Fund managers, who aspire to hand-pick stocks that pip the Sensex, have had their job made easy in the last six years.

That?s because the number of stocks outperforming Sensex returns has steadily risen from 8 in FY05 to 18 in FY10. That means more stocks are contributing to the rise in Sensex than before, which augurs well for fund managers as their chances of getting the right calls go up several notches.

Every year, there are a few key stocks that have beaten the Sensex by a huge margin. For instance, in FY10 till date, Tata Motors gave a whopping 300% returns compared with the Sensex?s 80% returns. The same year, Hindalco and Tata Steel logged returns of over 200%. In FY09, when the market was in the grip of a global recession and the Sensex gave negative returns of about 37%, Hero Honda and HUL were the only scrips to clock positive returns of 55% and 4% respectively.?

In FY08, Reliance Infrastructure and Tata Power beat the Sensex by clocking in excess of 100% returns compared with a paltry 19% logged by the Sensex.

In FY07, scrips like Bharti Airtel and Reliance Industries and in FY06 Mahindra & Mahindra, Sterlite Industries and Larsen & Toubro beat the benchmark index by a huge margin. A similar story is likely to play out in the fourth quarter of this fiscal ? the Sensex earnings could actually rest on the performance of just five companies. While Sensex, as a whole, is expected to grow its earnings for March ?10 quarter (year-on-year) by 33%, Tata Motors itself is expected to give it a 7% impetus, Reliance Industries another 4.6%, DLF 3.06%, Sterlite Industries 2.7% and Maruti Suzuki 1.93.?

That said, the bad news for fund managers is that in the calendar year till date, only 10 stocks have outperformed the Sensex. But whether this indicates a reversal of the trend witnessed in the past six years remains to be seen. According to a report by broking house Motilal Oswal, for Q4FY10, all sectors are likely to report positive growth with the exception of telecom. What?s more, 25 of the 30 Sensex stocks are likely to report positive earnings growth.