How we measure

What is a TRI benchmark, and why does it matter which one a fund is compared with?

Written by MF Analyser · last checked 3 October 2026

A TRI — Total Return Index — counts the dividends a company pays, not just its share price. Comparing a fund against a plain price index flatters the fund by roughly the market's dividend yield every year, because the fund collects those dividends and the index does not. Every benchmark on MF Analyser is a TRI.

The difference a TRI makes

A price index tracks what shares are worth. A total-return index tracks what an investor in those shares actually ended up with — the price and the dividends, reinvested on the day they were paid.

A mutual fund collects those dividends. They land in the fund and lift its NAV. So comparing the fund to a price index compares something that keeps the dividends with something that throws them away. The fund wins by roughly the market's dividend yield every year, whatever the manager did.

Why an index and not an index fund

There is a second, quieter version of the same mistake: using an index fund as the benchmark instead of the index. An index fund has an expense ratio, tracking error and cash drag of its own. Measure alpha against it and you are partly measuring the tracker's costs, and every fund in the category looks slightly better than it is.

MF Analyser holds the indices themselves — 32 of them, with daily history from January 2012, loaded from NSE.

Which index a fund is measured against

The benchmark is chosen by the fund's SEBI category, not by its name:

Large cap, index funds and most hybrids — NIFTY 100 TRI
Flexi cap, focused, value & contra, dividend yield, ELSS — NIFTY 500 TRI
Mid cap — NIFTY Midcap 150 TRI
Small cap — NIFTY Smallcap 250 TRI
Large & mid cap — NIFTY LargeMidcap 250 TRI
Multi cap — NIFTY 500 Multicap 50:25:25 TRI

Debt funds get no equity benchmark at all

Debt, gilt, liquid and arbitrage funds are deliberately given no benchmark here. A bond fund's beta against an equity index is noise, and an alpha computed from it is a number with no meaning. We would rather print nothing than print that. It is not a gap; it is the correct answer.

Also asked

Does a TRI benchmark make a fund look worse?

It makes it look accurate. A fund measured against a price index carries an advantage it did not earn — roughly the dividend yield of the market, every year. Against a TRI, what is left is what the manager actually added.

How far back does MF Analyser's benchmark history go?

Daily values from 2 January 2012 for most indices. NIFTY India Defence starts in April 2018 and the G-Sec indices vary, so a figure is only shown over a window the index genuinely covers.

See it for yourself

An answer you cannot check is just an opinion. These are the pages where the same thing is shown on live data.