Specialised investment funds at six months: 14 strategies

Fourteen strategies in six months

Specialised investment funds (SIFs) are six months old. On 13 April 2026, AMFI published NAVs for 14 SIF strategies from 9 brands, sold as 53 plan and option variants.

A SIF is run by a mutual fund house under its own SIF brand, with a ₹10 lakh minimum investment. Unlike an ordinary mutual fund it can hold short positions through derivatives, within limits, which is why every strategy so far carries "long-short" in its name. AMFI publishes SIF NAVs separately from mutual fund NAVs, and every number below comes from that daily series, which our SIF page tracks.

The launches have come in bursts: four in October 2025, one in November, two in December, none in January, four in February and three on a single day, 30 March. qsif runs three strategies; Arudha, iSIF and DynaSIF two each.

Returns since launch

None of these funds has a year of history, so the returns below are absolute, not annualised, from each fund's first NAV to 13 April 2026, on the Direct plan, Growth option.

Volatility is the annualised standard deviation of daily NAV changes, shown only for funds with at least 30 NAVs. The three strategies launched on 30 March have nine or ten NAVs each: Arudha Equity Long-Short is up 3.38%, Apex Hybrid Long-Short 0.40% and DynaSIF Active Asset Allocator 0.44%.

Seven of the 14 are above their first NAV and seven below. For scale, the oldest fund, qsif's Equity Long-Short, is down 4.46% since 8 October 2025; over the same dates the Nifty 50 fell 4.81%, from 25,046.15 to 23,842.65.

March: the first real test

The Nifty 50 fell 11.31% in March, from 25,178.65 on 27 February to 22,331.40 on 30 March. Eleven SIF strategies had a NAV at the end of February. All of them did better than the index, and ten of them fell.

• Equity strategies fell between 2.99% (Diviniti) and 8.95% (qsif Equity Long-Short). qsif's and iSIF's Ex-Top 100 funds, which hold no stocks from the 100 largest companies on the long side, lost 7.60% and 8.61%.
• Hybrid strategies ranged from a 0.13% gain at Arudha to falls of 6.87% at Titanium and 7.31% at iSIF. qsif, Altiva and Magnum lost between 0.91% and 2.16%.

The label is a loose guide. iSIF's hybrid fund has the highest volatility of any SIF with 30 NAVs, 17.57%, above every equity strategy, and its 7.31% fall in March was deeper than two of the five equity funds and close to the other three.

April so far

The market has bounced. From the end of March to 13 April the Nifty 50 rose 6.77%. The SIFs that fell most in March have risen most since: qsif Equity Ex-Top 100 gained 7.62%, qsif Equity Long-Short 7.08%, iSIF Ex-Top 100 6.54% and iSIF Hybrid 6.38%. Diviniti, the most cushioned equity fund in March, is up just 0.95%.

That symmetry is the point: a fund that gives up less in a fall usually takes less of the rise. The NAVs show how much market each fund has carried, not how skilfully.

What this does not tell you

Six months is not a record. The oldest SIF has 125 NAVs and the newest nine. One month moves these numbers a lot.

Start dates differ. A fund that began in October and one that began in February have lived through different markets, so their since-start returns do not compare.

We see NAVs, not portfolios. How much each fund was short, and in what, is not in our data.

None of this is a recommendation to buy or avoid any SIF.

Where to go from here

Every strategy, with its NAV chart, is on the SIF page. The guide to AIFs vs mutual funds places SIFs between the two. For how ordinary funds held up over the same month, see the funds that fell least in March 2026, and for the market itself, the March 2026 market recap.