Close to nine months after its launch, Quant Mutual Fund's pioneering QSIF Equity Long-Short Fund has built up assets under management of roughly Rs 592 crore, with its net asset value standing at approximately Rs 10.65–10.67 as of late June and early July 2026 — modestly above its Rs 10 launch price.
Since its inception on October 8, 2025, the direct plan of the fund has delivered a compound annual growth rate of around 6.49%, according to data compiled by mutual fund tracking platforms. The fund's portfolio currently holds roughly 75% in equities, with the remainder largely parked in cash and cash equivalents, reflecting the flexible, tactically managed nature of a long-short mandate. Top sectors and holdings span financial services, telecom, technology and energy names, with government securities also featuring in the debt sleeve of the portfolio.
Independent trackers note that the fund has underperformed its Nifty 500 benchmark over available time periods since launch, a reminder that long-short strategies do not always outperform a rising broad market, particularly in their early months when strategies are still being calibrated and track records are thin. Risk-adjusted metrics paint a mixed picture: the fund's alpha ratio stands at a positive 3.67, suggesting some outperformance relative to its risk-adjusted expected return, while its Sortino ratio — a measure of return relative to downside volatility — remains low at 0.05, indicating that risk-adjusted returns accounting for downside moves have been relatively modest so far.
The fund continues to carry an expense ratio of 0.95% and an exit load of 1% for redemptions within 15 days, with a minimum SIP investment of Rs 1,000 and a minimum lumpsum investment of Rs 10 lakh in line with SIF regulations. A rotating team of fund managers, including Ankit A. Pande, Sandeep Tandon, Sanjeev Sharma, Sameer Kate and Jignesh Shah, has overseen the strategy since launch, with changes to the named lead manager reported as recently as February 2026.
More broadly, data from the Association of Mutual Funds in India shows the wider SIF category has been gaining traction, with net inflows reported in the hundreds of crores in recent months and average industry-wide AUM crossing the Rs 2,400 crore mark. As the category matures, comparison platforms have begun offering side-by-side tools for investors to weigh Quant's various SIF strategies against those of other fund houses on metrics such as downside protection, since-inception returns and cost.
For investors, the early performance data serves as a reminder that SIFs, while innovative, remain a new and still-evolving category — one where track records are short, costs can be meaningfully higher than passive alternatives, and outcomes will likely vary significantly across the different strategies now competing for investor capital within the space.