Quartile rankings are a measure of how well a mutual fund has performed against all other funds in its category. The rankings range from "Top Quartile" to "Bottom Quartile" for all time periods covered in our drop down menu above. Mutual funds with the highest percent returns in the chosen time period are assigned to "Top Quartile", whereas those with the lowest returns are assigned to "Bottom Quartile". Quartile rankings are compiled by sorting the funds based on trailing returns over a period chosen by the user. Funds in the top 25% are assigned the ranking of "Top Quartile", the next 25% are assigned a ranking of "Upper Middle Quartile", the next 25% after that are assigned a ranking of "Lower Middle Quartile" and the lowest 25% are assigned the ranking of "Bottom Quartile". While, the current quartile ranking of a mutual fund scheme is important, what is even more important, is the consistency of quartile ranking across several quarters, as shown in the table below.