New Delhi, Sept. 15 -- The Nifty 50-India's headline stock market index-is down about 5% over the past 12 months and about 2% over the last six months. Yet a set of equal-weight index funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have done better in the recent period.

For instance, an equal-weight fund tracking the Nifty 500 Equal Weight index returned about 15% over six months (as of 9 September 2026), funds tracking the Nifty 100 Equal Weight index returned around 7%, and the Nifty 50 Equal Weight-based funds are up about 2.7% over the same period.

Equal weight simply assigns the same weight to every stock in an index, instead of weighting by market capitalization. In a Nifty 50 Equal Weight index, for instance, each of the 50 stocks carries...