Assessing the performance of mutual fund calls for evaluating its returns in the past few years. Although there are a number of factors that help judge a mutual fund’s performance such as macro-economic factors, credibility of a fund house and those of fund managers, sub-category of the fund scheme, stock allocation, et al.
However, the returns posted by the mutual fund scheme are seen as one of the key criterion of a mutual fund’s future performance.
Here we take a look at the large cap funds and the returns delivered by some of the top-performing ones since their inception. At the outset, we try to deconstruct what are large cap funds?
Large cap funds: Large-cap funds primarily invest in equity shares of companies that are placed in the top 100 companies of the benchmark index.. They are known to offer steady returns to their stakeholders over a long period.
Returns since inception
Most large cap funds gave anywhere between 10-16 percent return since their inception, the top-performing mutual funds gave as high as 19-24 percent annualised returns, as shown in the table below.
| Large cap funds | Returns since inception (%) |
| Sundaram Large Cap Fund - Reg – Growth | 24.36 |
| Kotak Bluechip Fund Regular Growth | 19.3 |
| Tata Large Cap Fund - Reg – Growth | 19.33 |
| HDFC Top 100 Fund – Growth | 18.94 |
(Source: SMC MF Weekly Update as on August 16)
As we can see in the chart above, large cap funds gave as high as 24 percent return on funds since inception. Kotak Bluechip Fund Regular Growth gave 19.3 percent return, Tata Large Cap Fund - Reg - Growth delivered 19.33 percent return and Sundaram Large Cap Fund - Reg - Growth gave 24.36 percent return. At the same time, HDFC Top 100 Fund - Growth delivered 18.94 percent return.
Sundaram Large Cap Fund- Top performing fund
The top performing scheme in the large cap category is Sundaram Large Cap Fund. We explain a little more about this fund here.
The fund was launched on July 30, 2002. The key stock holdings are ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, RIL, Infosys, HDFC, Sun Pharma, L&T, SBI, Bharti Airtel and Axis Bank.
The fund's returns in the past one, three and five years are 5.9 percent, 14.4 percent and 10.9 percent, respectively.
The fund is overweight on banks, pharma and biotech, beverages and underweight on diversified FMCG, petroleum products and power.
Among sectoral allocations, the fund has invested 28.3 percent in banks, 11.8 percent in IT-software, 9.9 percent in finance, 8 percent in pharma and biotech and 7.4 percent in petroleum products.
If someone had invested ₹10,000 in SIP every month since inception, the money would have grown to ₹24 lakh, according to the AMC's factsheet. The scheme's average AUM is ₹2,932 crore.
