Two different yardsticks
The difficulty is obvious: two different things are being compared. Judged against its benchmark, especially during a fall, any analyst would say that this fund did well. The investor’s yardstick, though, is not benchmark-relative returns but his own absolute returns. Those depend on when he invested, whether he made a lump-sum investment or used an SIP, and simply where he entered the market cycle. In my experience, his own loss drives the decision to sell, but he blames the fund to justify it. This allows the investor to ignore the responsibility he should take and shifts it to the fund manager.
