The five-year scorecard for mutual fund houses

Which fund companies' equity funds clocked the best median performance over a five-year period? Here's the answer

The past five years have been a choppy ride for stocks with the Bombay Stock Exchange's benchmark Sensex having been volatile but range-bound, while returning 3.54 per cent annualised returns (calculated till end of last month) in the period.

We ran a search to find out how each fund company's equity funds performed, on average, during the same timeframe.

Courtesy 

We called for all equity funds belonging to various equity categories assigned by Morningstar (Large-Cap, Small and Mid Cap, and ELSS) for every fund house. The query we ran looked only for funds with the 'growth' share class and did not include funds not open to retail investors.

To weed out the effect of short-term performers, we removed funds that have been in existence for less than three years. Finally, to ensure a large sample size, we included only those fund houses that had a minimum of five open-end funds in existence.

The table above shows the five- (and also three-) year median performance for equity funds belonging to various fund houses, and how many funds were included for the purpose of this study.

The median Morningstar rating for all the funds considered is also given (the Morningstar rating, however, is an overall measure of risk-adjusted performance across several timeframes, and not just one period).

Highlights:

• DSP BlackRock's seven equity funds clocked the best median five-year performance of 7.22 per cent.
• HSBC's funds, along with JM's, were the only ones to post a negative median annualised return.
• JM's five equity funds lost 9.11 per cent over the five-year timeframe. Each of the funds has a Morningstar rating of one star.