Every benchmark-relative statistic on this site is computed against the closest matching price index for the fund's category. Debt, arbitrage and cash-like funds get no equity benchmark ratios — measuring them against an equity index would be noise, so those tiles are left off rather than filled.
For the formula and the constants behind this figure, see Methodology.
Guides that use Benchmark
8 guides put this term to work.
- Active vs passive: can a human beat the market?The accounting identity that starts the argument, what SPIVA India shows about large caps, why persistence is the real problem — and where active still earns its fee.
- How to read a mutual fund factsheet like a proRead it backwards: mandate and benchmark, then holdings and concentration, then cost, then risk — and only then returns. Four minutes, in the order that matters.
- Index funds and ETFs: low-cost passive investing explainedWhat the Indian evidence says about active large-cap funds, the difference between tracking error and tracking difference, and where indexing stops winning automatically.
- Handling underperformance: when to stay and when to exitSeparating what changed about the fund from what changed about the market: mandate drift, manager exits, and the review habit that stops you acting on a bad quarter.
- Decoding alpha and beta: manager skill versus market riskBeta is how much market you took; alpha is what you got beyond it; R² tells you whether either number means anything. Read in that order, they catch a closet index fund.
- Rolling returns, and the start date that flatters a fundA trailing return runs from one day to one day, and moving either changes it. What sliding that window across the whole history shows that a single figure cannot.
- Tracking error and standard deviation in passive fundsOne measures how much a fund moves, the other how much it moves differently from its index — and neither is the number that actually reaches your returns.
- Contra funds: betting against the crowd, and what being early costsOverreaction is a real and repeatable market failure. The price of exploiting it is years of looking wrong in public, which is why so few investors collect.
More on returns
What the fund made, and over what stretch of time.
- NAV
- The per-unit price of the fund, published once each business day.
- Absolute return
- Plain point-to-point growth over a period under a year, not annualized.
- CAGR
- The steady yearly rate that would have taken the start NAV to the end NAV.
- YTD
- Return from 1 January of the current calendar year to the latest NAV.
- Rolling returns
- The same holding period measured from every possible start date, not just today's.
- Since inception
- Annualized return over the fund's whole available NAV history.
- XIRR
- The annualized return of a series of cash flows on different dates.