Shortlisting a fund with the screener: a mid-cap example

The problem

A category page tells you how many choices you have. It does not tell you which three are worth an evening of reading. This post walks one category, mid caps, from the full list down to three candidates, using only pages on this site and rules written down before looking at names. The data is as of the close on Friday 9 October 2026.

Before starting, it helps to have answered the questions in Five questions to ask before you buy any mutual fund. This walk assumes you already know you want a mid-cap fund.

Step 1: see the whole category

Start at Best Mid Cap Mutual Funds. It ranks the category by 3-year CAGR and shows each fund's star rating, 1Y, 3Y and 5Y returns, expense ratio and AUM. In our data there are 34 live Direct Growth mid-cap plans. Twelve have no 5-year record yet, three of them younger than a year.

Do not pick from the top of that table. A 3-year ranking rewards whichever style suited the last three years. Instead, use the "Screen all mid cap mutual funds" button below the table, which opens the Filter & sort screener with the category already set.

Step 2: four filters, written down first

The screener's filters include Min return (over 1Y, 3Y, 5Y or 10Y), Min AUM and Max expense. Set Plan to Direct and Option to Growth, then apply four rules:

Each rule has a reason. Five years means the fund has been through at least one sharp fall. The expense ratio ceiling of 1% removed nine funds, including ICICI Prudential Mid Cap, whose 5-year CAGR of 15.07% would otherwise have passed. The AUM floor (AMFI's July to September 2026 figure) removed only ITI Mid Cap, at ₹1,494 crore. The return floor then cut 12 to 6.

You can check this against a ready-made screen. Consistent compounders asks for a CAGR above 15% over both 3 and 5 years with AUM above ₹1,000 crore. Among mid caps it returns the same six plus ICICI Prudential Mid Cap, the one our cost rule removed. The stricter Mid-cap movers screen sets the 5-year bar at 18%, and only Motilal Oswal Midcap clears it today.

Step 3: the six survivors

The 5-year spread is under four points. Trailing returns cannot separate these funds much further, so the next step moves to each fund's own page.

Step 4: rolling returns and worst falls

On a fund page, the Rolling returns card (sign in to see it) shows every 3-year window in the fund's history with its Average, Median, Best, Worst and Positive periods. Rolling returns answer a different question from a 5-year figure: how often did someone who stayed three years do well? The rolling vs trailing returns guide explains why the two differ.

The histories are not equal in length. HDFC, Invesco and Nippon have Direct-plan NAVs from January 2013; Mahindra Manulife only from February 2018. So the last column below uses the same 68 monthly windows for all six, those ending between March 2021 and October 2026.

The maximum drawdown is the deepest peak-to-trough fall since the Direct plan began, which for most of these funds is the March 2020 crash. It is the Max DD column in the screener, too. For all six the trough came in March or April 2020.

Two things stand out. Motilal Oswal Midcap has the best 5-year return but the weakest worst window since 2021, at 9.37%, so its lead depends on when you measure. And Mahindra Manulife's clean full-history record, never below 11.71%, is partly a product of a short history. The worst window for each of the other five ran from May 2017 to May 2020, which Mahindra Manulife's Direct plan, launched in February 2018, was not around for.

Step 5: from six to three

The rule for the last cut, again written down first: drop the two funds whose worst common window fell below 10%, and drop any fund with less than nine years of Direct-plan history.

That removes Motilal Oswal Midcap and HDFC Mid Cap on the first rule, and Mahindra Manulife Mid Cap on the second. The three left are:

• Invesco India Mid Cap: the highest worst window since 2021 (14.40%) and the only one of the five older funds never to post a negative 3-year window.
• Edelweiss Mid Cap: the lowest cost of the six, at 0.68%, and the highest median window.
• Nippon India Growth Mid Cap: a worst window since 2021 of 12.65%, third best of the six, and the largest of the three by AUM.

A different reader with different rules would get a different three, and that is the point. HDFC Mid Cap, cut here, is the largest mid-cap fund in India by a wide margin and carries four stars. Writing the rules down before seeing the names is what keeps a shortlist from becoming a list of funds you already liked.

What to do with three names

Put two of them on a compare page to see portfolio overlap, exit loads and SIP returns side by side. Read each fund's portfolio and manager section, using the factsheet guide as a checklist. If you are tempted to keep all three, how many funds you need argues against it.

What the numbers do not tell you

Every figure here is backward-looking. The 15% return floor and the 10% worst-window cut are arbitrary lines, and moving either by a point changes the answer. Rolling and drawdown statistics come from NAV history on this site; the methodology page has the formulas. None of this is a recommendation to buy or avoid any fund.