Twenty years of equity funds: 98 with a full record

The number

Ninety-eight equity funds have a daily NAV record from the first days of April 2006 to 1 October 2026, about 20 and a half years. Their median return since then is between 10.8% a year (large-cap funds) and 14.4% a year (small-cap funds).

Money compounding at 10.8% for that long grows about 8 times; at 14.4%, about 16 times. The best fund of the 98, Nippon India Pharma, returned 17.45% a year, which is about 27 times.

These are Regular plan, Growth option funds, because Direct plans did not exist in 2006. Regular plans carry a higher expense ratio than Direct plans, so a Direct plan of the same fund would have returned somewhat more. The NAV history we hold begins in April 2006 even for funds that launched earlier, so "since inception" here means "since April 2006".

Category medians since April 2006

Small-cap and mid-cap funds lead on the median and large-cap funds come last. Over shorter windows the gaps are wider and less stable; large-cap fund returns and small-cap fund returns show the one-to-ten-year picture.

The best and worst of the 98

Those four are the only funds below 8.5%. The best fund compounds 10 points a year faster than the worst, which over 20 and a half years is the difference between about 27 times the money and about 4.3 times.

Large-cap funds, specifically

The large-cap funds in this group returned between 7.37% and 12.81% a year, a 5.4-point spread among funds that all aim at the same index. Aditya Birla Sun Life Large Cap led on 12.81%, then HDFC Large Cap on 12.28%. For the funds' record over rolling ten-year windows, see large-cap rolling returns.

The survivorship caveat

This list is not a fair sample of every fund that existed in 2006. Funds that were merged into others or closed after poor results are missing, and the ones that remain have, by definition, lasted. The medians above are therefore higher than an investor in a random 2006 fund would have achieved on average. The ranking within the survivors is still informative: even among funds that lasted 20 years, a spread of 10 points a year separates the best from the worst.

Reading this

Over 20 years, which fund you hold matters about as much as which category it sits in. The best large-cap fund (12.81%) out-earned the median fund in every other category except small-cap (14.36%) and mid-cap (13.29%), while the worst mid-cap fund (10.67%) returned slightly less than the median large-cap fund (10.81%). The SIP calculator turns any of these rates into the outcome of a monthly instalment.

Returns are historical, computed from NAVs of funds that still exist; they are not a forecast. Past returns do not indicate future performance.