s ₹11,40,000 turned out to be a stale copy of holdings they had already counted once. That is how a household can believe it owns twice what it owns. Rounded rupee values, one valuation date, and no exit loads, brokerage or taxes considered.
The number itself was not a surprise. What changed was the conversation. When the same ₹10,92,000 was grouped by what the holdings actually own, rather than which app they lived in, roughly ₹7,80,000 sat in equity and about ₹3,12,000 in debt-style assets. That is closer to seventy-thirty than the sixty-forty Arun had been repeating for a year. Nobody had made a bad decision. They had just never seen the two halves in the same place.
The overlap nobody had noticed
Two of Arun’s four schemes were large-cap funds, which invest mainly in India’s biggest listed companies. Four of Meera’s nine shares were exactly those kinds of companies, the names everyone recognises. Owning both is not a mistake. Plenty of households do it on purpose. But it meant their exposure to a small handful of very large businesses was more concentrated than either screen showed. Neither of them knew it.
A combined view will not open up every scheme and list all of its underlying companies for you. It does something simpler, and still useful. It makes the first layer visible: direct equity, equity funds, debt funds, gold, cash-like holdings, and anything that does not fit neatly. That first layer is where the better questions start. Most households have never seen theirs.
Three small errors that made the total wrong
Their first attempt was off by about ₹90,000. The reasons were ordinary, and worth naming. None of them involved market movement. All three were bookkeeping.
Once those were fixed, the total stopped changing every time they rebuilt it. That is the real test of whether a portfolio view is trustworthy.
- A closed scheme still sitting in the list, redeemed eighteen months earlier and never removed
- The same holding entered twice because it appeared in both a broker statement and an old tracker
- Units recorded from a statement but the average cost left blank, so gain looked far larger than it was
- A dividend-payout scheme treated as if it had reinvested, inflating the unit balance
A monthly routine works better than one long Sunday
The rule they settled on was simple, because simple rules survive busy weeks. Transactions get recorded when they happen. Prices and NAVs get refreshed just before a review. The review happens once a month, on the first Sunday, and takes whatever time it takes. They dropped daily checking. It produced a lot of feeling and no decisions.
Westro keeps Indian stocks and mutual funds in one view so you do not rebuild a sheet each month. Importing the statement your broker sends can save a lot of typing. Your broker and fund statements stay the official record. Check anything that matters against them. Treat prices on screen as possibly delayed, not final.
What had changed by the third month
By the third first-Sunday, the review took about eleven minutes. The useful part was not the speed. It was that the couple had stopped asking a vague question, “are we doing enough?”, and started asking questions with actual answers. Do we still have a reason to own each of these nine shares? Should the next SIP instalment go towards the part of the portfolio that has shrunk while the rest grew?
No tracker improved their returns. This guide is not telling you what your own mix should be. That depends on your goals, your timelines, and how large a fall you could take without changing plans. What a single view changed was narrower and more useful: one number, one sitting, one decision, without three apps giving three answers.
Frequently asked
Yes, for a simple view. Both compare what you put in with what it is worth today. If you later want a return that includes every buy and sell date, keep those dates.