The lone warrior among the large-cap category

The year of 2017 was the year of wealth creation for the investors, but the year 2018 is checking the patience of investors. Since the last six months, the markets have been witnessing a roller-coaster ride with weak global cues and other macroeconomic traps.

The phenomena has wiped out investors' extra return expectation and brought them to the realistic world with curtailed expectations. Even though benchmark indices have recovered, the constraint of volatility is so high that investors are still looking for a good and safer investment options.

Among the equity funds which are actively-managed large-cap mutual fund schemes are considered to be the most safe in the current market. But does it actually serve fair returns to the investors. With the market recovery, if we see and evaluate the performance of these large-cap funds it seems that the large-cap schemes are lagging far behind the index's performance.

Even though each of the funds follows different benchmarks, we have considered Nifty 50 TRI as a benchmark to evaluate the performance. With this, we have analyzed the trailing returns of the last 6 months of the Nifty TRI and large-cap category and all the funds within the category.

In the past 6 months, the Nifty 50 TRI has offered a return of 6 per cent against which the large-cap category has served investors with a negative return of 0.2 per cent. Whereas no fund except one fund has managed to beat the Nifty 50 TRI, there are many funds who have beaten the category average returns but are not able to beat the index.

Among all those schemes, the lone warrior of the category is Axis Blue-Chip Fund who have managed to beat the benchmark Nifty 50 TRI performance. The key reason behind this is not all constituent stocks of Nifty 50 have performed, only a select few stocks have pushed the index and put it in the place where it's currently. So the funds which have placed their bets on these stocks have managed to survive. The large-cap category seems to be very safe currently, but there is only one fund and fund manager who have managed to beat the major benchmark index.

Below are the some of the large-cap category toppers on the return front in the last six months. If we analyse, except the Axis Blue-Chip Fund no other fund among the topper is actively-managed. So we consider, the Axis Blue-Chip Fund is the sole warrior among the actively-managed large-cap fund space.