Since Inception Trap

A fund's ad flashed "18.9% since inception" at me last week. Right below it on the same screener sat a fifteen-year-old fund saying 13. Most people stop reading there and tap the 18.9. I did the opposite and pulled both apart on Sunday morning.

Here is what the big number was hiding.

Fund A is six years old. It happened to launch the month the market bottomed out, rode a +75% first year on the recovery, and then did a thoroughly ordinary 10% a year after that. Fund B is fifteen years old and just plodded along at 13% through two full cycles, a crash and a boom included.

So the 18.9 and the 13 are not even the same measurement. One covers six years, the other covers fifteen. You are comparing a six-year sprint to a fifteen-year marathon and declaring the sprinter faster.

Put them on the only stretch they both actually lived, the same recent five years, and the ranking flips. Fund A did 10. Fund B did 13. Rs 10 lakh over that identical window grows to 16.11 lakh in A and 18.42 lakh in B. The boring fund ends 2.32 lakh ahead. Strip out Fund A's single lucky birth year and it was a plain 10% fund the entire time.

The deeper problem is that since inception answers a question you cannot act on. What if I had invested on the founder's first day. You cannot. That date is gone. The only money you can deploy earns whatever comes next, and the since-inception figure never promised you that.

So read the standard 1, 3 and 5 year lines where the windows actually match. Ask what regime the fund was born into. A monster first year off a bottom is a birthday, not a process.

Line funds up on the same window, not the same ad: