What the funds are holding, and why you can check it
Every month, each Pakistani asset management company publishes a Fund Manager Report. It is a PDF, it runs to thirty or sixty pages, and it is mostly boilerplate.
Buried in each fund's page is a small table: the ten largest equity holdings, with the percentage of the fund in each. Almost nobody reads it. Collected properly, it is one of the more useful datasets on this market.
Why ten rows a month is worth anything
A single fund's top ten tells you little. The same table across forty funds, over several years, tells you three things that are hard to get any other way.
Crowding. When a stock appears in the top ten of thirty funds at once, the marginal buyer for it has largely already bought. That is not a reason to sell, but it changes what a disappointing result does to the price, because the people holding it are the people who have to sell.
Conviction, as distinct from presence. A stock at 11% of a fund is a position its manager will defend. The same stock at 3% is a placeholder. The weight carries information the holding itself does not.
Rotation. Month over month, the same fund's table shows what went up in size and what dropped out. One fund trimming a name is noise. Eleven funds trimming the same name in the same month is a flow.
The honest limits
This data has real holes and it is better to know them.
It is late. A report describing September is published somewhere in October. You are reading a position that was true a few weeks ago. For a point-in-time study that matters enormously; for understanding how the market is positioned it matters less.
It is the top ten only. Nobody publishes the whole book. A fund holding forty names shows you the ten that matter most, and the other thirty are invisible.
Coverage is uneven. Not every house publishes the same detail, and some have stopped. Arif Habib's monthly industry roundup carried a page per fund — 73 to 107 funds an edition — right up to January 2026, and from February 2026 the same publication dropped to five pages of aggregate tables. The detail did not move elsewhere. It stopped.
Some archives are unreadable. Several years of older reports were produced with fonts that embed no character map, so the text cannot be extracted at all without running optical character recognition over the pages. The numbers are visible to a human and invisible to a machine.
The industry view sits on top of it
Alongside the per-fund tables, the aggregate figures are worth watching in their own right: total equity assets under management, the split between conventional and Shariah-compliant equity, and for individual stocks the number of funds holding them and the percentage of free float those funds represent.
That last figure is the one to respect. When funds collectively hold a large share of a stock's free float, the tradable supply is smaller than the market cap suggests, and the price moves further on the same order size in both directions.
What to do with it
You do not need a database to use the idea. Pick the three or four funds whose mandate resembles what you are trying to do, read their top tens for the last three months, and ask two questions: what has grown, and what has gone.
The answer will not tell you what to buy. It will tell you who already owns what you are thinking about buying, which is a different and frequently more useful thing.
Fund reports are published by the asset management companies themselves and describe a past month. Nothing here is financial advice or a recommendation to follow any fund's positioning.