309 of 429 PMS Strategies Beat Their Stated Benchmark Over One Year

Of the 429 PMS strategies carrying paired one-year fund and benchmark data dated 30 June 2026, 309 — 72.0% — beat their stated benchmark. 120 did not. The median strategy beat its benchmark by 4.50 percentage points.

About this data. The figures in this article are drawn from the PMS Sahi Hai fund dataset and are stated as of 30 June 2026. They cover 429 PMS strategies: those carrying both a one-year return and the one-year return of their own stated benchmark, dated 30 June 2026, in the Equity, Debt, Hybrid and Multi Asset classifications. Of the 662 PMS strategies in the dataset, 81 were excluded for want of a paired benchmark figure, 129 for carrying a different reporting date, and 23 for falling outside those four classifications (14 thematic, 4 unclassified, 3 exchange-traded, 1 sectoral, 1 arbitrage). Restricting to those four classifications is our own editorial methodology for this article, not a SEBI requirement.

How returns are compared. Every strategy is compared only with the benchmark named in its own record, over the same one-year period. The 429 strategies are measured against 15 different benchmarks, so no single market index describes them all. Returns are trailing one-year figures as reported in our dataset; they are not SEBI-standardised composite returns. We made no independent adjustments for risk, fees or taxes; their treatment in the source data has not been independently verified.

Limitations. One year is a single measurement window and says nothing about repeatability. Strategies absent from our dataset, or absent for this period, are not represented in these figures, so the article does not account for survivorship. We have not established why some records carry earlier reporting dates, and no conclusion should be drawn from that. No comparison is made between PMS and any other investment vehicle.

There is no single index to measure Indian PMS against. Across these 429 strategies we count 15 distinct benchmarks. The largest group — 279 strategies — is measured against the S&P BSE 500 TRI; 104 against a Nifty 50 index; the remainder against multi-asset and debt indices. A headline claiming that some number of strategies “beat the Nifty 50” would compare 325 of them to an index they do not report against. So every figure here is a strategy measured against the benchmark named in its own record.

A 72.0% beat rate is not the same as saying PMS works. The distribution of excess return over each strategy's own benchmark is broad:

A quarter of these strategies trailed their benchmark, and the gap between the 25th and 75th percentile is over 10 percentage points in a single year. The mean excess (+5.57 percentage points) sits above the median, which is consistent with a stronger positive tail in the distribution.

Only one Hybrid strategy qualified, so no rate is shown for it — a single record is not a percentage. Debt (20 strategies) and Multi Asset (24) are small samples and should be read as such.

These two rates cannot be compared directly. They differ in benchmark and in what sits inside each group: the S&P BSE 500 group is entirely equity (279 of 279), while the Nifty 50 group is 102 equity plus one multi-asset and one hybrid, and the equity mandates within each differ too. Without controlling for cohort composition, the gap cannot be attributed to index behaviour, to manager skill, or to anything else. It is reported here as an observation, not an explanation.

From 662 PMS strategies, we kept those carrying a one-year return and the one-year return of their own stated benchmark — a strategy missing either side is excluded rather than shown half-complete. That leaves 581. Of those, 452 are dated 30 June 2026. Restricting to the permitted classifications — Equity, Debt, Hybrid and Multi Asset — removes 23 records, giving the 429 used throughout. We publish the denominator with the number, because a beat rate without one is unreadable.