Is Your PMS Manager Leaving Returns on the Table?
The Indian equity market has never been more alive with opportunity. Yet many investors quietly suspect that their portfolio is not capturing as much of that opportunity as it could. They’re not wrong to wonder.
At Grey Sky Capital, we spend our days buried in data, hunting for performance patterns most managers never see. And when you do that long enough, one thing becomes obvious – Most PMS strategies are not working as hard as your capital deserves.
Some are sharp. Many are sluggish. Very few are ruling the roost. And if you don’t measure them rigorously, you won’t know which camp yours belongs to.
Why this matters: the gap between ‘Good Enough’ and ‘Exceptional’
The PMS industry in India has exploded between 2020 and 2025, showing a growth of ~150% in the last 5 years – and alongside it, the performance gap within categories has widened dramatically.
- Across all categories of PMS strategies (large, mid, thematic, methodical), the dispersion between the top decile and bottom decile returns is often huge, almost always running into double digits annually.
- Several PMS products that appear respectable in marketing brochures quietly slip into lower performance buckets when you look at 3-year or 5-year data.
- Many managers highlight absolute returns but rarely talk about risk efficiency, consistency, or how often they’re actually beating the market — or peers.
On the surface, everyone looks like they’re doing fine. Under the hood? Nope.
So what?
So, we vibe-coded a simple tool that cuts through the noise. There’s a certain clarity that only raw numbers can give: cold, uncompromising, unpolitical. That’s why we built an evaluation tool that pulls performance data for PMS strategies across India from APMI and ranks them in deciles across various time periods.
It’s a simple idea with 3 powerful features:
- Decile Rankings (The Truth Layer)
Top 10% vs bottom 10% is a vastly different world. A strategy sitting in the 8th or 9th decile may still feel good because the markets have been generous, but relative to peers, it’s under-delivering.
- Multi-Period View (No Place to Hide)
We’ve compared every PMS strategy on performance across:
- 1 month (absolute returns)
- 3 months (absolute returns)
- 6 months (absolute returns)
- 1 year (CAGR)
- 3 years (CAGR)
- 5 years (CAGR)
A manager who did brilliantly last year may have lagged for years before that. A flashy chart can hide that, but decile rankings don’t. The tool compares performance of all equity and multi-asset PMS strategies to one benchmark rate that we believe is a fair comparison point: the NIFTY 50 TRI.
- Early Warning Indicators (Caveat emptor!)
If your strategy consistently falls in lower deciles (4 through 10), it’s a clear signal - your capital might not be fighting in the same league as others.
Let’s see what your fund manager is really made of...
Some early insights from the data
While the full tool gives you the detailed view, here’s what stands out from our broader analysis – we have focused on what matters the most when comparing strategies. Output. Returns. Consistency.
Hard data:
- More than 52% of PMS strategies have underperformed NIFTY 50 TRI in the last 5 years (CAGR).
- More than 79% of PMS strategies have underperformed NIFTY 50 TRI in last 1 year’s returns.
- Over the last 5 years – just about 19% of the PMS strategies have given >25% CAGR. In the same period, NIFTY 50 TRI has given 18.58%.
- Over the last 3 years – just about 12% of the PMS strategies have given >25% CAGR. In the same period, NIFTY 50 TRI has given 13.91%.
You're getting benchmark-hugging performance despite paying high fees, brokerage and probably taking on added volatility risk!
Some qualitative commentary:
- Most PMS strategies cluster around mediocre, benchmark-hugging returns. The competition is thin at the top and surprisingly thick in the middle.
- Several PMS products take substantially higher risk than their category median, without corresponding outperformance.
- Fees and Performance don’t correlate tightly. Some high-fee strategies live in the lower deciles. Some low-fee strategies quietly outperform.
Why should you check where your PMS strategy stands?
Most investors don’t evaluate their PMS performance relative to peers. They look at absolute returns and feel satisfied if the number “looks good.” But, if your PMS is consistently in the lower deciles, you’re not just underperforming, you’re losing years of compounding.
Your manager may be doing exceptionally well — and if so, the data will show that. Or they might be lagging far behind peers — and again, the data will show that.
We will be updating this tool monthly with data sourced from APMI. As on the date of publishing this blog, the data is updated for 31st October 2025.
Check now! → https://greysky.capital/pms-monitor/
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