Banking funds outperform markets by a huge margin, over one year

Mutual funds' investors primarily focused on banking and financial services segments have secured the highest profits over the past one year as these schemes have outranked the NSE and BSE benchmarks, with considerably healthy margins.

The average returns of this category of schemes falls at around 54 per cent over the past one year, while ICICI Prudential Banking and Financial Fund has  scaled the highest during the period with a return of 67 per cent to its investors.

As a matter of fact, the category stands as the highest performer among all segments over the past one year, followed by smallcap equity, which is up 40.43 per cent and then infrastructure funds, up 36.88 per cent. Interestingly, midcap and largecap equity funds have delivered 35 per cent and 28 per cent returns respectively, between the period of February 23, 2016 to February 23, 2017. 

Birla Sun Life Banking and Finance Services Fund generated the highest return of 59 per cent, Tata Banking and Finance Services Fund generated 56.74 per cent returns and Sundaram Financial Services Opportunities Fund generated 56.64 per cent returns. While the UTI Banking Sector Fund also generated 56.56 per cent in the past one year, with most of the other banking and finance sector funds trading beyond the 40 per cent mark.

Moreover, the stocks of Yes Bank surged the most by 111 per cent in the period of last one year, whereas the Punjab National Bank stocks gained 92.78 per cent. While, Federal Bank and State Bank of India gained 74.48 per cent and 70.63 per cent respectively, attaining the highest gainers' slab of the segment.