Aditya Birla Sun Life Tax Relief 96 is One of the oldest ELSS funds, this fund sported a three-star rating for many years but has shown a material improvement in performance since 2014, climbing to the five-star ranking recently. The fund has been consistently overweight on mid-caps relative to the category, with about 40 to 50 per cent allocation in large-caps and about 50 per cent in mid-caps in recent times.

Aditya Birla Sun Life Tax Relief 96 fund suffered quite a bit of fund manager shuffle in its initial years until 2006. The management team has remained very stable since then, with Ajay Garg at the helm since 2006.

Aditya Birla Sun Life Tax Relief 96 fund follows a multi-cap, bottom-up strategy. It uses a 360 degree view of a company in order to invest in compelling businesses, without any market-cap bias.

The investment philosophy of the fund is to invest in quality companies. It hunts for companies run by professional managements, which have predictability of earnings and strong moats. The portfolio reveals quite a few unconventional mid-cap picks as top holdings. The fund's quality bias has also led to a number of MNC stocks figuring among stock choices.

Aditya Birla Sun Life Tax Relief 96 fund struggled to beat its benchmarks and peers in 2010 and 2011 but pulled up its socks from 2012, faring very well in the first two years of this bull market, in 2014 and 2015. The three year return is now over 4 percentage points ahead of the benchmark returns and 1 percentage point more than the category returns. The five year record shows a near 2 percentage point differential.

Overall, Aditya Birla Sun Life Tax Relief 96 is a fund that sticks to quality mid-caps for the long haul.