Abstract

India is re-emerging as an economic power on the world stage with its rapidly growing economy
becoming an investment led economy. Ever expanding impact of economic liberalization, privatization
and globalization; growing incomes, savings and investments by individuals to fulfil their future
requirements through achieving higher returns; rising risk-return appetites; and booming Indian stock
markets with benchmark indices touching new all-time-highs; this all have generated a fervent
environment for investments in the Indian equity markets. Mutual Funds and Unit Linked Insurance Plans
(ULIPs) being professionally managed and well regulated; are becoming the most eligible proxies to
investments inequities. In this paper one of the maiden study in the field of performance evaluation of
Indian equity based mutual funds and ULIP funds is carried out on the basis of statistical measures
Absolute Return, Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), Standard Deviation, Sharpe’s Ratio,
Treynor’s Ratio, Information Ratio, Downside Risk, Sortino Ratio, Omega Ratio and Modified Sharpe
Ratio for the periodApril-2008 to March-2016. The results of the study suggest that equity based mutual
fund schemes out perform the equity based funds of Unit Linked Insurance Plans (ULIPs).