Every rule of thumb says avoid the debt heavy companies. Buying the most indebted, that could pay their interest, beat the Indian market by five points a year.

We built 258 portfolios from it, one for every starting month, held one, three and five years. Most screens we have tested only reveal their character at one horizon. This one showed the same face at every horizon, and that steadiness is its signature.

At every horizon the answer came back the same: roughly two of every three starting months beat the index, with five year holds earning a median near 29% a year. Some screens need patience to work and some are exposed by it. This one simply kept paying at the same steady rate, wherever you cut it.

The shape of it: paid often, and paid big at the far end

Over a single year, half of all starts landed between roughly −23% and +91%, with the best year reaching about +141% and the worst near −40%. The upside tail stretched more than three times as far as the downside. That is what being paid a premium looks like in the raw data: many good years, a scatter of spectacular ones, and the occasional hard fall as the price of admission.

The full decade: the borrowers outran the market

Run straight through from 2016, the thirty most levered names that could service their debt compounded at about 19.15% a year against the index's 13.9%, turning ₹10 lakh into roughly ₹58 lakh where the index reached about ₹37 lakh. It even cleared the market on reward for each unit of risk taken, which levered baskets are not supposed to do. And what it owned may surprise you: not speculative wrecks but Power Grid, held in every single rebuild, Larsen and Toubro, NTPC, the great debt financed builders of Indian infrastructure.

The fall you signed up for, start by start

Leverage magnifies both directions, and the drop was as real as the return. Across start dates, the worst fall over a five year hold typically reached about 48%, and the unluckiest starts lost around 68% before recovering, against the index's 34%. There is no version of this idea without that exposure; the premium exists precisely because most investors will not sit through it. The distribution shows what sitting through it actually meant.

What it actually owned

The basket is the physical economy: power, engineering, materials, autos, the businesses that borrow because what they build is expensive. A meaningful large cap weight sets it apart from the micro cap screens, though nearly half still sat in the smallest names, which is where the swings come from.

A premium, not a free lunch

The oldest logic in finance says risk that cannot be diversified away must be paid for, and leverage is exactly that kind of risk. This screen collected the payment: five extra points a year, steady odds at every horizon, earned by holding companies whose debt makes most investors flinch, protected by the one gate that matters, the ability to pay the interest. What it asks in return is tolerance for falls of half or more, arriving without warning. Whether that trade suits you depends entirely on which loss you fear more, the visible one on a bad day or the quiet one of declining the premium for a decade.

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