'Almost 0 returns after 3 years of SIPs'. Time to stop?

Summary: If it feels like your SIPs have gone nowhere, you are not alone. But pausing now will be a costly mistake. Read the story below to find out why.

Scroll through any investor forum on Reddit or social media right now and you will find the same distress repeating itself: “Three years of SIPs and my returns are almost zero.” “My XIRR has crashed from 15 per cent to -8 per cent in a month.” “I have barely seen profit since I started a year ago.”

This anxiety is common, particularly among investors who have not been in the market for too long and are perhaps now facing their first major market crash. If you are one of them, the current downturn might be making you consider whether you should even continue.

The short answer is ‘yes’. That is because poor returns in the short run and especially if you haven’t been investing for long, are not a warning sign. They are, in fact, almost a rite of passage. Here is why.

Markets can give you nothing for years and still make you rich

Equity returns come in lumps, not in a steady line. The BSE 500, a proxy for the broader market, for instance, has seen divergent performance across years. It swung from 37.6 per cent return in 2017 to -1.8 per cent the very next year. Yet its annualised return over the last decade is a respectable 12.3 per cent. An average flexi-cap fund, benchmarked against the index, did 12.9 per cent over the same period.

A Rs 10,000 monthly SIP in this fund, started a decade ago, would have turned Rs 12 lakh of contributions into Rs 23.5 lakh today. That is the point. Markets reward patience, not timing. Your portfolio will experience some good years and some bad. But the dips and the surges even out over time. Staying invested through both is what actually builds wealth.

Early years always look worse than they are

Your SIP returns are measured as XIRR—the annualised return that accounts for the timing of each instalment you invest. And it might be looking terrible today simply because the portfolio is in its early stage. 

Suggested read: 'Feeling cheated by the market. 7 years of SIP and I'm done'

Think of it this way: your most recent SIP instalment has had almost no time to grow, while the one from three years ago has had slightly more. In the early years, most of your money is still fresh. Even a small market fall hits the whole portfolio hard because there is little accumulated growth to cushion it.

But as your corpus grows larger, as the money already invested starts to outweigh the new money coming in, the portfolio gains stability. Volatility hurts less.

This month’s Mutual Fund Insight has mapped this with hard data. Our cover story tracked which portfolios held up through the worst market crashes and which buckled. One investor, for instance, who had been running an SIP for a decade, held healthy returns even during the brutal 2008 crash. Another just a couple of years in saw serious pain. Seniority in the market proved to be an effective armour. The story has also answered how long it takes for a portfolio to reach that age.

So, fretting over poor returns today is futile if you started only a few years ago. In fact, compounding speeds up with time.

In the flexi-cap example above, the Rs 10,000 monthly SIP built Rs 6.2 lakh in the first four years. But in the next four years, the corpus more than doubled to over Rs 16 lakh. The early years feel slow because they are. The real acceleration comes later.

Suggested read: A year of SIPs & almost 0 returns? Here's what's going wrong

Remember, a falling market is a discount sale

When markets fall, your SIP buys more units of the fund at lower prices. This pulls down your average cost per unit, meaning when prices recover, your gains are amplified.

Suggested read: SIPs and rupee cost averaging

And with the Nifty 50 now trading below 20 times earnings—a level that does not appear often—even seasoned investors are paying attention. Fund managers like Prashant Jain and S Naren have pointed to this correction as one that has cleared significant overvaluation from earlier. Buying at these levels, systematically, is exactly what SIPs are built to do.

Your takeaway

Continue your SIPs. Poor returns in your early years are not a verdict but only the beginning of the story. The math is on your side; it just needs room to work.

If you need help with deciding which funds are worth putting your faith and money in, consider checking our recommendations at Value Research Fund Advisor. Our analysts go beyond recent performance and assess funds on a variety of long-term parameters. Only those that clear our rigorous analysis make it to our ‘Buy’ list.

Try Fund Advisor today

This article was originally published on April 07, 2026.