The fund defines mid and small companies as the ones which have a market capitalisation below that of the 100th stock in the S&P CNX 500 index. It aims to invest at least 75 per cent of the corpus in such companies and the rest in companies above the mentioned capitalisation or not forming part of CNX 500 index.
Since the companies it looks for carry an inherent risk, this is reflected in the fund's varying fortunes over the years.

Performance

Till 2011 the fund had not posted any significant performance barring 2009. But the last 18 months have witnessed a heightened activity and the fund has emerged as a strong competitor to the best performing funds in the category.

It was part of the top quartile last year and has managed to curtail its fall better than peers when we look at its year-to-date returns. It has also done better than the benchmark in the past two years. The fund's portfolio has a lot of stocks which have been around for more than 6 years, such as Gujarat State Petronet, Exide Industries and Pidilite Industries.

While its mid cap bets have mostly turned profitable, the same cannot be said of its small cap bets which have more losses against their name than profits and hurting performance.

The top gainers for the fund include IPCA Labs, Yes Bank, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial services, Pidilite Industries and IndusInd Bank while service sector bets like Mercator, Television Eighteen India and Trent have been drags on the fund's profits.

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