Mutual fund SIP returns analysis: How 5 top-performing small-cap funds compounded a ₹10,000 SIP over 5 and 10 years

Before reading further, please note this exercise is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered an investment advice. Returns used for calculation are from AMFI as on November 11, 2026. Point to point return has been used in this article. However, final SIP values of two funds can differ over long period even as their headline returns appear similar.

Also, please note that a SIP's result depends not only on where a fund ends up but on the path it takes to get there. It also depends on how it behaved in the years when the investor was buying, and how much of the corpus was built during cheap periods.

The five-year list is led by Invesco India Smallcap Fund, which returned 19.34% a year. A ₹10,000 SIP in the direct plan of this fund would be worth approx. ₹10.14 lakh today, or 1.69 times the total money invested. Bandhan Small Cap Fund is next with 19.13% and a corpus of ₹10.08 lakh, followed by Bank of India Small Cap Fund at 18.53% and ₹9.91 lakh.

Nippon India Small Cap Fund and Quant Small Cap Fund both returned 17.09% annually, delivering SIP corpus of around ₹9.5 lakh after 5 years.

5-year ₹10,000 monthly SIP

The 10-year list is headed by Nippon India Small Cap Fund at 20.73%, ahead of Quant Small Cap Fund at 20.51%, Axis Small Cap Fund at 19.46%, SBI Small Cap Fund at 18.16% and HSBC Small Cap Fund at 18.08%.

10-year ₹10,000 monthly SIP

Bandhan, Invesco and Bank of India do not appear in the 10-year list because none of them has completed a decade. There is a gap of nearly ₹57,000 between the top two 10-year SIP outcomes, despite a difference of just 0.22 percentage points in annual return.

Risk levels

Risk levels vary across funds. HSBC Small Cap Fund has the highest standard deviation among the eight schemes at 1.18, followed by Bank of India at 1.12 and Invesco at 1.11. SBI Small Cap Fund is the steadiest at 0.93. Betas range from 0.78 for SBI small-cap to 0.99 for HSBC small-cap, and Sharpe ratios from 0.02 for Nippon India small-cap and SBI to 0.08 for Bank of India.

Recent returns

The most recent returns of these schemes have been uneven. Bank of India Small Cap Fund returned 25.82% over the year to rank fourth among 36 schemes, and Invesco India Smallcap 19.28% to rank third. At the other end, Nippon India Small Cap Fund returned 7.14%, SBI 5.57% and Axis 8.25%. The AUM size of these funds have no impact on their recent performance either. For instance, Nippon India small-cap is the largest of the eight at ₹76,902.83 crore of assets as on October 31, 2026, followed by SBI at ₹39,202.76 crore and Bandhan at ₹35,203.84 crore, while Bank of India is the smallest at ₹3,685.24 crore.

First, over a decade the top-performing small-cap SIP turned ₹12 lakh into ₹40 lakh, but the spread between the five funds is wide, with ₹33 lakh at the bottom of the table.

Second, all eight funds carry standard deviations at or above 0.93, so these outcomes came with sharp swings along the way.