After Bandhan MF's US Treasury Bond 0-1 year Fund of Fund (FoF), Aditya Birla Sun Life (ABSL) MF has come out with US Treasury 1-3 Year Bond ETFs FoF and 3-10 Year Bond ETFs FoF. US bonds, which generally offer low yields, have turned attractive post the 525-basis point hike in US interest rates. According to Bloomberg data, the 1-year and 2-year US treasury yields now stand at 5.4 per cent and 5.1 per cent, respectively. Although the yields remain lower than what Indian government bonds offer, the differential has come down steeply.
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Omkeshwar Singh, head, Rank MF, a mutual fund investment platform, answers your queries.
Drop in the number of schemes is less than 3%, despite merger of 38 schemes between Sept 2017 and May this year
Balanced advantage funds (BAFs) were popular in the later part of 2021 and continued to see good inflows until some months back as investors looked for safer options amid over-valuation concerns. As such concerns ease, investors are turning to riskier funds and shifting from BAFs. Redemptions from the hybrid fund category have exceeded in six of the last seven months, with investors pulling out a net of Rs 3,140 crore during the seven-month period.
Ulhas Joshi, Head -- Sales, Rank MF, a mutual fund investment platform, answers your queries.
"We remain open to opportunities if appropriate valuations come up," said Reliance MF CEO Sundeep Sikka. Reliance MF, which is India's biggest mutual fund in terms of assets under management, has also become the first fund house to cross an average AUM of Rs 1 lakh crore. "Consolidation has already started in the industry and, going forward, only top 5-7 fund houses would command the major chunk of funds as investors will have confidence in large fund houses," Sikka said.
UTI Mutual Fund will hit the capital markets with initial public offering on Tuesday for its sixth thematic funds including auto, banking and public sector undertakings.
The cash pile within smallcap mutual fund (MF) schemes has grown over the past few months amid a relentless rally in stocks in this space. While fund managers usually don't make cash calls, incessant inflows and valuation discomfort have forced their hand. At the end of January, the top 10 schemes had over Rs 12,160 crore in cash, compared to Rs 8,700 crore in August 2023.
Until now, these platforms were either working through an investment advisory (IA) or stockbroking licence.
Reliance Mutual Fund has launched a pharma fund in India -- its third sector specific fund after banking and power -- and expects to raise over Rs 200 crore.
'If their allocation to certain segments have become high due to strong returns over the past three-four years, they should rebalance their portfolios and bring them in line with their long-term asset allocation.'
Mutual fund is an investment vehicle that is made up of a pool of funds collected from many investors for the purpose of investing in securities such as stocks, bonds, money market instruments and similar assets.
Debt mutual fund (MF) schemes, which witnessed relatively muted inflows in the past three years, saw a surge in investor interest in April amid election-induced volatility in the equity markets. Active debt funds garnered nearly Rs 66,000 crore net inflows in April, most at least since December 2020.
Building a MF portfolio is akin to building and furnishing your home. There is no model portfolio to suit everyone's needs, so you can follow a few rules to build yourself one.
Anil Rego, CEO, Right Horizons, answers your personal income tax queries.
Now that bank FD rates have gone up and most BAFs haven't delivered good returns, these investors are likely to be moving back to FDs, observed a senior MF distributor. The performance of BAFs in the past year has been mixed.
rediffGURU Sunil Lala answers your MF-related queries.
The steady inflows from systematic investment plans (SIPs) into mutual funds (MFs), coupled with outflows from debt schemes, has propelled the share of SIPs in the total assets being managed by the industry to a new high of 17.1 per cent in February. SIPs are used predominantly by retail investors. Nearly seven of every 10 SIP accounts are in equity-oriented active MF schemes.
Several of the mutual fund schemes have plans like dividend, growth and bonus.
Mutual funds have ratcheted up Rs 53,700 crore (Rs 537 billion) through new fund offers (NFOs) in 2022 until November, against Rs 1 trillion in Calendar 2021, notwithstanding the number of launches this year eclipsing the 2021 tally. Industry insiders cite the absence of launches in popular categories as the reason behind lower collections this year. Typically, only NFOs in popular categories from major fund houses rake in the moolah.
rediffGURU Samkit Maniar answers readers' personal income tax queries
Two equity funds at the opposite ends of the risk matrix - small-cap and arbitrage - bucked the 'low inflow' trend in May this calendar year 2023 (CY23) to receive the highest net inflows in recent years. The Rs 3,280-crore net inflows into small-cap schemes in May was the highest for the category since the mutual fund (MF) industry started releasing fund-wise inflow data in April 2019. Arbitrage schemes raked in a net Rs 6,640 crore - the highest since July 2021.
As per the revised structure, the ARN fees for NBFCs have seen the biggest decline of 80 per cent to Rs 100,000 (from Rs 500,000 earlier), while fees for proprietary firms have also been slashed considerably from Rs 10,000 to Rs 3,000.
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This feat was achieved 25 years after the mutual funds industry was opened to private players. The industry now aims to achieve the next Rs 25 trillion in 5 years.
Ask rediffGURU Ulhas Joshi your mutual fund queries.
Follow these simple steps if you want to create a solid retirement corpus and retire young, says Anamika Pareek.
The Indian equity markets have significantly increased in importance within the emerging market (EM) basket of stocks in recent years. Since 2018, India's weighting in the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) EM Index - tracked by passive funds with assets of nearly $500 billion - has doubled, while the number of domestic stocks has grown by almost 70 per cent.
Market watchdog Sebi on Thursday asked mutual fund companies not to deduct marketing and distribution charges from investment made by subscribers, a move which analysts termed "revolutinary for investors".
Reliance MF, the country's largest fund house, has witnessed an increase of about 13 per cent with the average AUM crossing the Rs 1,00,000 crore mark in May as compared to Rs 88,387.98 crore at the end of April. In May 2008, it had crossed the Rs 100,000 crore mark, but in terms of total assets under management. This time, the level has been crossed in the average monthly AUM, which is taken into consideration in the data released by the Association of Mutual Funds of India.
Hybrid mutual fund (MF) offers, expected to drive higher investor interest after the change in debt fund taxation, are set to end 2023 with the slowest account growth in the past three years. Investment accounts in hybrid funds are up 5.7 per cent so far in 2023 compared with 7.6 per cent in 2022 and 20 per cent in 2021, shows the data from the Association of Mutual Funds in India (Amfi). In 2020, the count had dipped 2.4 per cent.
Actively managed debt funds with the flexibility to go long on duration made a strong comeback on the returns chart in 2023, thanks to softening bond yields. The average one-year returns of floater, long-duration, gilt, and dynamic bond funds, which ranged between 2.3 per cent and 4.5 per cent at the end of 2022, now stand at over 7.2 per cent, with some schemes delivering over 8.5 per cent, according to data from Value Research. Debt fund returns are inversely related to yields of underlying investments, meaning a decline in yields is positive for funds.
Sebi has time and again voiced its concerns over higher agents' fees.
Even as net flows into smallcap funds in March turned negative, for the first time in 30 months, they remained a big draw for new investors. The smallcap fund category saw a net of 360,000 investment accounts, or folios, getting added last month, the second-most among all active equity categories. Smallcap funds' continued traction could be driven by their strong performance across timeframes, say experts.
'Small cap funds do have their own merits and they make sense when the investor has a longer investment horizon.'
