The most bullet-proof small-cap fund of the last 10 years

Summary: We recently did a piece on how there are three small-cap funds that beat the Nifty 250 Smallcap TRI index 100 per cent of the time based on five-year rolling returns. But we didn’t stop there today. We have now checked how these three funds held up when the market went into freefall, through six major crashes since 2015. Small-cap funds can make you feel like a genius one year and break your heart the next. But what if there was a small-cap fund that has not only delivered outstanding returns but also protected you better than most when markets crashed? In a recent article, we analysed five-year daily rolling returns for all 13 active small-cap funds with a 10-year history between September 21, 2020, and September 19, 2025. For the uninitiated, rolling returns simply mean checking returns for every possible five-year period, not just one fixed start and end date. It basically removes the effect of luck or perfect timing and shows which funds deliver no matter when you invest. Coming back to the article’s findings, we observed that the Nifty Smallcap 250 TRI, which tracks the entire small-cap universe, delivered a strong 18.07 per cent annualised return during this period. Impressively, 12 out of 13 active funds beat this average, and 10 of them delivered over 20 per cent annualised returns. Even more impressive was the fact that three funds beat the