The Piotroski score is the quality investor's favourite checklist. In India, it lost to a plain index fund.

Over the full decade, ten lakh rupees run through the score grew to about ₹33.7 lakh. The same money in a plain Nifty 500 index fund grew to about ₹37.2 lakh. The gap looks small on paper, but look at the chart above: it is not a one off. At one year, three years, five years and the full ten, the score trailed the market. A screen you study nine financial ratios to build, quietly beaten by a fund that does nothing but hold the index.

The average, and the range

An average this close to the market still hides a wide spread. Run the score for every start month and hold a single year, and your outcome swung from a 39 percent loss to nearly doubling your money, decided almost entirely by timing. Stretch the hold and the swings calm, but the verdict does not change: it beat the index in fewer than half of all windows.

You paid more, and earned less

Here is the part that should stop any quality investor. A screen built entirely around financial strength and safety handed you a rougher ride than the market it lost to. At its worst the portfolio fell about 76 percent from its peak, twice the index's fall, and took more than two years to climb back to even. You accepted a deeper hole and a longer wait in exchange for a lower return. That is the exact opposite of what a quality screen is supposed to buy you.

Did the score even sort?

The score's whole promise is simple: a higher score means a healthier company and, in time, a better return. So we sorted every stock into ten buckets by its score and looked. The ranking did not hold. The middle of the pack did best. The very highest scoring bucket, the stocks the checklist rates most highly and would have you buy first, landed near the bottom. Whatever earned money in this decade, it was not the score.

How often did it actually beat the market?

Strip away the averages and ask the plain question: pick a random month, hold for a while, and how often did the score actually come out ahead of a plain index fund? About half the time or less, on every horizon. A coin flip, in return for studying nine financial ratios on every company you buy.

A strategy is a claim, not a checklist

None of this makes the score worthless. A respectable absolute return is still a return, and the screen may yet have its decade. But it was sold as a route to safer, stronger performance, and in ten years of Indian data it delivered neither the outperformance nor the safety. A famous name and a tidy nine point checklist told you one story; the data told another. The only way to know which is true, for any screen you are tempted to trust, is to run it against real history yourself.

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