If a Turkish fund returned 40%, what did I actually earn?

A Turkish fund reports its return in Turkish lira. If you think in euros, dollars or pounds, that number is not your return — it is the first half of a two-part calculation, and the second half has historically been the larger one.

The arithmetic that matters

A fund that gained 40% in lira over a year, in a year when the lira lost 35% of its value against the dollar, did not make a dollar investor 40%. It made roughly:

1.40 × 0.65 ≈ 0.91 — a 9% loss in dollars, from a 40% headline gain.

This is not a corner case in the Turkish market. It is the ordinary case, and it is the single most important thing for a non-Turkish reader to internalize before comparing any Turkish return to a return at home.

Two different questions people conflate

• "Did this fund beat inflation?" — the question a Turkish saver is asking. Their liabilities are in lira; their groceries are in lira. Nominal lira return versus Turkish CPI is the right frame for them.
• "Did this fund make me money?" — the question you are asking, if you will eventually spend the proceeds in another currency. Lira return versus your own currency is the right frame for you, and it can point the opposite way.

Both questions are legitimate. They are not the same question, and a fund can be a clear success at one and a clear failure at the other in the same twelve months.

Currency exposure is not the same as currency denomination

A fund whose units are priced in lira may hold assets that are not: foreign equities, eurobonds, gold. Those holdings carry their own currency behaviour, which partly offsets lira weakness — which is precisely why they are popular locally. Conversely, a fund holding only Turkish deposits and short-dated lira debt has essentially no offset at all.

So "is this fund exposed to the lira?" is a question about its portfolio, not about its unit currency. The holdings breakdown on each fund page is where you answer it.

How to use this site for that

Every fund page and the fund list let you switch the return basis: nominal lira, inflation-adjusted (against official CPI or the independent ENAG series), or in USD or EUR terms. For a reader outside Turkey the currency views are usually the honest ones — and the gap between them and the headline number is the thing this page exists to make impossible to miss.