We bolted together the two best quality signals we have tested. The blend was ordinary, and its sharpest cut was not.

We built 261 portfolios from the blend, one for every month you could have started, held one, three and five years. The broad results are respectable and unremarkable: the top thirty made about 16.8% a year against the market's 13.9%, ₹48 lakh against ₹39. Then look at the amber line above. The ten best combined scores compounded at 24.5% a year, nearly ₹90 lakh, and did it with the gentlest worst fall in the portfolio, about 45%. The story of this screen is the gap between those two results.

It certainly knew a good business when it saw one

Whatever else it did, the blend picked companies you would be proud to own. Jubilant Foodworks survived 96% of the yearly rebuilds; Narayana Hrudayalaya, Hatsun Agro and Federal Mogul held their places in more than three quarters. The basket leaned into consumer businesses, nearly a third of the money, and half sat in the smallest tier of the market. These are compounder like names found by pure arithmetic, no story, no brand admiration, just heavy gross profits and clean accruals.

Most single years, the index won

Here is the uncomfortable middle of the story. Over one year holds the blend beat the index in only 47 of 100 starts, worse than a coin flip, with a typical single year of about 10% while the market ran hotter. Quality of this kind does not chase rallies; it simply refuses to break. So the reward arrived the slow way: over three years it beat the index in 63 of 100 starts, over five years in 73, and by then every single start had made money, the worst at 5% a year. The blend converts patience into consistency, and impatience into disappointment, with unusual purity.

What adding signals actually buys you

The lesson of this test is precise. Combining gross profitability with clean accruals did not add their returns together; the broad blend earned less than either idea's reputation promises, because most companies that score well on one score modestly on the other, and the average of two good answers is an average. What the combination did buy was selectivity at the extreme: the few companies that scored superbly on both tests at once were a genuinely rare breed, and owning just those ten paid handsomely with the gentlest ride in this series. Whether a ten stock portfolio of mid sized companies suits your money is its own question. That the intersection of two honest signals is worth more than their union is a finding worth keeping.

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