Portfolio Benchmark Comparison

What this tool is comparing

You build a portfolio out of real schemes, give each one a weight, and pick an index to measure it against. Everything on the page is then computed from the same daily NAV history: rolling returns, volatility, the deepest drawdown, the year-by-year ranking, and what a SIP or a lumpsum would actually have grown into over the window you chose.

The reason to do this as a portfolio rather than one fund at a time is that funds are rarely held one at a time. Two schemes that each look middling can combine into something steadier than either, and a backtest of the combination is the only way to see it.

Why rolling returns rather than a single CAGR

A compound annual growth rate depends entirely on the two dates you picked. Move the start back six months across a crash and the same fund over the same history tells a different story. It is the most quoted number in fund marketing and the easiest one to select for.

A rolling return computes the outcome for every possible starting point over a fixed holding period — every three-year stretch in the data, or every five, or every seven — and shows the whole spread. The question it answers is what a typical holding period looked like, not what the luckiest one did. The distribution view turns that spread into a shape: a wide one means the result depended heavily on when you happened to buy.

Picking a benchmark that means something

The convention is to measure against the index closest to what the fund actually holds. A large-cap portfolio belongs against NIFTY 50, a diversified one against NIFTY 500, a mid-cap allocation against NIFTY MIDCAP 150. Comparing a mid-cap portfolio to NIFTY 50 flatters it through strong years and punishes it through weak ones, because the two are not carrying the same risk in the first place.

A comparison only runs over the period both the fund and the index cover, and it will not be extended past what exists. Where a horizon is longer than the data, the page says so rather than filling the gap.

Total return, not price return

The index series used here is a total-return series: dividends are treated as reinvested. That matters more than it sounds. A growth-plan mutual fund retains everything it earns, so measuring it against a price-return index — one that ignores dividends — quietly hands the fund an advantage worth roughly the market's dividend yield every year. Over a decade that is enough to turn an ordinary record into an apparently good one.

Risk, measured two different ways

Volatility describes ordinary movement: how much the value bounces around month to month. Maximum drawdown describes the worst of it — the deepest fall from a previous peak to the trough that followed, which is what someone who bought at exactly the wrong moment had to sit through before recovering.

They are not the same question, and two portfolios with near-identical returns can differ sharply on the second. The drawdown chart is usually the one that changes how an allocation feels, because it is the number that describes the experience rather than the outcome.

What rebalancing does to the result

Left alone, a portfolio drifts. Whichever holding grows fastest takes over the weighting you originally set, so a 60/40 split quietly becomes something else entirely. Turning rebalancing on sells back to the target weights whenever drift passes the threshold you set — trimming what has run, adding to what has not.

The backtest applies the same rule to every portfolio and to the index line, so the comparison stays like-for-like. What it does not do is charge for it: in a real taxable account each rebalance books capital gains and may trigger an exit load, and neither is deducted here. A strategy that rebalances often looks better in a backtest than it would in practice.

CAGR and XIRR are answering different questions

CAGR assumes one amount invested once and left alone. XIRR is the annualised rate implied by cash flows on the dates they actually happened, which is what a monthly SIP needs. For the same portfolio over the same window the two will not match, because most SIP money has been invested for far less than the full period.

What a backtest cannot tell you

• Nothing here forecasts. The spread between the best and worst windows for the same fund is usually wide enough that any single figure drawn from it is a poor prediction.
• Tax and exit loads are not priced, so rebalancing is free in this model and is not free in a real account.
• Expense ratios are already inside a fund's NAV, but an index carries none, which is part of why beating one is harder than it looks.
• Survivorship: schemes that were merged away or wound up are not in the search, so the universe you can pick from is the one that made it to today.
• A fund's mandate, manager and holdings can change across a long backtest. The NAV series is continuous; the thing producing it may not be.

Why the search shows growth plans only

An IDCW plan pays part of its return out along the way, so its NAV series is not comparable with a growth plan, or with a total-return index, without adjusting for every payout. Rather than show two versions of the same scheme whose numbers cannot be read against each other, the fund search lists growth plans and leaves the rest out.

Scheme NAV history comes from public mutual fund APIs and the index series from a public daily total-return mirror. Both are fetched when you open the tool and cached in your browser for the day, so returning to it later does not download them again.