{
 "items": [
  {
   "title": "Survivorship bias - the largest single distortion",
   "severity": "high",
   "body": "The universe is the Nifty 500 as constituted in 2026. Every company that was in the index during these ten years but was dropped, demerged out or delisted is ABSENT. Index membership is partly a consequence of past outperformance, so this panel is biased upward. In FY17-FY20 only 316-362 of the 500 names were even listed, so the early-year rankings are computed on roughly two-thirds of the universe. Relative comparisons are more robust than absolute levels, but ALL of them are measured on a survivor set."
  },
  {
   "title": "Ten observations per year-over-year statistic",
   "severity": "high",
   "body": "Any statistic that uses one value per FY (every macro correlation here) has n=10. A correlation needs |r| > 0.63 to be significant at 5%. Every rate correlation in this study is below that and is statistically indistinguishable from zero. These should be read as hypotheses, not findings. The year-over-year results are especially fragile: FY21 alone contributes a disproportionate share of every pooled average (mean stock +139.9%)."
  },
  {
   "title": "Price returns only - no dividends",
   "severity": "medium",
   "body": "Split/bonus-adjusted price returns, not total returns. Understates performance, most for high-payout Power, FMCG and PSU sectors. No total-return series was available, so this is stated rather than corrected."
  },
  {
   "title": "Overlapping windows inflate naive statistics",
   "severity": "medium",
   "body": "The commonly quoted early-mover figure (55% of eventual top performers were strong in the first 30 days) is partly mechanical, because the full-year target contains the signal window. Against a properly non-overlapping forward target the figure falls to ~34%. Always separate signal from target."
  },
  {
   "title": "The 2025 RBI repo-rate path is unverified",
   "severity": "medium",
   "body": "Values through 2023-02-08 matched independently known RBI policy history exactly. The 2025 cuts (Feb / Apr / Jun / Dec) come from press reporting of MPC decisions and could not be checked against a primary RBI source. Verify before relying on the FY25 and FY26 policy path."
  },
  {
   "title": "India 10Y is a monthly proxy at FY boundaries",
   "severity": "low",
   "body": "FRED's INDIRLTLT01STM is the only free India 10-year series and it is MONTHLY. FY 'change' is therefore the last monthly observation at each FY boundary, not a true year-end daily value. Good enough for trend direction; not for precise timing."
  },
  {
   "title": "Regime changes are inside the sample, not outside it",
   "severity": "medium",
   "body": "COVID (FY20-FY21), the 2022-23 rate-hike cycle, the 2019 NBFC crisis, the Adani episode and the 2024 election-result PSU drawdown are all in-sample. Ten years contains at most two full cycles, and the market was in a structural uptrend for most of the window, which flatters every long-side statistic."
  },
  {
   "title": "Small-cap dominance is largely an order-statistic artefact",
   "severity": "medium",
   "body": "Winners skew small (63% vs a 33% universe), but winners also carry far higher volatility (47.7% vs 36.9%). In any ranking of extreme outcomes, high-dispersion names are over-represented BY CONSTRUCTION. The same property that makes small-cap winners common makes small-cap disasters common - the bottom-20 lists carry the same skew. This is a statement about volatility, not an exploitable size premium, especially after impact costs."
  },
  {
   "title": "Corporate-action residuals",
   "severity": "low",
   "body": "Nine stub removals, one bonus repair and three demerger exclusions are documented and auditable, but eight ambiguous 30-45% drops were deliberately left unmodified. Untested corporate actions of small magnitude may remain."
  },
  {
   "title": "Distinguishing skill from luck is impossible here",
   "severity": "high",
   "body": "With ~20 top names per year and 10 years, a rule that 'works' in 6 of 10 years can easily be noise. Nothing here is a validated trading strategy. The momentum and early-mover edges in particular are small enough to be consumed by transaction costs."
  }
 ],
 "disclaimer": "This is a quantitative research exercise, not investment advice. It contains no recommendation to buy or sell any security. Past performance over ten survivorship-biased years in a single market is not a reliable guide to future returns."
}