The mutual fund industry in India has seen remarkable growth, with the number of unique investors skyrocketing from around 20 million in March 2020 to over 54 million in March 2025. Despite this surge in participation, many investors still struggle to access actionable data and insights that go beyond basic historical returns, fund ratings, or portfolio data points. These traditional metrics often fail to provide a truly holistic view for informed investment decisions.

Recognising this gap, Share.Market (PhonePe Wealth) introduced the CRISP Mutual Funds Scorecard. This inaugural edition aims to provide unbiased, transparent, and actionable insights to empower investors.

What is the CRISP Framework?

CRISP stands for Consistency, Risk and Investment Style of the Portfolio. It is Share.Market’s in-house evaluation framework designed to provide a detailed view of performance, relative risk, and how money invested in mutual funds is managed. The framework assesses funds based on three key parameters:

  • Consistency in Performance: This measures how consistently a fund has performed relative to its category peers. It analyses 1-year rolling returns over the past five years and classifies schemes as “High,” “Medium,” or “Low” based on a scoring system that rewards consistent top quartile performance and penalises bottom quartile performance. This helps investors identify funds that have consistently outperformed, rather than those with sporadic results.
  • Relative Risk vs. Peers: This parameter assesses a fund’s volatility compared to others in the same category over the past five years using annualized standard deviation of monthly returns. It helps investors spot risk outliers by classifying funds as “Within acceptable range” or “Too High” on risk. Avoiding funds that take extreme risks within a category is a key consideration.
  • Investment Style or Factor Analysis: This unique feature of CRISP provides insights into a fund’s management style by analysing its exposure to factors like Value, Quality, and Momentum over a five-year period. Based on weighted average portfolio factor scores, funds are classified as “High”, “Medium” or “Low” across these three styles relative to peers and benchmarks. Understanding a fund’s style helps in comparing it with similar funds and achieving desired diversification.

Why Investment Style is Crucial

Even within the same fund category defined by market capitalisation or sector, funds can have significantly different investment styles. These styles, much like different bowling types in cricket, perform differently depending on the market conditions. For example, Quality outperformed Value and Momentum from 2018 to 2020, but Value and Momentum have gained prominence more recently.

Considering a fund’s investment style is vital when comparing its performance or risk with peers. Furthermore, understanding investment styles helps investors achieve style diversification in their equity portfolios, mitigating the impact of the cyclical nature of style performance.

Key Findings from the Scorecard for March 2025

The inaugural CRISP Scorecard, based on data from March 2020 to March 2025, reveals some interesting patterns across fund categories:

  • Funds demonstrating ‘High’ performance consistency often derived their edge from a strong Value or Momentum factor, or a combination of both, over the past five years.
  • The Quality style, while intuitively desirable, has not consistently been a standalone primary driver for top-tier performance consistency over the last five years. Funds high on Quality style have struggled for consistency compared to Value or Momentum styles during this period.
  • While some consistently high-performing funds operated with relatively higher risk, elevated risk was not a prerequisite for high performance in the majority of cases.
  • The report highlights that Asset Management Companies (AMCs) exhibit different approaches to investment styles. Some AMCs show a strong bias towards a single style (e.g., Edelweiss, HDFC, Axis, Mirae, Invesco, HSBC, Motilal Oswal towards one style; PPFAS towards Quality and Value; Canara Robeco towards Momentum and Quality), while others appear more diversified across their offerings (e.g., quant, ICICI Prudential, SBI, Aditya Birla Sun Life, Bandhan, Kotak Mahindra). This provides investors with ample choice for style diversification.
  • Interestingly, some funds achieved high performance consistency without a strong tilt towards ‘High’ Value or ‘High’ Momentum. These funds showed more balanced or muted factor exposures, suggesting that factors like superior stock selection or effective asset allocation were significant performance drivers beyond overt style dominance.
  • Conversely, some funds with ‘High’ exposure to styles that performed well (Value and/or Momentum) did not achieve strong Consistency scores. This reinforces that favourable style factors alone do not guarantee top results.

Overall, while Value and Momentum have been frequent drivers of success over the last five years, the path to consistent performance is varied, with some funds succeeding through balanced exposures or unique strategies.

You can read the CRISP Mutual Funds Scorecard published for the quarter ending in March 25 here.

Using CRISP in Your Investment Decisions

CRISP is designed to be a powerful tool for analysing and shortlisting mutual funds by providing actionable insights on consistency, risk, and investment style. The CRISP Scorecard provides a deeper level of analysis, moving beyond simple rankings to help investors understand the underlying drivers of fund performance and risk.

However, CRISP should be used in conjunction with other qualitative factors such as the strength and stability of the fund management team, fund size, and associated considerations.

Crucially, investors must always take into account their personal investment horizon, risk appetite, and financial circumstances before making any investment decisions.

Remember – Past performance is not an indication of future results. Mutual fund investments are subject to market risks, and it is essential to read all scheme-related documents carefully before investing.

Note: Data referenced in the report is as of March 2025.