Equity MFs fare slightly better than indices

Mumbai: While the equity-oriented mutual fund schemes have managed to outperform their benchmark indices over the past one year, the margin of outperformance is just marginal in the range of 1 per cent – 2 per cent.

According to the data available with Value Research, a mutual fund tracking firm, equity large cap schemes have generated a return of 15.64 per cent over the last one year as against a gain of 13.48 per cent and 12.06 per cent posted by NSE Nifty and BSE Sensex respectively.

Similarly, MF equity schemes focused on mid cap stocks have generated a return of return of 19.60 per cent, marginally higher than 18.63 per cent gain posted by the BSE mid cap index during the last one year.

However, it was small-cap equity schemes, which was a clear under-performer as compared to its benchmark index despite generating the highest return over other equity-oriented schemes. The average annual return of small cap equity schemes stood at 25.96 per cent as compared to 27.44 per cent gain in BSE small cap index.   

“When we consider the kind of volatility that Indian markets witnessed during the period, I wont say the performance of equity MF schemes was bad. If we look at the constituents of Nifty or Sensex, only a handful of stocks have performed really well whereas most of the large-cap diversified funds holds around 40-75 stocks in their portfolio,” top3choice.com founder Jaideep Bhattacharya said.