A formula built to be boring did the opposite. It beat the market by seven points, and it fell no harder.

Nine years ago you put ₹10 lakh into the thirty stocks that were calm, high yielding and rising all at once, and rebuilt the list each year. Today it is worth around ₹43 lakh, against roughly ₹30 lakh for a plain Nifty 500 index fund. That is about 20% a year versus the market's 13%, a seven point edge, and, as the next chart shows, it came without the extra pain you would normally expect to pay for it.

That combination is rare. Most market-beating screens charge for it with a savage drawdown. This one did not, and the reason is baked into its design.

One backtest is one story, so we built 245 portfolios from the screen, one for every month you could have started, held one, three and five years. True to its name, the range was tame for an equity strategy: over a single year, eight in ten holds landed between −9% and +76%, with far shallower losses than most screens here.

The ranking genuinely worked

Unlike the plain low-volatility screen, this one sorted. Sort the market into ten buckets by the combined calm-plus-income-plus-trend score and the returns climb fairly steadily from the weak end to the strong, a rank correlation around −0.78. Adding dividend and momentum to the low-risk base did not just lift the average; it gave the screen a real ability to tell better stocks from worse, which the low-volatility screen on its own never had.

It earned the name "conservative"

Here is the part that separates it from the pretenders. When the market fell, this basket fell about 34% from its peak, essentially the same as the index, not deeper. It delivered a seven point annual edge and matched the market's drawdown, where the plain low-risk screen delivered less return through a bigger fall. The label was not a marketing word here. It was a measured result.

Owned the payers, not the darlings

The basket filled with steady, dividend-paying infrastructure and utility names, Power Grid, NTPC, SJVN, Bajaj Auto, the unglamorous cash generators that pay you to wait and rarely lurch. Its biggest weights sat in energy, utilities and industrials. This is what "conservative" looked like in holdings: not the market's favourites, but its quiet, reliable dividend engine.

Low risk done right

The Conservative Formula is the constructive answer to a familiar failure. Buying calm alone was not enough, and quietly cost return. Buying calm that also pays and trends turned the same instinct into a genuine, market-beating, low-drawdown strategy over this stretch. It is a reminder that "defensive" is not a fixed property of a stock but a result you have to engineer and then verify. This version verified. The honest caveat is the window, nine years rather than a full decade, and one that never delivered a truly generational crash, so test it hard against the worst years before you lean on it.

So we took it to Krest, and ran it through the whole test.