NBP Financial Sector Fund tops FY26 with 70.4% return

August 17, 2026 (MLN): NBP Financial Sector Fund (NFSF), managed by NBP Fund Management Limited, closed FY2026 (July 2025–June 2026) as the top-performing conventional stock fund in its category, delivering a 70.4% return against its KSE-30 Total Return Index benchmark's 49.4%.

This is an outperformance of roughly 21 percentage points, according to the fund's own June 2026 Fund Manager's Report filed under MUFAP's standardized format.

The figure, which NBP Funds has also used in its marketing campaign for the scheme, marks the fund's best fiscal-year showing since its February 2018 launch and comes on the back of a broad re-rating of Pakistan's banking and financial stocks over FY26.

Since inception, NFSF has returned 22.1% annualized versus 20.7% for its benchmark, a cumulative outperformance of 1.4 percentage points annualized.

FY26 PERFORMANCE IN CONTEXT

NBP Financial Sector Fund is an open-end equity scheme that invests in listed companies from the banking, insurance and investment sector. As of June 30, 2026, the fund held Rs 2,601 million in net assets, with roughly 88.6% deployed in equities and the balance in cash.

Its FY26 return followed a strong FY25, when the fund returned 61.8% against a 64.2% benchmark, meaning FY26 was the year NFSF flipped from underperforming to comfortably beating its benchmark.

Source: Fund's FMR June 2026

The fund's top holdings as of June 30, 2026 were concentrated in mid-to-large banking names: Askari Commercial Bank (16.8% of assets), United Bank Limited (11.1%), Meezan Bank (11.0%), MCB Bank (9.7%), Habib Bank Limited (8.9%), Bank AL Habib (7.6%), National Bank of Pakistan (7.5%), Habib Metropolitan Bank (7.2%) and Bank Alfalah (4.7%), with a small insurance sleeve led by Adamjee Insurance (1.6%).

The fund's heavy weighting toward Askari Bank in particular, nearly double its next-largest position, appears to have been the biggest single driver of its outperformance relative to the more diversified KSE-30 benchmark.

Source: Fund's FMR June 2026

Pakistan's mutual fund industry runs several other schemes carrying "Financial Sector" branding, but not all AMCs have yet published audited FY26 (July–June) fund-wise returns in the same standardized format.

To give an apples-to-apples snapshot, the comparison below uses MUFAP's live daily performance summary as of August 17, 2026, which reports trailing-period returns (calendar 2026 year-to-date and trailing one-year) rather than the July–June fiscal year NBP Funds discloses.

Readers should treat the two as related but not identical measurement windows.

Source: MUFAP

On this live snapshot, UBL Financial Sector Fund is actually running slightly ahead of NBP on both calendar-year-to-date (+5.58% vs +4.59%) and 3-month returns (+16.26% vs +12.03%), while NBP holds a clear lead on the trailing one-year number (+38.51% vs +31.23%).

Atlas Financial Sector Fund, a smaller and more recently established scheme, is broadly in line with the pack on shorter horizons but does not yet have a full one-year or fiscal-year track record on MUFAP's system.

MCB Financial Sector Fund is the newest entrant and is currently sitting below its Rs 100 par NAV on a calendar-year basis, reflecting its short trading history rather than a meaningful annual comparison point.

The apparent gap between NBP's fiscal-year figure (70.4%) and its own trailing one-year figure (38.51%) as of mid-August is a reminder that FY26 (which ended June 30) captured a particularly strong run for bank stocks that has partly cooled since, the fund's 1-day, 15-day and 30-day figures on MUFAP's August 17 sheet show more modest moves.

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