Concentration warnings are easy to produce and easy to get wrong. The usual version measures your largest holding against the total of the same kind of thing — your biggest share against your share portfolio — and announces a percentage.

That number answers a question almost nobody is asking.

The denominator is the whole point

Suppose one company is 98% of the shares you own.

If shares are 95% of everything you have, that is a genuine concentration. One company's price, one board, one set of results, decides nearly all of your financial position.

If shares are 19% of everything you have, because the rest is in a money market fund and a sacco, then that same company is under a fifth of your money. It is a perfectly ordinary way to hold a small equity allocation, and warning about it is noise.

The two situations produce an identical "98% of your shares" and could not be more different. A tool that can only see your shares cannot distinguish them — not because its arithmetic is wrong, but because it is looking at a fraction of what you own.

Two different risks, worded differently

Once everything is in view, the largest position can be measured against the whole. But "largest position" means two distinguishable things, and collapsing them into one warning loses the part that matters.

Most of your money in one listed company is exposure to one share price. If it halves, you halve. The response is usually to add other things, not to sell.

Most of your money with one provider — one fund manager, one sacco — is exposure to one institution holding your savings. That is not a market risk, it is a counterparty risk, and Kenyan savers have lost money to it. The response is different: it is about who holds it, not what it is invested in.

A warning that says "one position is most of your money" without saying which of these it is has told you something true and not told you what to do about it.

When a warning should keep quiet

Two cases where the right output is nothing at all.

When something cannot be valued. If one holding has no current price, the total is unknown, and a percentage of an unknown total is a confident-looking number with nothing behind it.

When there is only one holding. Telling somebody with a single fund that it is 100% of their money is arithmetic, not insight. They know. A warning that fires on the obvious teaches people to dismiss warnings, and then the one that matters gets dismissed too.

What you actually get from the split

The useful output is not the warning, it is the picture: how much of what you own sits in shares, in money market funds, in sacco deposits and shares, in government paper.

Most people are surprised by it, usually in one of two directions. Either far more is sitting in a transactional account earning nothing than they thought, or far more is in one equity position that grew into dominance without a decision ever being made — which is the ordinary way concentration happens. Nobody chooses to put 98% in one company. One holding does well for three years while nothing is added elsewhere.

Seeing the split is what turns that from something that happened into something you decided.

On Ipahco

The breakdown on your portfolio covers everything you have recorded — shares, funds, saccos, bonds, deposits — not just the exchange-traded part. The largest position is measured against that whole, and the wording distinguishes one company from one provider.

Which means it depends entirely on your having told it about the rest. A portfolio with only shares in it will show shares as 100% of your wealth, and will be right about the data and wrong about you.