SEBI requires every scheme to publish one. The badge here is our own estimate from the fund's category and measured volatility, not a scrape of the AMC's label, so treat it as a comparable ranking rather than the official disclosure — that lives in the scheme's own factsheet.
For the formula and the constants behind this figure, see Methodology.
Guides that use Riskometer
11 guides put this term to work.
- Can you lose money in mutual funds? Understanding market riskYes — but temporary, permanent and self-inflicted losses are three different things, and the largest source of realised loss is behavioural rather than market.
- Demystifying the riskometer: how to read SEBI’s risk levelsPortfolio-derived, updated monthly and comparable across fund houses — useful for spotting mismatches and changes, far too coarse to pick between equity funds.
- 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.
- Large & Mid Cap funds: the SEBI category that must own both boxesA mandatory 35% large and 35% mid, with 30% at the manager's discretion — so it carries mid-cap risk by rule and cannot retreat when mid caps look expensive.
- Sharpe and Sortino: measuring risk-adjusted returnsVolatility, Sharpe, Sortino and maximum drawdown measure four different things, and only one of them predicts whether you will still be holding in year three.
- Credit risk and yield-to-maturity in debt fundsA high YTM describes the risk taken, not the return you will earn. How to read it beside the rating profile, and what a credit event permanently does.
- Micro-cap funds: the riskiest edge of Indian equitySEBI has no micro-cap category — you are buying the undefined tail below the small-cap floor, where the premium is for illiquidity and fragility, not swings.
- 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.
- The emergency fund: where liquid funds fit, and where they don'tIts job is to stop you selling equity in a bad month — the same month the market is down. Sizing, structure, and what liquid funds do and don't protect against.
- How SEBI's rules actually protect a retail investorThe structural protections, the conduct rules and the safety nets — and the more useful half: an explicit list of what none of it protects you from.
- Case study: what went wrong when a debt fund frozeSix schemes, ₹25,000 crore, redemptions stopped overnight — and the defining fact that it was a liquidity failure rather than a default wave.
More on risk
How rough the ride was — the half of the story a return number hides.
- Standard deviation
- How much daily returns scatter around their average, annualized. Trailing 3 years.
- Maximum drawdown
- The largest peak-to-trough fall the fund has ever had, over its full history.
- Sharpe ratio
- Return above the risk-free rate, per unit of total volatility.
- Sortino ratio
- Like Sharpe, but only downside moves count as risk.