While SEBI has made information related to PMS available on its website, only monthly data from January is available. What investors really need is historical performance. SEBI continues to ensure that investors find it impossible to get any useful historical performance data
Following pressure from Moneylife through a Right to Information (RTI) application and appeals, the Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has started uploading information 
of performance from Portfolio Management Services (PMS). But this information is of no value because it is merely monthly performance starting from January. SEBI has not uploaded information that investors really need—long-term performance, say three years. This is surprising because SEBI is certainly aware of the importance of trend data.
Vide Master Circular SEBI/IMD/MC No.3/10554/2012, SEBI mandates mutual funds to disclose performance data on basis of yearly, three years, five years and since inception. However, we find that there is no such exhaustive data pertaining to each PMS’s historical performance. We find that only monthly performance is disclosed online and that too only from January 2013 onwards. This means, there’s no way to know how a PMS has performed in the last one year!
It is pertinent to note that the minimum amount required to invest in PMS companies is Rs25 lakh. This calls for some serious homework on not only the investors’ part but also advisors’ too. But, alas, the different systems adopted by SEBI makes it nearly impossible for investors (or advisors) to take an informed decision. Why does SEBI have different systems for reporting for PMS and mutual funds? What is more interesting is that SEBI has mandated that PMS companies disclose their performance and assets under management (AUM) for the preceding three years (on annual basis, not monthly). But even this has not been uploaded on SEBI’s website! The link can be accessed here (http://www.sebi.gov.in/sebiweb/investment/PMRReport.jsp). SEBI has mandated that PMS companies must disclose information for last three years on their respective websites (but more on this later).
According to Section 14(iv) of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Portfolio Managers) Regulations, 1993 (The Regulations), PMS companies should disclose “the performance of the portfolio manager provided that the performance of a discretionary portfolio manager shall be calculated using weighted average method taking each individual category of investments for the immediately preceding three years (emphasis ours) and in such cases performance indicators shall also be disclosed.” There is absolutely no mention of historical returns or returns for period more than three years, let alone returns since inception. Whereas mutual funds must disclose returns for one year, three years, five years AND returns since inception, as per SEBI’s mutual fund regulations.
Earlier, Moneylife had fought hard and won a case against SEBI in which the Central Information Commissioner (CIC) had ruled that SEBI has to upload data of PMS schemes onto its website. Shockingly, it was found out that the monthly report uploaded not only did not contain historical data, but the format at which SEBI uploaded made it nearly impossible to download and compare with other PMS schemes, unlike mutual funds. To make matters worse, only one report at a time (i.e. one company and one month) can be viewed (and not downloaded). If you want to ‘download’ PMS data off SEBI’s website, you will have to copy and paste manually which is an extremely tedious task. Therefore, if you want to make an informed decision to compare and contrast, say more than 20 PMS schemes, it is simply not feasible to do it within a reasonable time frame. There are 250 PMS schemes in total.
Moreover, SEBI mandates PMS companies to disclose performance-related and other information on each respective PMS on their respective websites. Most PMS companies have neatly tucked away the ‘disclosure document’ in some corner of their website, which can be hard to locate. Unfortunately, one usually needs to be tech-savvy to locate this document. On the other hand, most mutual funds companies provide this facility of checking their performance online, with relative ease of access.
For the time being, investors will have to choose to keep the Rs25 lakh on hold until SEBI and PMS companies make it easier for them to access the information.
Moneylife sent an email to SEBI and asked how investors can get data of historical performance of PMS. Till the time of writing this story, we have not received any answers from them. We will incorporate their answers as and when we receive it.
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I have also suffered similar ‘baseless’ accusations on several posts on moneylife.in from this person. Anybody who makes a counter point or disagrees immediately gets labeled as an employee of HDFC Bank or HDFC group.
I do hope you will desist from making and personal attacks. Otherwise it undermines all our efforts to get a fair deal for consumers. I hope you realise that
This is completely uncalled for personal attack. EVEN IF Mr JIGAR SHAH IS WORKING FOR HDFC BANK that does not necessarily make him evil. Moneylife is interested in facts and truth alone. Mr Jigar Shah has made an important point. If you find ways of contradicting his fact, please do. It does not help to imagine things and impute motives. We apologise to Mr Jigar Shah
its not only PMS but all the investors in the various stock broking firms they have been mapped in online trading as well offline trading if the client is offline trader then online trading is managed by the broking house itself there is parallel accounting the loss is booked in either account is booked to concerned cleints accounts and profit is booked for stock broking account so the pms is not the only scam there many but this is not our motto or expose but we need justice and transperancy