Download new versions of the mutual fund lump sum and SIP screeners that pull & analyze data from Value Research. The new VR fund categories have been incorporated. Since many funds have changed after the SEBI recategorization, users must check (in the sheet) if the fund is rate or not. If the fund is unrated, then in VR’s opinion the change in the fund is too big to ignore past data. Therefore for presently unrated funds, this screener should not be used.

If the fund is rated, then it is VR’s opinion (even though the fund may have announced a fundamental change in strategy) that the fund has not changed drastically. In such a case, past performance may be considered. Please note that I am not asking you to take the rating seriously, but asking you to check if a rating is issued or not.

Before we begin, to avoid confusion, there are three different screener files available:

1 Lump Sum screener based on annual returns (data from VR) – the latest version in this post and is an Excel file

2 SIP Screener based on trailing SIP returns (data from VR) – the latest version in this post and is a Google Spreadsheet.  Ramesh Vijayaraghavan made some modifications to simplify usage.

3 Monthly Outperformance consistency screener (data from AMFI and VR) – this is published each month. Last was in Jan 2018 and next one in the coming days. This is check for outperformance against a category benchmark.

Lump Sum screener based on annual returns

This pulls annual returns (Jan 1st to Dec 31s) from VR and does the following:

1: If you give a reference rank of 15 (variable), it will tell how consistent funds have got a better rank when 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 year returns (based on annual returns) are considered.

2: How consistently funds have got a 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 year return that is better than the corresponding duration median. The median simply divides a data distribution into two – bottom half and top half. For distributions that are not “bell shaped”, the median is a better measure than the mean or the average.

3: It now includes 1,3,5,10Y trailing returns data. Trailing return means return from last business day to 1Y/3Y before etc. So this will change each business day. You can check if the fund is rated or not in this sheet. If not rated, then this screener has no meaning.

4: In the evaluate sheet you can compare the 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 Y returns of funds in any category with any index fund or ETF. Earlier indices were available for comparison. I have no replaced that with index funds or ETFs. This is more realistic (at least for index funds) as expenses are included.

5: You can also compare annual returns of funds with any index fund or ETF. This gives you a measure of how the fund fared when returns were negative. You can find this in the downside protection sheet.

6: In the shortlist-3 sheet, you can check how consistently the funds annual return (last 12Y) has fared above the median annual return.

The following is a user guide.

NOTE: Before using the sheet, you must log in into VR via the Excel sheet. See this can be done here

Download the freefincal mutual fund screener version 7

SIP Screener (Google Sheets)

Thanks to Ramesh Vijayaraghavan, all you need to do is, select a fund category, and wait for the sheet to execute and display results. You can enter a SIP return rank and make the screener diplay X no of funds that have a better rank than say, 10 or 5. Theannuall retun based CAGR is also available in this sheet and can be used to spot funds that have consistently beat the category average (did not replace this with the median as yet).

Follow this link make a copy in your G-drive to use. If you share the sheet, ensure that the screener source is mentioned as freefincal  and data source as Value Research.