Every portfolio dashboard gives you a number. The useful question is what that number is actually measuring. Alpha — the headline 0–100 score in iNiveś — measures one thing: how competitively your holdings are priced right now, given their quality, growth, and the risks around them.
It is deliberately not a returns tracker. A portfolio that doubled last year can score low today, and a beaten-down portfolio can score high, because Alpha looks forward through valuation, not backward through your P&L.
The three inputs
Alpha blends three signals, then subtracts two penalties:
| Input | What it measures | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| Valuation attractiveness | How cheap holdings are versus their own history and peers | Higher is better |
| Profitability | Return on capital, margins, earnings quality | Higher is better |
| Sentiment | Market and analyst positioning around the holding | Higher is better |
| Risk | Volatility, drawdown behaviour, concentration | Penalty |
| Interest-rate drag | Sensitivity to rate environments | Penalty |
The six Vitals — Quality, Value, Growth, Stability, Momentum, Yield — do not feed Alpha. They roll up into Pulse, the normalized composite index shown alongside it. Mixing the two up is the most common misreading of the dashboard.
What moves the score
- A cheaper entry price on the same quality raises Alpha immediately. This is why Alpha can rise while your portfolio value falls.
- Deteriorating profitability lowers it even if the price hasn't moved yet.
- Concentration lowers it twice: once through the risk penalty, and again through the HHI penalty applied at the portfolio level.
What doesn't move it
- Your purchase price (Alpha is not a profit measure).
- Your holding period.
- Deposits or withdrawals, except where they change the mix of holdings.
How to read the number
Alpha is banded 0–100 and mapped to three rank tiers:
- No-brainer — high competitiveness, strong fundamentals, attractive price.
- Multi-bagger — strong fundamentals, reasonable price.
- Healthy — solid, unremarkable; the base of most well-diversified portfolios.
A holding can be "Healthy" and still be a good investment — the tiers rank competitiveness, not your obligation to act. Treat Alpha as a triage tool: it tells you where to look first, not what to buy.
Alpha is computed per holding and aggregated to the portfolio with value weights, so a large position moves the portfolio score more than a small one. The portfolio-level number is not a simple average.
Why this matters for Indian portfolios
Indian retail portfolios skew heavily toward a handful of sectors — financials, IT, and recently manufacturing. Alpha surfaces when that skew is being paid for and when it isn't, which is exactly the question a tip or a spreadsheet can't answer.