The Same Fund Can Show 6% or 19% CAGR. Only the Dates Changed.

Someone shows you a number. "This strategy has done 22% CAGR."

There is exactly one question that matters before you react to that, and almost nobody asks it: between which two dates?

Not "over how many years" — that's the easy part, and it's usually volunteered. The specific calendar dates. The day the clock started and the day it stopped. Because a CAGR is not a property of a fund, a stock, or an index. It is a property of a fund and two dates, and whoever picked the dates picked the answer.

One Fund, One Decade, Two Honest Answers

Take a fund that turns ₹1,00,000 into ₹4,02,900 over twelve years. Nothing exotic — roughly a 4x. Full-period CAGR: 12.3%.

Now slice that same twelve-year run in half. Suppose the first six years were the flat, grinding half and the second six caught the run-up:

Window shown	Start value	End value	CAGR quoted
Full 12 years	₹1,00,000	₹4,02,900	12.3%
First 6 years	₹1,00,000	₹1,41,900	6.0%
Last 6 years	₹1,41,900	₹4,02,900	19.0%

(Illustrative figures, chosen so the two halves compound exactly to the full-period result.)

Every number in that table is arithmetically correct. Not one of them is a lie. A brochure quoting 19% and a brochure quoting 6% are describing the same fund, held by the same manager, running the same strategy. The only difference is where someone put the start line.

This is the whole trick, and it is not a sophisticated one. It just works, over and over, because the reader hears "19% CAGR" as a fact about the fund instead of a fact about a window.

The Three Places the Dates Get Chosen

1. "Since inception" sounds neutral. It isn't.

"Since inception" feels like the honest option — no cherry-picking, just the whole life of the fund. Except the inception date was itself a decision, and funds are not launched at random moments.

A strategy launched in the middle of 2020 has an inception date sitting almost exactly on a generational market bottom. Every "since inception" number it will ever print carries that starting point permanently baked in. A near-identical strategy launched eighteen months earlier — same manager, same process — will quote a materially lower "since inception" figure for the rest of its life, purely because of when the paperwork was filed.

When you see "since inception," the follow-up is: inception when, and what was the market doing that month?

2. The end date is doing at least as much work as the start date.

Start dates get all the suspicion. End dates are quietly worse, because they move on their own — and a deck prepared in a good month keeps that good month forever.

Same fund, same investment, measured ninety days apart:

Measured to	Value	Period	CAGR quoted
A market high	₹2,10,000	5.00 years	16.0%
3 months later, after a ~12% fall	₹1,84,800	5.25 years	12.4%

(Illustrative — same ₹1,00,000, same holdings, nothing bought or sold in between.)

Nothing about the portfolio changed. No decision was made. The manager did not become 3.6 percentage points worse at their job in one quarter. A screenshot taken in the first row will be in circulation long after the second row is the reality.

3. Trailing returns silently re-anchor every single day.

The 1Y / 3Y / 5Y columns look like four independent checks. They aren't — they all share the same end date, which is today. If today happens to sit near a high, all four numbers are flattered at once, and the fact that they agree with each other feels like corroboration when it's actually just the same bias applied four times.

Two windows sharing an end date do not independently confirm anything.

XIRR Doesn't Rescue You From This

If you've read XIRR vs CAGR, you know XIRR is the better formula: it treats each deposit and withdrawal as a dated cash flow instead of pretending you invested one lump sum on day one. That's a genuine fix for a genuine problem.

It is not a fix for this one.

XIRR is precise about when each rupee moved inside the window. It has nothing whatsoever to say about who chose the window's edges. Feed it a favourable eighteen months and it will return a beautiful, technically flawless number. The formula has no opinion about the fact that those eighteen months were selected after the fact.

Which produces the specific situation worth naming: someone shows you a 34% XIRR. The arithmetic checks out. You still know almost nothing — because the cash flows they fed it started in the spring of a crash year and stopped at the top of the following rally. Strip the dates off, and eighteen months of a recovering market becomes indistinguishable from skill.

XIRR without disclosed entry and exit dates is exactly as manipulable as CAGR. The formula was never the weak point. The window was.

What to Ask the Person Showing You the Number

Ask these of a PMS provider, an advisory, a smallcase manager, an RM, or the person on your feed with a screenshot. A manager running an honest book has all of it ready and will not mind being asked. Real hesitation on any single one of these is itself the answer.

1. What are the exact start and end dates of this number? Day, month, year. Both ends.
2. Show me the same figure ending one quarter earlier, and one quarter later. A robust track record barely moves. A window-dependent one falls apart, and you'll see it in one line.
3. Give me every entry and exit date on this capital — not just the return. When was the money deployed? When was it raised to cash? A 30% number produced by being fully invested through one specific rally is a different claim from a 30% number produced across several entries and exits.
4. Is this the composite across every account in the strategy, or one account? "Our best client did 40%" and "the strategy did 40%" are different sentences. So is a model portfolio that nobody's actual money ever traded.
5. Is this net of all fees, expenses, exit loads and taxes — or gross? Ask them to state which. Performance fees on a good year can quietly eat several points.
6. What did the benchmark do over the identical dates? Not "the Nifty does about 12% long term" — the benchmark over your exact two dates. If a strategy returned 24% in a window where the index returned 22%, the window was the story, not the manager.
7. What is the worst three-year stretch this strategy has produced? Anyone can show you their best window. The worst one tells you what holding it actually feels like.

Reading a 15–30% Claim Without Getting Fooled

So a fund, PMS or portfolio is advertising 15%, 22%, 30%. How suspicious should you be?

Check it against the honest long-run baseline. The Nifty 50's own long-term return profile is published by NSE (Nifty 50 return profile, NSE Indices) and has historically sat in the low-to-mid teens. That's the reference point. A claimed 28% over a long period is a claim of very large, sustained outperformance — possible, but it should survive question 2 above. A claimed 28% over a carefully chosen three years usually does not.

Ask for rolling returns instead of point-to-point. A point-to-point return is one window, hand-picked. Rolling returns run the same calculation across every window of a given length — every 3-year period, stepped forward month by month — and report the range. This is the single most effective defence available to you, because it removes the choice of dates entirely. If a manager will only ever show you point-to-point figures, that is information.

Note which format you're reading. Indian mutual fund factsheets and ad disclosures at least standardise the periods — 1Y, 3Y, 5Y, since inception, with a benchmark printed alongside — which makes them meaningfully harder to game than a slide in a PMS deck or a story on someone's feed. The looser the format, the more freely the dates were chosen.

Be suspicious of numbers with no drawdown attached. Every real strategy has a worst year, a worst quarter, a period where it lagged badly. A track record presented without one hasn't been shown to you in full.

The One Number Nobody Can Cherry-Pick

Here's the part worth sitting with. Every problem on this page comes from someone else choosing your dates.

On your own portfolio, the dates were never up for negotiation. The day you transferred ₹2 lakh to your broker is a fact recorded in your ledger. So is the day you withdrew ₹50,000. So is every charge, every idle month where the cash sat waiting for an entry that never came. Nobody selected them for effect — you lived them.

That's what makes a ledger-based XIRR structurally different from a marketed one. It isn't a better formula; it's the same formula run on a window you can't fake, over cash flows you didn't choose after the fact. Your first deposit is the start date. Today is the end date. There is no flattering slice available.

Which is also why it's frequently lower than what your broker's Holdings page shows — and why that lower number is the useful one. A Holdings-based XIRR quietly re-dates your capital to when each stock was bought rather than when the money left your bank, which is the same date-shifting trick, just automated. And once you have the honest figure, comparing it against the index over your own exact cash flow dates is the only apples-to-apples comparison that exists for your portfolio.

Know that number first. It's the benchmark you should be holding every 22% pitch against — and the only one where you already know both dates.

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