by he best mutual funds are not the ones that top the charts for a year or two. Those rankings keep changing. What really matters for long-term investors is consistency– the ability to deliver decent, inflation-beating returns across market cycles.
At Outlook Money, we looked beyond short-term winners and focused on equity mutual funds that have quietly done their job year after year. Our aim was simple: identify funds that never disappointed long-term investors.or this analysis, we looked at equity mutual fund schemes whose seven-year rolling returns never fell below 12 per cent in any seven-year period over the last decade, from December 2015 to December 2025. The returns were rolled on a daily basis.We chose 12 per cent because it is the most commonly used assumed return for equity mutual funds in long-term financial planning. We chose a seven-year holding period because most experts recommend investing in equity only if you can stay invested for at least that long.
In other words, we were not looking for funds that delivered spectacular returns in a bull market. We were looking for funds that avoided very low returns, even over long holding periods.
To do this, we analysed the seven-year rolling returns of actively managed equity mutual fund schemes between December 2015 and December 2025. Only schemes that had completed at least 10 years of existence were considered. This ensured that each fund had lived through different market phases of strong rallies, sharp corrections, and periods of high volatility.
