Every benchmark-relative statistic on this site is computed against the closest matching index for the fund's category, in its total-return form (TRI, dividends reinvested — as they are in a fund's NAV) and, for a US index, converted to rupees, since the fund is priced in rupees. Against a bare price index every fund would look better by the index's dividend yield. 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
10 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 problem — and where active 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 right order.
- Index funds and ETFs: low-cost passive investing explainedWhat the Indian evidence says about active large-cap funds, tracking error versus 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 survives 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 says whether either number means anything. Read in order, they catch a closet indexer.
- 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 one 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.
- How to read an index P/E ratioConsolidated trailing-twelve-month and free-float weighted — and why the absolute number means nothing until you know what it has meant before.
- Is the market expensive? Valuation without market timingValuation predicts ten-year returns and not next year's. Why rebalancing and timing look identical on the same chart, and when a reading should change anything.
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.