What makes MF Analyser different from other mutual fund research platforms?

Why there is no comparison table on this page

People do ask how this site compares with the other well-known fund research sites, and we are deliberately not answering that with a feature grid.

Three reasons, and they are the same reasons you should distrust anyone else's grid: a comparison of someone else's product written by their competitor is marketing, not research. Their features change, and a table that was accurate in October is quietly wrong by March. And we would be grading our own exam — the rows get chosen because we win them.

So here is what we will do instead. Below is what this site does differently, stated so you can verify each claim, and then a short test you can run on any fund research tool — including this one — to decide for yourself.

What is actually different here

1. Nothing is for sale, so nothing is promoted

You cannot buy a fund on MF Analyser. No AMC pays for placement, there is no distributor arrangement, and no commission is earned on anything you choose. That is why there is no "recommended funds" list — there is nothing to recommend for. Where a site earns on what you buy, read its rankings with that in mind, whichever site it is.

2. Every figure shows its working

Each number carries its window, its as-of date and its benchmark. The risk-free rate is stated (6.5%). Risk is from 36 month-end returns annualised by √12. Benchmarks are Total Return indices, never index funds, so a tracker's own costs never leak into a fund's alpha. Rolling returns are stepped daily, not monthly. You can recompute any of it from the same AMFI NAV we used.

A return printed without a date is a forecast in disguise. We treat one as a bug.

3. It refuses to print numbers that would be meaningless

This is the one that costs us pages and we do it anyway:

• Debt, gilt, liquid and arbitrage funds get no equity benchmark, and therefore no beta and no alpha. A bond fund's beta against an equity index is noise.
• A fund too young for a window shows "—", never a number built from four data points and never a zero.
• A fund house that has filed no portfolio shows as missing, not as zero — an empty chart reads as "holds nothing", which would be false.

Every one of those decisions makes the site look less complete. Each one makes it more true.

4. No ratings, no stars, no "best fund"

MF Analyser is not a SEBI-registered Investment Adviser or Research Analyst. A star rating is a recommendation with the working hidden, so there are none here. You get the measures and whatever ordering you asked for; the judgement stays yours.

5. Your whole portfolio, not just one fund at a time

Upload a CAS and the portfolio is blended and measured as if it were a single fund — its own return, risk, drawdown and benchmark — then looked through to the companies underneath, with the overlap between every pair you hold.

What we do not have

Because a page about why we are different that lists only strengths is an advertisement:

• No expense ratio, AUM or portfolio turnover. Not in our data at all. Take them from the AMC's factsheet.
• Holdings are not universal — 49 fund houses have filed portfolios. Most of the industry by assets, not all of it.
• No transactions. You cannot invest here, so you will need somewhere else to actually buy.
• No advice. If you want to be told what to buy, this is the wrong site, and you should be talking to a SEBI-registered adviser.

The test — run it on any tool, including this one

Five questions. They sort research tools faster than any comparison table, and they work whoever wrote them:

1. Does every number carry an as-of date? If not, you cannot tell stale data from current data.
2. Is the method published? Which risk-free rate, which window, which benchmark. If it is not stated, the number cannot be checked.
3. Is the benchmark a Total Return index? Against a price index every fund looks better than it is, by roughly the market's dividend yield each year.
4. Does it earn money on what you choose? Not disqualifying — but it tells you how to read the rankings.
5. Does it say what it does not know? A tool that never shows a blank is filling gaps with something.

Apply those to us too. If a figure here disagrees with a figure elsewhere, our date, plan and benchmark are all stated, so you can find out which of the two is wrong — and sometimes it will be ours. That is the point of showing the working.