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 lowest volatility in the chosen time period are assigned to "Top Quartile", whereas those with the highest volatility are assigned to "Bottom Quartile". Volatility of a fund is a measure of returns fluctuation and is measured in terms of annualized standard deviation of monthly rolling returns over the period selected by the user (from the drop down menu). Volatility can be good or bad. If price (NAV) of a fund increases rapidly, the volatility of the fund will increase, but this is "good volatility". If price (NAV) of a fund falls rapidly, the volatility of the fund will also increase, however, this is "bad volatility". "Downside volatility" measures the fluctuations of monthly returns in the months when the NAVs fall; hence it is a measure of "bad volatility". Quartile rankings are compiled by sorting funds in ascending order of "downside volatilities", or in other words, "bad volatility". 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".