# Funds That Vanished

_Systematic Investing . 2026-07-17 . By Tanmay Kurtkoti. Educational, illustrative, not advice._

Friend sorted his app by ten year returns on Tuesday and picked from the top of the list. Reasonable. Everybody does it.

Then I asked him where the losers were.

Not the ones near the bottom of his screen. The ones that are not on his screen at all.

Funds do not retire on a high note. They get merged into a sibling or quietly wound up, and it is almost never the one that has been winning. Over ten years, roughly 75 pct of Indian large cap funds were still standing. Tax savers, 73. Mid and small cap, over just five years, 70. So about one in four large caps walked off the board, and the record walked off with it.

Here is the part that bothers me. Nobody moved those funds to the bottom of the ranking. They were removed from the photograph. Whatever is left is what your app then calls the category average.

The shape of it, illustratively: say the 75 still listed averaged 12 pct a year. Say the 25 that got folded away were running 8.5 when they went. The average of everything you could actually have picked on day one is 11.13, not 12. On Rs 10,00,000 over ten years that is Rs 2,34,289 of difference between the number on the screen and the number that was available to you.

The published scorecards that count the dead ones say so out loud. They use every fund that existed at the start of the period as the denominator, on the grounds that grading only the survivors is biased in favour of the fund category. That is the whole reason their numbers read harsher than the leaderboard in your hand. Same market. One of them just refuses to bury the evidence.

Honest version: a ten year track record only exists for the funds that lasted ten years. You had to choose on day one, not on day 3650, and on day one a quarter of your options were names nobody remembers now