WITH 2025 BEHIND US, investors are looking out for investing strategies for the New Year. So, where should you invest in 2026? In equities, past performance is one of the safest criteria to select mutual funds to invest in. Consistently performing schemes, which cushion downsides, are some of the best bets. Fortune India devised a two-stage methodology of quantitative and qualitative assessment to identify the top investment options in 14 categories across mutual funds and insurance.

Morningstar India is our knowledge partner for mutual funds and SecureNow Insurance Broker for life-, health-, term- and motor insurance. For qualitative assessment, the data was placed before a jury to identify the Top 3 in each category.

The high-powered jury included Ashish Shanker, MD and CEO of Motilal Oswal Private Wealth; Ashutosh Singh, MD and CEO, BSE Index Services Pvt Ltd; Jignesh Desai, co-founder, NJ Group; Navneet Munot, MD and CEO, HDFC Asset Management Co. Ltd; Pranav Haldea, MD, PRIME Database Group, and Soumya Rajan, founder and CEO, Waterfield Advisors.

The Process

We considered 10 categories in mutual funds and four in insurance. We used rolling returns instead of trailing returns in calculations to identify the schemes that have performed consistently, while avoiding any recency bias in performance of the funds. A rolling return is the average of a series of returns over a long period.

Mutual Funds

Equity mutual funds include large-cap, mid-cap, small-cap and all-cap funds. All-cap funds comprise flexi-cap, multi-cap, ELSS or tax-saving, focussed equity and large- and mid-cap funds. In fixed income, we considered long duration funds (dynamic bond, medium-to-long duration, long duration & gilt funds), corporate bond funds, short duration funds (short duration, banking & PSU funds and medium-duration funds) and ultra-short duration funds (ultra-short duration, low duration and money market funds). We looked at the best fund managers in equity and fixed income too.

We considered funds with a minimum five-year vintage in equity categories and minimum three-year vintage in fixed income categories. Further, the schemes with average assets under management (AUM) for the last 12 months, in the top 95% of the cumulative AUM of the respective category, were considered.

For the best fund manager, those who have been managing two or more eligible funds within the asset class for at least three years were considered.

In equity funds, 70% weight was assigned to returns and 30% to risk.

In debt schemes, risk assumed a weight of 40-50% in line with the belief that investing in equity is to earn inflation-beating returns whereas investors in debt schemes demand safety of capital while earning decent returns. A final score was reached for each eligible scheme in its respective category as per weights. Each individual parameter for the fund is rebased on a scale of 100. The fund with the best score for each parameter gets a rebased score of 100. The rebasing is done for each award category individually. After each individual parameter for the fund is rebased on a scale of 100, the rebased scores are multiplied by the respective weights to arrive at a final score for the fund. Each fund is then ranked based on the final score within its award category. For top fund managers, a composite score was ascertained for each fund manager comprising weighted average of the final score by each scheme managed by them by the one-year average AUM of the fund.