# 24 Jun 2026 morning

_Systematic Investing . 2026-06-24 . By Tanmay Kurtkoti. Educational, illustrative, not advice._

A friend sent me a screenshot on Saturday. A five-star fund, finger hovering over the buy button, asking if it was the one. I asked him what part of those five stars happens after today.

He went quiet, because the answer is none of it.

A star rating is built entirely on the past. Three, five, sometimes ten years of risk-adjusted return, ranked against the fund's category. Every input is history. It is a beautifully kept trophy cabinet, and people keep reading it as a forecast. Knowing which fund won the last race tells you almost nothing about the one you are about to enter.

The part nobody puts on the brochure is what happens to those winners. Take all the funds sitting in the top quarter of their category and come back a few years later. Only about one in four is still there. A quarter is 25 percent by definition, so a coin flip sorted into four buckets would hand you the same answer. The badge, on the evidence, carries roughly zero edge into the future.

Which is why two funds wearing the same five stars today can drift four points a year apart from here. On Rs 10L over seven years, that is the gap between 20.76L and 26.60L. Same rating yesterday. Completely different tomorrow. And tomorrow is the only stretch your money actually lives through.

I am not saying ignore the past. I am saying stop mistaking it for the plan. A rating grades what already happened. A rule decides the next trade. Before the stars, I want to know the universe a fund picks from, how it sizes each position, and how often it rebalances, because a process I can read forward beats a badge I can only look at backward.

Pick the rule. The stars are just the rear-view mirror