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The scheme seeks to generate long term capital appreciation and income distribution to investors from a portfolio that is predominantly invested in equity and equity related securities of large cap companies.

A top-of-mind choice in the large-cap category, this fund has beaten both the category and benchmark in eight of the nine years since launch. This has earned it a four- to five-star rating for much of the last six years. While a number of category peers have slipped behind benchmarks in the last one year, this fund has stayed ahead of its benchmark with a 1 percentage-point outperformance.

The fund has traditionally had a higher-than-category allocation to large caps. Its mandate earlier called for a concentrated portfolio, with the stock picks drawn from the top 200 stocks by market cap. Post the SEBI reclassification, the fund is repositioned as a pure large-cap fund. It has tweaked its mandate to maintain a minimum 80 per cent exposure to the top 100 stocks by market cap. This will not materially change its risk or return profile, given that the market-cap range is practically the same. The 'focused' approach has been dropped from the mandate. This is in any case a positive, given that the fund's burgeoning size (`16,100 crore by April 2018) made a very compact portfolio difficult. The changes will take effect from end-May.

The only limitation to assessing this fund is that despite its consistent show in the last nine yeas, it hasn't seen a serious bear market since inception. In 2011 and in 2015, it managed to contain downside well relative to the market. The fund's manager, Manish Gunwani, quit and the fund is now steered by Sankaran Naren. A good fund for conservative investors.

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