India's Headlines That Matter: Your No-Nonsense Daily Briefing

India has established a new migration and mobility accord with Switzerland. In our last briefing, we focused on bringing you stories with real impact, and while today is a quieter day for major national headlines, this development is a significant one. The agreement aims to streamline movement and cooperation between the two nations. Also in the news, reports indicate a continuing policy of deporting unauthorized immigrants from the country. And in sports, cricketer Bhuvneshwar Kumar has been named captain of the Indian team for the upcoming Hong Kong Sixes tournament. But while the national news cycle is less turbulent, a new piece of analysis is shaping conversations in financial circles. It examines a simple question: if you invest the same amount of money, in the same way, every month...

do you get the same results everywhere in the world? The answer is a clear no. And the data reveals something important about the Indian market's character. The analysis comes from Niranjan Avasthi, the President at Edelweiss Asset Management. It compares the performance of Systematic Investment Plans, or SIPs, across ten different global markets. The study looked at the decade from October 2016 to September 2026. Now, here’s how they did it, because the method is key. They didn't just look at one five-year period. They looked at one hundred and twenty different five-year windows, each one starting a month after the last. Think of it like taking a five-year-long video of the market, and then sliding that camera forward one month at a time, for ten years straight.

This "rolling" approach smooths out any single good or bad period and gives a much clearer picture of an investment's consistency. All the returns were measured in US dollars, to make it a fair comparison. The results were stark. The clear winners on raw returns were the US markets. An SIP in the Nasdaq-100 would have given you an average annual return of nineteen point one percent. The S&P 500 was next, at thirteen point seven percent. So where did India stand? The average return for an Indian SIP was eight point four percent. That’s higher than France, Germany, Brazil, and China. But it’s not the number itself that tells the whole story. The real insight is in the CONSISTENCY. Of all the one hundred and twenty five-year periods they measured for India, ninety-eight percent of them ended with a positive return.

Not a single one of them had a major loss. In fact, eighty-seven percent of all outcomes were clustered in a predictable range, delivering returns between six and twelve percent. Compare that to other markets. In Brazil, South Korea, and China, roughly a third of all five-year SIPs ended in a loss. Their worst outcomes were negative six to negative eight percent. So while you might have had a chance at a higher return, you also had a significant chance of losing money over a five-year timeframe. In the US, the returns were higher, but also more spread out. India’s performance was less spectacular, but it was far more reliable. As Avasthi put it, the "same discipline and the same monthly habit gave very different outcomes." Of course, it's important to remember that this is a look at past performance and is for informational purposes only.

It is not financial advice, and an SIP method does not guarantee positive returns in the future. But the data paints a compelling picture. It suggests the defining feature of the Indian market over the last decade wasn't just growth, but stability. While other markets offered a rollercoaster of high peaks and deep valleys, India offered a steadier climb. For an investor, that changes the calculation from just asking "how high can this go?" to also asking "how reliable is the journey?"