ETF Rankings
Every ETF listed on NSE, grouped by what it actually tracks and ranked on what it costs to own — the gap between its price and its NAV, how easily it trades, and what it loses against the index. Not on returns: twenty ETFs track the Nifty 50 and all of them return what the Nifty 50 returns. Plus every listed REIT and InvIT, with each yield split into the part that is income and the part that is your own capital coming back.
Picking a mutual fund means picking a manager, so returns rank it. Picking an ETF means picking a wrapper. Every fund tracking the Nifty 50 holds the same fifty companies in the same weights, so their returns differ by rounding — and a table that ranks them on it is calling a winner at random. What genuinely differs is what the wrapper costs you, and that is three things.
- A premium is a loss, not a disadvantage. Buy an ETF at 20% above its NAV and you have handed over ₹1.21 for ₹1.00 of assets before the index moves. So beyond a half-percent noise band the premium is charged in absolute score points on top of the ranking, up to 45 of them — enough to drop the best-scoring fund in a group to the bottom of it. No amount of liquidity makes up for it. Discounts are not penalised: buying below what a fund holds is not a cost to a buyer.
- Ranked only against what it tracks. A gold ETF beating a pharma ETF says gold ran, and nothing about either wrapper. Every fund sits in a group defined by its underlying — down to one group per sector and one per factor, because momentum and low-volatility track different indices too.
- The benchmark is the group's own median return. Twenty-one funds tracking the Nifty 50 are the Nifty 50, net of the cost of tracking it — which is the honest comparator for how much one wrapper loses. If a group's returns turn out to be spread too widely to be tracking one index, the tracking column is dropped for that group and the page says so, rather than printing a number that measures the wrong thing.
- Differences too small to trade are treated as no difference. Every median premium in the Nifty 50 group sits between −0.06% and +0.10%, because arbitrage keeps it there. Scoring that spread would manufacture a ranking out of noise, so each input declares the smallest gap that means anything and goes flat below it.
- One year, not seven. The mutual fund rankings use a seven-year window to stop a manager looking clever after one good year. An index tracker has no manager to catch, and what it is judged on here — the gap to NAV, the turnover, the fee drag — is mechanical and shows up in months. A fund needs a year of both NAV and price history to be ranked; most Indian ETFs launched after 2021, and the ones too young to judge are listed with their figures and no rank.
- What's missing: expense ratio and AUM have no clean public feed. TER matters less than it looks here — it is already inside the NAV the tracking column measures — but AUM is a genuine gap, and a very small fund can close or merge. The bid-ask spread is not published either, so turnover stands in for it.
This is a research screener, not advice. A rank is a statement about what an ETF has cost to own against its own peers, not a recommendation to buy, and it says nothing about whether the index underneath it is worth holding. Premiums move during the session and the figure you trade at is the one on your broker's screen, not this one. ScalperSense is not a SEBI registered investment adviser.