Learn Lesson 5 of 6 5 minutes
Whose record is the three-year number?
A fund page shows you a three-year return and the name of the person running the fund. It rarely shows you that the two have very little to do with each other.
Built on P7 — manager tenure, read from the monthly factsheets.
A mutual fund is a legal entity that outlives the people who run it. Its record is continuous; their tenures are not. So the number on the page covers a period, and the name on the page covers a different one, and unless somebody puts the two dates side by side nobody notices.
An example from the largest funds here
ICICI Prudential Large & Mid Cap Fund launched on 1 Jun 1998 and has been running for 28 yrs. Its page carries a three-year return of 15.35% a year.
The record on the page
36 monthsthe period the displayed three-year return covers
The current lead manager
3 monthsGaurav Jain has been named on the factsheets since 1 Jun 2026
What that means, said plainly
33 of those 36 monthswere earned before the person now running the fund was named on it
This is not a criticism of anybody. It is a statement about what a number can and cannot be evidence of. A three-year figure mostly earned under other people is evidence about the fund house's process, the mandate and the market — and very little evidence about the individual whose name sits beside it.
Tenure read from the monthly factsheet archive; the return is the fund's own trailing figure. Both on the fund page.
The fund is run by 2 named managers: Gaurav Jain (since Jun 2026), Lalit Kumar (since Jun 2026). A factsheet names everyone with a responsibility on the scheme, which is worth knowing before attributing anything to one of them.
Over the span of the archive this fund has changed hands 10 times, most recently in Jun 2026. Each of those months is a date on which the record stopped being the same person's.
Where the dates come from
Not from a biography and not from a press release. Every month, every fund house publishes a factsheet that names the managers of each scheme. This build has parsed 47,290 of those scheme-months and resolved 677 people out of them. A manager's tenure is the run of consecutive months on which their name appears — so a change of hands is dated to the month it was disclosed, which is the only month anybody could have known about it.
The one that says "at least"
Some tenures on this site are written with a ≥ in front of them. That is not a rounding: it means the person was already named on the first factsheet we hold for that fund, so all we can honestly say is that they have been there at least that long. They may have been there for a decade before.
Those figures are floors, and we treat them as floors. A censored tenure gets no percentile against its category — a floor has no place in a distribution — and it is never used to claim that a record predates anybody, because it cannot. This lesson's own example had to be chosen from the funds whose start dates are known, for exactly that reason.
And — inevitably — it does not predict
It would be satisfying if long-tenured managers went on to do better. We tested it: ranking funds by their lead manager's tenure gave a top-fifth-minus-bottom-fifth spread of −0.53% points a year over the following twelve months, with a t of -0.56 and an interval of −2.34 to +1.35. Nothing. The manager data is also the thinnest in the study — factsheet listings are sparse before 2018 — so that row carries less weight than the others, not more.
So the use of this measure is not to pick anybody. It is to tell you what a displayed number is evidence of, which is a question you can answer before you have any opinion about the fund at all.
The argument against this lesson
Fund houses are institutions, not solo practices. A large AMC has a research desk, a risk framework, a model portfolio and an investment committee that outlast any individual, and in the most process-driven houses a change of manager genuinely is closer to a change of signature than a change of strategy. Co-managed funds make the attribution worse in the other direction: the same months are credited to every person named, so nobody's tenure is really their own record. And a factsheet names the manager of record, which is a regulatory designation rather than a statement about who argued for which stock. The honest use of this measure is narrow — it tells you whether a displayed figure predates the current names, and stops there.
Everything above is a description of what has already happened, measured from what fund houses, AMFI and the exchanges publish. It is not advice, not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything, and not a forecast — neither Anveshan nor Lineage Money is a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst.