Best versus worst fund in a category, each year 2021–25

The question

We usually compare categories: small cap against large cap, flexi cap against mid cap. But every category holds dozens of funds, and they do not all return the same. How far apart are the best and worst funds in the same category in a single calendar year?

For each year from 2021 to 2025 we worked out the calendar-year return of every Direct plan, Growth option fund in nine categories that had a NAV in the last days of both that year and the one before, and took the highest return minus the lowest. Closed-ended ELSS series, which no longer take money, are left out.

Best minus worst, in percentage points

Across all 45 category-years the median gap is 23.0 points, so in a typical year the best fund in a category beat the worst by about 23 paise on every rupee invested.

The widest and narrowest cases

Widest: small cap in 2021. Funds returned between 34.9% and 91.7%, a gap of 56.8 points, in a year when the category median was 63.3%. Next came ELSS in 2021 (13.6% to 63.3%, 49.6 points) and mid cap in 2024 (11.8% to 58.9%, 47.1 points).

Narrowest: large cap in 2025. The 32 large-cap funds returned between 5.2% and 11.9%, a spread of 6.7 points, the narrowest of the 45 category-years. Large cap is also the category with the lowest median gap over the five years.

The middle half of funds is much tighter than the extremes. The interquartile range, the span between the 25th and 75th percentile fund, was 3.2 to 15.2 points across all 45 category-years. The best and worst funds are outliers: the span between the 75th and 25th percentile funds was usually less than half of the best-to-worst gap.

Falling years

The gaps change character when markets fall. In 2022 a lot of funds lost money in categories whose median was positive: 12 of 27 flexi-cap funds, 10 of 26 large & mid cap funds and 7 each in ELSS, focused, large cap and small cap. In 2025 the story is small cap: the median was -2.8% and 22 of 29 small-cap funds were negative, against 6 or fewer in every other category. A category's median hides these counts; a category's returns by calendar year shows the medians and this note the spread behind them.

Does category or fund matter more?

It depends on the year. In 2021 the category medians ranged from 28.5% (large cap) to 63.3% (small cap), a 34.8-point range, while within small cap the funds ranged over 56.8 points, so a poor small-cap fund could return less than a good large-cap one. In 2025 the category medians ranged from -2.8% to 9.0% (11.8 points), while within-category gaps were 6.7 to 23.3 points: for eight of the nine categories the gap was larger than the whole range of category medians.

The practical reading is that choosing a category and choosing a fund are both decisions with large effects, and neither makes the other redundant. Our note on beating the index counts how many funds in each category finished ahead of their benchmark, and the one-year spread across all categories covers a trailing year.

Caveats

Best and worst are single funds. One unusual fund sets each end, so these gaps move with a single scheme's strategy. The middle-half column is steadier.

Survivorship. A fund that was merged or closed after a bad year is not in today's list, which narrows the worst end of the earlier years.

Funds are not strictly alike. Categories allow different degrees of freedom: a flexi-cap fund may hold any mix of market caps, a large-cap fund must hold mostly large caps, and the width of the gap partly reflects that.

Past gaps do not predict future ones, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any fund. The screener lets you sort any category by return over any period.