Top 10 Mutual Funds in Bangladesh, Ranked by NAV — and the Four Things the Ranking Can't Tell You

Every “top ten funds” list ranks on one number: past return over a short window, because that is the only thing the industry publishes every week. Below is such a list — the ten strongest mutual funds in Bangladesh by two-year NAV return, as at 29 July 2026. But a ranking answers only one question. This article gives you the rule behind the table, and then the four questions the table cannot answer for you.

Disclosure: the author is Managing Director and CEO of Ekush Wealth Management Limited, a BSEC-registered asset management company. Funds managed by Ekush appear in the charts below and are ranked by the same rule as every other fund. No asset manager is named or assessed here. This article explains how to evaluate mutual funds; it does not recommend any fund, including the author's own. Past performance is not a guide to future performance.

1. The Ranking, and the Rule Behind It

A “top ten” list is not something to ignore — it is something to read carefully, starting with the rule. Here is the rule used below; check it against any other list you are shown.

• Universe — every mutual fund in Bangladesh, open-end and closed-end alike. Nothing screened out for structure, size or manager.
• Measure — two-year return on net asset value (NAV), adjusted for dividends. Not market price. Not the year-to-date figure.
• Eligibility — at least two years of continuously published NAV to 29 July 2026. Funds launched after July 2024 are excluded, as are funds whose NAV has not updated since March 2026.
• Cut-off — 29 July 2026. Everything here is a photograph of that date.

One result deserves stating before the chart rather than after it: no closed-end fund reaches the top ten. The strongest closed-end fund returned 21.1% on NAV over two years; the tenth-placed open-end fund returned 35.9%. As a sector, closed-end funds returned −5.8% over two years in which the DSEX rose 9.9%. Section 6 explains why that is a fact about structure, not skill.

Read the two columns together and the first lesson arrives unprompted. The fund ranked third over two years returned just 7.7% year to date. The fund with the strongest year-to-date figure of the ten ranks only fifth over two years, and two more are tied to the decimal at eighth and ninth. The order depends entirely on where you start counting.

Two more observations, both uncomfortable and both true. Not one of these ten funds beat the DSEX over the first seven months of 2026, whose price return alone was 20.83%. And a two-year return below roughly 19% did not preserve the purchasing power of the money invested, whatever else it did.

2. What “Year to Date” Actually Means Here

The phrase invites a mistake, so it is worth pausing on. “Year to date” here means 1 January 2026 to 29 July 2026 — seven months, not a year. The weekly closed-end tables print a year-to-date column beside three-month and six-month columns, and the three disagree: one asset manager shows 16.6% year to date against 9.6% over three months and 11.7% over six. Year to date is a distance from a fixed starting line, not a period of any standard length.

This matters in two directions. A reader who sees “YTD 19.6%” and mentally annualises it to something near 34% has invented a number that does not exist. And a reader comparing a fund's seven-month figure against an annual interest rate — a bank deposit at 9%, a treasury-bill yield — is comparing seven months of one thing against twelve months of another.

There is a subtler problem. Because the calendar restarts every January, a year-to-date figure is longest in December and shortest in January; in February it describes six weeks. Rankings built on it churn violently for reasons that have nothing to do with the funds. When you compare, compare like windows: six months against six months, one year against one year, and preferably the longest window on offer.

3. How Fresh Is the Number You're Looking At?

Every figure here is dated 29 July 2026 and was published on 30 July. A NAV is a moving object; a ranking is a photograph of it. Bangladeshi open-end funds publish NAV weekly, so two funds compared on a Thursday may be quoting prices struck on different days.

Worse, some rows in any published table are far older than the table. In March 2026 the regulator removed one asset manager from six funds; those funds' NAVs then stopped updating — they still carry their 1 March 2026 valuation — and any table still listing them quotes a figure five months stale beside figures struck last week. Fiscal year-end closures suspend dealing in other funds — and a NAV you cannot transact at is a quotation, not a price.

NAV should be published daily, on a fixed schedule, on one page per fund, with the valuation date printed beside the number. Until that happens: read the date before you read the figure. For the primary number, go to the asset management company's own website; BSEC carries the fund documents, and the Dhaka Stock Exchange carries closed-end prices. Compiled weekly tables are convenient, but they are not the source.

4. Three Tests, Not One

A ranking answers one question: what did it return? Three questions remain — and answering them is the real work of choosing a fund, the companion to choosing the manager behind it.

Test one — against what? A return means nothing on its own: 15% is excellent against a flat market and poor against one that rose 20. The DSEX is a price index; it excludes dividends, while fund returns as published are dividend-adjusted. Comparing one against the other quietly credits the fund with the market's dividend yield — roughly four to five per cent a year. Add it back, and a good deal of apparent industry-wide outperformance disappears. Then match the yardstick to the mandate:

• Equity or growth funds → the DSEX, with dividends added back.
• Balanced funds → the blend named in the prospectus, not the equity index.
• Fixed-income funds → the treasury-bill yield or the call-money rate. Never the DSEX.
• Shariah funds → a Shariah index.
• Every fund, for every saver → inflation, which was running at 9.42% year-on-year in May 2026.
• If a fund's prospectus names no benchmark, that is itself the answer.

Test two — at what risk? Open any weekly fund review published in Bangladesh and count the risk columns: there are none. Every column is a return. Three numbers are missing, and all three change the meaning of the ranking above:

• Volatility — how far a fund's NAV swings around its own trend. Two funds with the same return are not the same fund if one arrived smoothly.
• Maximum drawdown — the deepest fall from a peak to the trough that followed. This is the number that decides whether an investor actually stayed invested, and so whether they earned the return at all.
• Concentration — the share held in the ten largest positions. High concentration is not wrong; it is undisclosed leverage on one person's judgement.

So before you buy any fund in the chart above, do three things the chart cannot do for you. Pull two years of weekly NAVs from the manager's website and see how far the NAV swung — that is volatility. From the same series, find the deepest fall from a peak to the trough that followed — that is drawdown — and ask honestly whether you would have held through it. Then open the fund's latest portfolio disclosure and add up its ten largest holdings as a share of assets — that is concentration.

A fund that returned 40% with a 30% drawdown and half its money in five shares is not the same investment as one that returned 38% smoothly across sixty holdings. No ranking published in Bangladesh tells you which you are looking at. You have to open the file. Test three — over what period? — is the next section.

5. Change the Window, Change the Winner

The windows published for open-end funds are year to date, one year and two years. That is the entire record. But two years of the Bangladeshi market is one regime, not a cycle: no 2010–11 crash, no 2020 shock, no floor-price era. A fund that has never been tested by a falling market has not been tested.

Even within that short record, the order is unstable. The third-placed fund over two years is last of the ten year to date; the fund that leads the ten year to date places only fifth over two years. Nothing about either fund changed — the clock did. Before you treat any record as a record, ask for five to ten years, through at least one drawdown, under the same fund manager, against a stated benchmark, net of fees. Very few Bangladeshi open-end funds can yet supply that. It is a fact about the age of the industry, not a criticism of any manager — and it is exactly why the chart at the top of this page is a photograph, not a verdict.

6. Open-End and Closed-End Are Different Instruments

Open-end funds are bought and sold at NAV, directly with the asset manager: there is no market price, and therefore no discount. Closed-end funds are listed and traded, and price and NAV drift apart — sometimes enormously. Bangladesh's closed-end sector trades at a large discount to NAV — around 30% for the sector, approaching 50% for several funds — while at least one trades at a premium of roughly 137% to its own net asset value. Both facts describe the price, not the management.

Every closed-end fund carries a stated redemption year, here ranging from 2026 to 2033. At redemption, price must meet NAV, so the discount is not permanent — but the wait is measured in years, and no return column tells you anything about it. This is why the ranking above is built on NAV: a closed-end fund's market-price return blends the manager's performance with the market's mood about the manager. Judge the manager on NAV; judge the entry price separately, and treat the discount as a question — why is it there, and what would close it — rather than as a bargain.

7. Fixed-Income Funds, Where the Label Does the Least Work

Bangladesh now has a small group of funds whose stated mandate is fixed income — the natural home for a saver who wants something steadier than equities, and the category where the published numbers mislead most easily. The universe below is every fund identified as a fixed-income mandate, with no selection. Two have not yet completed two years, and one (LankaBangla Fixed Income Fund, prospectus approved 3 March 2026) has no record and cannot appear.

Three things to take from that table. First, the name is not the mandate — a fund called “fixed income” may hold a great deal of equity. One fund here has been reported to hold around half its assets in shares, and its one-year return is negative as a result; another, a listed closed-end fund, has lost 21.7% of NAV over two years. Read the portfolio, not the label.

Second, the dividend-yield column is not a quality signal. BSEC granted discretionary dividend flexibility to a few of these funds, while the Mutual Fund Rules, 2001 oblige income funds to distribute the bulk of realised income. A fund showing 0.0% yield may be retaining and compounding income, not earning none. Comparing yields across funds with different obligations compares regulations, not performance.

Third, benchmark them against the risk-free rate, not the index. A fixed-income fund returning well above the treasury-bill or call-money rate is being paid for risk taken somewhere — the correct response is to ask where, not to congratulate it. Equally, a fund returning below inflation has cost the saver purchasing power, however positive the number on the page.

8. A Checklist

• What is the fund's stated benchmark, and is it the right one for what the fund holds?
• Did it beat that benchmark, after fees, over the longest window published?
• What is its worst drawdown — and would I have held through it?
• What does it own? Top-ten holdings, equity share, concentration.
• Open-end or closed-end? If closed-end, am I buying the manager or the discount?
• When was this NAV struck? Is the fund still dealing?
• Has the regulator taken any action against the asset manager?
• Does the return exceed inflation? If not, nothing else matters.
• Is the record long enough to be a record, or is it just a window?
• Am I comparing NAV to NAV — or NAV to market price?

Sources

• Fund NAVs and returns to 29 July 2026: UCB Stock Brokerage Limited, Weekly Mutual Fund Review, 30 July 2026.
• Primary NAV: each asset management company's own website.
• Fund documents, prospectuses and regulatory actions: Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission, sec.gov.bd.
• Closed-end market prices and the DSEX: Dhaka Stock Exchange.
• Market dividend yield, call-money rate and inflation: Dhaka Stock Exchange and Bangladesh Bank.
• DSEX total-return reference figures are the author's estimate: the published DSEX price return with the market's cash dividend yield added back (the DSEX itself excludes dividends).

Take the rule and the three tests, apply them to any list you are shown, and let the numbers earn their place. You can run your own figures in our free Investment Calculator, see how funds compare with FDR, DPS and Sanchayapatra, or read why a monthly SIP often beats trying to pick the top of a table.

Disclaimer: Investment in mutual funds is subject to market risk. Past performance does not guarantee future results and is not a guide to future performance. The rankings and figures above are as at 29 July 2026, are drawn from third-party and public sources believed reliable, and are provided for general educational purposes only — not as a recommendation of any fund or a solicitation to invest. Ekush Wealth Management Limited is licensed by the Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC).