Dalal Street has a new villain—mutual funds that bet their retail investors’ money in overpriced initial public offerings (IPOs).

The charge sheet isn’t short. The largest of the names, including SBI MF, HDFC MF, and ICICI Prudential MF, featured in the list of the 20-odd anchor investors in the recently concluded Rs 7,300 crore ($825 million) public issue of eyewear maker Lenskart. (Anchor investors are those who can buy into an IPO earlier than retail investors, so the company can signal that serious money has already shown up.)

It caused outrage, and some even calledLinkedinLenskart IPO anchor investors & Sebi for the market regulator to step in and ban them and other entities (pension funds and insurance companies that played anchor investors’ roles) from participating in future IPOs.

Mutual fund houses, in particular, were blamedThe Economic TimesCome clean, MF managers: Lenskart IPO raises a storm of questions on governance, morals, and questions were asked of their governance and morals. Such was the blowback that DSP Mutual Fund, in a first, issued a commentXDSP MF on Lenskart anchor investment justifying why it invested in the Lenskart IPO.

Many feel fund managers are violating their fiduciary duty to investors. They manage other people’s money for a fee, and are supposed to make every rupee count. So an investor’s returns should not be put at risk in questionable and overvalued IPOs. Fair?

Except the numbers nudge in the opposite direction.

The Ken parsed through IPO data from nearly the last five years and mutual-fund performances separately, and found that several schemes that bet big on anchor investing had delivered on the metric that investors care the most about: returns. This, despite putting money in costly IPOs and in those that lost money.

“There’s nothing to complain about,” said a former fund manager.

For many, the question is not about the output; it’s about the optics of the input.