MF update: Top category performers of last one month

Contrary to the common belief, in the last one month, the best performing sector funds were financial sector funds. Despite all the noise around the bad loans, rising delinquencies level and deteriorating financial condition of banks, especially public-sector banks, share prices of these companies have given returns better than many other sector funds.

In the last one month, when the bellwether index Nifty was marginally down by 0.4 per cent, Nifty Bank and Nifty PSU Bank index were up by 4.55 per cent and 2.61 per cent, respectively. Among sectoral funds, these remained the top performer. It has generated return of 2.53 per cent in the same period. The only category of the fund that has given the positive return in the last one month is an International category. The worst performer being Pharma sector that has given a negative return of 8.61 per cent. Digging deeper, we see that passively managed funds have performed better than actively managed funds among the banking sector.

In the last three months, the best performer remains the IT sector and bank which remained the second-best performer.