Eleven rules, six measures of cheapness, one momentum filter. It landed on the same stocks a single number found.

Score every company on price to book, price to earnings, price to sales, earnings yield, cash flow yield and dividend yield, all at once, keep the cheapest tenth, and among those buy the ones already climbing. The result was one of the strongest in this series: about 22% a year against the market's 13.9%, roughly ₹73 lakh from ₹10 lakh. Eleven rules of genuine sophistication. And they worked. The interesting question is what they actually bought.

The composite genuinely sorted

First, the good news: unlike some multi factor screens, this one ranked stocks with real skill. Line the market up by the composite score and returns rise cleanly from the expensive end to the cheap, a rank correlation of about −0.89. Layering six value measures did not muddy the signal; it produced a genuinely ordered result. Sophistication, here, was not just for show.

But it walked you to the same commodity stocks as one line

Now the deflating part. For all its machinery, the portfolio it built was deeply familiar: Oil and Natural Gas, GHCL, Vedanta, Gujarat Narmada, the same energy and materials cyclicals that a single cheapness number picked in our Acquirer's Multiple test. Over a third of the money sat in commodities, another fifth in energy. Six value metrics and a momentum overlay, and cheapness still dragged you to the same unloved corner of the market. The elaborate machine and the simple one shared a soul.

And it charged the same steep entry fee

The shared soul came with a shared bill. Like every deep value screen here, this one fell hard, about 72% from its peak, roughly twice the index. All the metric stacking in the world did not soften the ride, because the ride is a property of what you own, not how cleverly you chose it. Cheap cyclicals crash together whatever the screen that gathered them.

Elaborate on the page, familiar in the portfolio

Trending Value is a genuinely good strategy, and a genuinely humbling one. Its eleven rules did sort cleanly and did beat the market by a wide margin, so the sophistication was not wasted. But it did not conjure a different kind of portfolio. It found the same cheap, cyclical, unloved businesses that one honest cheapness ratio finds, and it demanded the same iron stomach to hold them. The lesson is not that complexity is useless. It is that complexity mostly refines an idea rather than replacing it, and you should always know which simple idea you are really betting on underneath.

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