Glossary· Ratings & classification
What is Peer group?
The funds a rating or rank is measured against — same sub-category, plan and option.
Ranking a Direct Growth small-cap fund against Regular IDCW large-cap funds would measure plan and category, not skill. The peer count is shown with the rating, because a percentile out of 12 funds is a weaker claim than one out of 200.
For the formula and the constants behind this figure, see Methodology.
Guides that use Peer group
15 guides put this term to work.
- The twelve mistakes that cost first-time SIP investors the mostAlmost none of the money new investors lose goes to bad funds. It goes to plan, cost, horizon and behaviour — and every one of these mistakes is avoidable.
- Equity funds demystified: large cap, mid cap, small cap and the SEBI rulebookSince 2017 every open-ended scheme sits in one defined box with a binding rule on what it must hold. What the boxes mean, and why comparing across them fails.
- Flexi cap vs multi cap: which strategy offers better flexibility?One is obliged to hold small caps; the other is free not to. The 2020 rule change that created the split, and why it affects how you read an older track record.
- Debt funds explained: duration risk and credit risk are not the same thingSixteen SEBI categories along two independent axes. Why a gilt fund can have a worse year than an equity fund, and what the 2023 tax change actually removed.
- Core and satellite: how to build a portfolio you can actually maintainEvery holding is either reliable or interesting, most of the money is in the reliable part, and the interesting part has a size limit set in advance.
- Fund manager changes: should you panic when the captain leaves?Were you buying a person or a process? What to check immediately, what to watch for six to twelve months, and the one situation where moving quickly is free.
- Mutual fund overlap: are you really diversified?Diversification stops early and overlap starts at once. Why the answer is four to six, how to measure your duplication, and how to unwind it without a tax bill.
- Treynor and information ratio: advanced tools for comparing fundsOne prices market risk, the other prices the decision to differ from the index. For choosing between active funds in a category, the second matters most.
- The psychology of a market crash: behavioural finance that survives contactLoss aversion, herding and action bias are not character flaws — they are default settings. The pre-commitments that work when in-the-moment judgement fails.
- Value vs growth: which style actually wins over the long run?Two different bets with two different failure modes — the value trap and multiple compression — and leadership cycles long enough to exhaust anyone's patience.
- Focused funds: is holding only 30 stocks conviction or recklessness?The stock cap is a multiplier on the manager's process, not a strategy — it widens the distribution of outcomes without raising the expected return.
- 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.
- Dynamic bond funds: letting a manager call the interest-rate cycleYou are not buying a duration, you are buying a forecast — of the one variable the bond market has already priced. Why choosing duration yourself usually wins.
- Your annual portfolio audit: a step-by-step health checkNinety minutes, once a year, in six parts — where the default action at every step is to do nothing, because the audit exists to catch drift, not to trade.
- AI and algorithms in fund management: hype and realityInside Indian AMCs it does operations and compliance, not stock picking. Why predictive advantage is structurally hard, and what SEBI now requires.
More on ratings & classification
How funds are grouped and scored here.
- Star rating
- Our own 1–5 stars: 60% performance, 15% risk, 10% cost, 15% downside.
- Category & sub-category
- SEBI's scheme classification — what the fund is allowed to hold.