A screener to select mutual funds with lower risk & higher return


Here is a simple way to select mutual funds that have beat the category benchmark in terms of both return and risk over the last one, two, three, four and five years simultaneously! That is higher than the benchmark return and lower than the benchmark risk.

This option is available in our monthly MF fund screener which has rolling return and rolling downside capture screening capability.

Unlike return, risk can be measured in many ways. The simplest and most common measure of risk is the standard deviation. We look at a mutual fund’s daily returns and determine how much they deviate from the average daily return over say a year or three years. This tells us how volatile the fund is. A fund with lower risk is one with a lower standard deviation than a benchmark.

The excess return of the fund = Five-year return of the fund minus the five-year return of the index. We need this to be positive. We have used a five-year return as an example here.

The Excess risk of the fund = Five-year standard deviation of the fund minus five-year standard deviation of the index. So if the excess risk of the fund is negative it means the fund has taken lower risk than the index and vice versa.

Both these measures are plotted against each other for five years for funds across categories. Clearly, we are looking for funds with higher return and lower risk. That is we are looking for funds with a positive excess return and negative excess risk.

Shortlisting mutual funds with lower risk and higher return
A plot of the excess return of funds vs their excess risk

This screening is only over five years. To gauge performance consistency, we repeat the above test for one, two, three, four and five-year periods. That is a fund must be within the blue box for all the periods simultaneously!

These are the number of qualifying funds in each category.

Number of qualifying funds in each category as of July 7th 2022

  • Aggressive Hybrid Fund5
  • Dividend Yield 1
  • Large & Mid Cap Fund 2
  • Large Cap Fund 1
  • Mid Cap Fund4
  • Sectoral/ Thematic 4
  • Small cap Funds 3
  • Value Funds 1

That is a total of 21 funds out of 378 funds. This is based on trailing returns. To analyze consistent performance the screener has rolling returns and rolling downside protection-based filters. This is the July 2022 Equity Mutual Fund Screener.

This is a video guide for using the screener.

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Pattabiraman editor freefincalDr M. Pattabiraman(PhD) is the founder, managing editor and primary author of freefincal. He is an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He has over nine years of experience publishing news analysis, research and financial product development. Connect with him via Twitter or Linkedin or YouTube. Pattabiraman has co-authored three print books: (1) You can be rich too with goal-based investing (CNBC TV18) for DIY investors. (2) Gamechanger for young earners. (3) Chinchu Gets a Superpower! for kids. He has also written seven other free e-books on various money management topics. He is a patron and co-founder of “Fee-only India,” an organisation for promoting unbiased, commission-free investment advice.


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