Is ICICI Prudential Value Discovery Fund worth the hype?

Published: November 6, 2022 at 6:00 am

This edition of the fund performance report looks at ICICI Prudential Value Discovery Fund. One of the best-known value-oriented funds in the country with one of the best-known fund managers, Sankaran Naren. Naren was fund manager up to Feb 2011. He got back on the team in Jan 2021, perhaps to help the fund back on its feet.

Disclaimer: Fund performance reports present return and risk analysis of a fund with representative benchmarks and not investment recommendations. It must be expressly understood that the data below reflect only past performance and is in no way an indication of future performance. Our investment recommendations are: Handpicked List of Mutual Funds (PlumbLine).

If there were a fund name that succinctly conveyed what its goal is, Value Discovery would qualify. The broad goal is to buy companies trading lower than their intrinsic value before others (the market) “discover” (or re-discover) them.

Value investing immediately sounds glamorous to the newbie investor. Most people do not tell you that it is quite risky relative to buying a market cap-oriented index like the Nifty or Sensex. Whether you are a value-oriented stock or mutual fund investor, you must be ready to go through years and years of underperformance.

The fund conveniently changed its benchmark from S&P BSE 500 to the Nifty 500 Value 50 Index. The new benchmark is quite easy to beat. Quant-based value investing rarely works! See: Is it time to exit ICICI Value Discovery & Quantum Long Term Equity? This article also has the PE, PB, Div Yield History of the fund.

Months before the March 2020 crash, the fund failed to beat the S&P BSE 500 over the trailing 1,2,3,4,5 year (see above link). Today things are quite different! Whether it is due to Naren’s re-entry or not is hard to prove conclusively.

According to the Sep 2022 freefincal equity mutual fund performance consistency screener, things look quite different today.

TenueNifty 100 TRIICICI Prudential Value Discovery Fund – Direct Plan – Growth
1Y3.777%13.016%
2Y25.499%32.354%
3Y19.302%25.300%
4Y12.099%14.589%
5Y13.113%14.641%

While this is a just reward for investors who have suffered with the fund, such performance is unlikely to last. One cannot but wonder when the fund would start underperforming again (not if, when) and if/when Naren would again exit the fund or, worse, the AMC.

Now let us look at how consistently the fund has performed with respect to Nifty 100 TRI.

1 Rolling return outperformance consistency: the fund returns are compared with category benchmark returns over every possible  3Y,4Y, and 5Y period. Higher the outperformance consistency, the better. Suppose 876 fund returns were compared with 876 benchmark returns, and the fund has beaten the benchmark 675 times. The consistency score will be 675/876 ~ 77%.

Three years

MetricICICI Prudential Value Discovery Fund – Direct Plan – Growth vs Nifty 100 TRI
No of rolling return entries Index (3 Years)1639
No of rolling return entries Fund (3 years)1639
No of times fund outperformed the index (3 years)843
rolling return outperformance Consistency Score (3 years)51%
Four years
MetricICICI Prudential Value Discovery Fund – Direct Plan – Growth vs Nifty 100 TRI
No of rolling return entries Index (4 Years)1396
No of rolling return entries Fund (4 years)1396
No of times fund outperformed the index (4 years)701
rolling return outperformance Consistency Score (4 years)50%

Five years

MetricICICI Prudential Value Discovery Fund – Direct Plan – Growth vs Nifty 100 TRI
No of rolling return entries Index (5 Years)1147
No of rolling return entries Fund (5 years)1147
No of times fund outperformed the index (5 years)543
rolling return outperformance Consistency Score (5 years)47%

Star fund manager or not, enticing fund name/strategy or not, that is consistently poor performance!

2 Upside performance consistency over every possible 3Y,4Y, 5Y: Higher the better. A score of 70% means, 7 out of 10 times, the Fund performed better than the category benchmark when the benchmark was moving upThis is a measure of reward. It is computed from rolling upside capture data (see link below).

MetricICICI Prudential Value Discovery Fund – Direct Plan – Growth vs Nifty 100 TRI
upside performance consistency (3 years)27%
upside performance consistency (4 years)25%
upside performance consistency (5 years)23%
This is to be expected. Value-oriented funds do not always do well when broad market index moves up.
3 Downside performance consistency over every possible 3Y,4Y, 5Y. Higher, the better. A score of 60% means, 6 out of 10 times, the Fund performed better than the category benchmark when the benchmark was moving downThis is a measure of risk protection. It is computed from rolling downside capture data. Read more: An introduction to Downside and Upside Capture Ratios.
MetricICICI Prudential Value Discovery Fund – Direct Plan – Growth vs Nifty 100 TRI
downside protection consistency (3 years)100%
downside protection consistency (4 years)100%
downside protection consistency (5 years)100%

That is an excellent performance. However, downside protection does not matter much if the returns are often below the index!

In summary, ICICI Prudential Value Discovery Fund is only for die-hard fanboys of Sankaran Naren and value-investing principles. The typical investor is expected to go through euphoria and frustration with the fund cyclically and should avoid the fund or the category. A closer look at the fund’s track record reveals that it has only beat the NIfty 100 TRI about 50% of the durations considered, which is quite poor and therefore not worth the hype. Too much seems to depend on Naren’s ability (which no doubt is remarkable). But one cannot stay invested in the fund worrying about when he would exit again or when the performance would drop again.

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