With just three trading sessions left this year, the Sensex is up 8.8 per cent in 2025. Yet, many investor portfolios have not felt that cheer. This is because nearly 79 per cent of actively-traded BSE stocks failed to beat SBI’s fixed deposit return of 6.25 per cent (for one year to under two-year duration).
Yes, this year the market’s toughest rival was not some global shock or a mysterious quant signal. It was the old faithful your parents and grandparents swear by: The risk-free SBI FD.
That is why the year feels confusing. The benchmark is green and maybe just a good day’s rally away from all-time highs. But stock picking, and sometimes even casual investing outside the biggest names, has been a grind in 2025.
It is not that equities stopped rewarding risk. It is that rewards got concentrated, and the rest of the market was left trying to explain itself.
The contrast is sharp because the recent past trained investors to expect an easier equity game. In 2023 and 2024, 70 per cent and 63 per cent of stocks beat the same 6.25 per cent hurdle. In 2021, 85 per cent did.
Simply put, you could throw a dart, miss the board, and still end up with a return that looked respectable next to a fixed deposit. In 2025, the market reverted to an older lesson — reminiscent of 2018 and 2019 — that bull markets can be selective, even unforgiving.
This also lands at an awkward moment for how households are allocating money. RBI data on the flow of financial assets shows bank deposits at ₹11.86-lakh crore in FY25, down from ₹14.22-lakh crore in FY24. Over the same period, household investment in equities almost tripled from ₹29,080 crore to ₹73,566 crore. In short, households moved some confidence away from deposits and towards equities.
The index did not punish that shift, but individual stock performance certainly did not make it feel wise.
Market cap buckets
If this was a year of narrow leadership, market-cap tells you where the narrowness lived.
Among the large-caps, that is, top 100 companies by market capitalisation, 55 stocks, including RIL, HDFC Bank, Bharti Airtel and SBI, beat the FD hurdle. In the next 150, called the mid-caps, 68 stocks (45 per cent) beat the age-old FD. This list includes the likes of Ashok Leyland, Mazagon Dock, HPCL, BHEL, Marico, SRF. Beyond that, the success rate drops hard. Among companies ranked 251 and below by market-cap, only 18.5 per cent (610 of 3,297) beat the FD, and 81.5 per cent did not. That is the punchline for anyone who thought the rally was a democracy.
In 2025, the vote belonged to the heavyweight table. For the rest of the market, it was like watching a speech on television.
Industry wise
On a broad classification, banks were among the better pockets, with about 58.5 per cent (24 of 41) banking stocks beating the FD hurdle. That is not surprising in a year when large financial names held up better and investors stayed closer to the familiar.
Steel, electronics and auto ancillaries had mixed outcomes — enough winners to matter, but not enough to lift the sector’s mood.
Then come the sectors where the FD comparison becomes awkwardly one-sided. Sugar (3 per cent), hotels (8 per cent) and entertainment (8 per cent) show very low hit rates. You can still find stories, expansion plans, and confident management commentary, but 2025 was not in a storytelling mood.
The about 30-stock transport sector is a perfect metaphor this year. Only 10 per cent of transport stocks beat the FD, yet 85 per cent of the sector’s market value did. Which is a polite way of saying a couple of stocks, such as Blackbuck and Interglobe, did the hauling, while the rest of the sector was stuck behind a slow-moving truck.
Takeaways
Winners existed in 2025, but the flashy ones were few. Only 97 stocks doubled and 130 delivered 51 to 100 per cent. The bigger bucket of ‘winners’ was the more ordinary kind: 352 stocks returned 15 to 50 per cent.
The FD yardstick is not an argument that equities should behave like fixed income. It is a reality check on how dispersed equity outcomes can be, even when the index is positive.
Year 2025 did not reject equities, it trashed casual optimism. The fixed deposit did not suddenly become exciting. It simply became, for one year, uncomfortably competitive.
Published on December 27, 2025
