A single CAGR number lies by omission. Here's the fuller picture for Quant Small Cap Fund - Direct Plan - Growth Option: every rolling 5-year holding period in its history, sorted end to end.
What the range actually looks like
The gap between p10 and p90 is 43.3 percentage points — meaning depending on when you bought, your 5-year experience could sit anywhere in that band. Someone who started the clock at the top of a cycle had a very different outcome from someone who started near the bottom.
The timing question
Two investors in the same fund can end up with wildly different returns purely because their starting date was 12 months apart. That's not the fund manager's fault; it's how equity math works when you're measuring over a finite window.
For Quant Small Cap Fund - Direct Plan - Growth Option, 94% of all 5-year windows ended positive, and 81% beat a 7% FD. Those are the real "if I held this for 5 years, what are my odds" numbers — not the spot CAGR you see on a ratings site.
What we're not saying
One number everyone quotes: "this fund has a 5-year CAGR of X%". That X is the number from today backwards. It's accurate for the single investor who started their SIP exactly 5 years ago. Everyone else got something else.
The distribution tells you about a range of plausible outcomes — which is what a decision-maker actually needs. See the full picture (with the peer percentile and percentile bar) on .