A fund which has soundly trounced both the benchmark and the peers by big margins over the last five years, it started out as a three-star fund in 2013 and has retained a four- to five-star rating since 2014. The fund's mandate is to invest at least 65 per cent of its portfolio in small caps. Small caps are defined as the stocks that fall in between the highest and lowest market caps of companies figuring in the S&P BSE SmallCap Index. Leaning neither towards value stocks nor towards growth, the fund, like all Reliance Mutual Fund products, adheres to a middle-of-the-road philosophy of finding good businesses at a good price. Tracking a large investment universe (450 stocks), the fund claims, helps it unearth small-cap opportunities ahead of others. The key attributes for stock selection are good management, reasonable valuations, and business scalability and sustainability.

The fund is not an old-timer in the category and has only a five-year track record. However, in these five years, it has established its credentials by beating its benchmark and peers by sizeable margins. One-year returns are positive despite the losses in the category. Both three- and five-year returns are currently ahead of the SmallCap Index by 23 and 15 percentage points, respectively. It did manage the negative markets of 2011 and 2013 very well with far better returns than the category.