Category: Mutual Funds

In this post, I discuss a simple way to find out if a certain fund or a certain fund category is suitable for our need. We shall the use often-mentioned idea of standard deviation as a simple measure of volatility. Although not perfect, it is good enough to differentiate type based on daily market risk (there are other types of risk that cannot be quantified on a daily basis like credit risk).

Go to the Value research fund page of Quantum Liquid fund and click on the "performance" tab. If you scroll down that page, you will see this box: read more

This year marks twenty years of computer and internet usage for me. In a two-part series, I discuss my experience and learnings on managing multiple passwords (part 1) and computer security (part 2).  From spending the whole day in the IIT, Madras library in the mid-90s to rarely entering it in the 2010s, it has been a sea change in the way I (and all of us) seek and process information.

The need for a password manager: necessity is the mother of clutter.

Initially one could access all parts of a website (including sub-directories!). Soon site owners wanted users to "log in" to use the entire or sections of the site. From having to log in to use e-mail, now more passwords were required. Unfortunately, each website had its own password codes. Some wanted one letter in capital, some a character like $,%,... and so on. When online banking took off, some banks wanted the passwords changed every few months and even insisted that the new password should not resemble the last three passwords! Some AMCs also insist on this. read more

With each passing day, our parents are growing old and their ability to be independent is gradually diminished. Elder care or senior care is a young, but rapidly evolving business, however, the ground reality is that, even if we are willing to pay, the competence and training levels are nowhere near adequate.

If there is one event that shakes up your finances it is an unexpected recurring expense. These days more and more middle-aged Indians are facing such an expense: finding someone to take care of their parent(s) while they need to work or go about their lives, often in another city or country. read more

In this post, I discuss why it is important for investors to not take mutual fund market cap classifications seriously. In particular, your "large cap fund" is probably either a multi-cap fund all the time or now and then. The notion of what is a giant cap, large cap, mid-cap, small-cap or micro-cap stock is not set in stone. Each analyst has their own definition and it is common to see a fund hop categories. read more

Use this tool to calculate the annualized return (XIRR) of your mutual fund SIPs month by month since the date you started it and compare its performance with its benchmark. In this update to the Mutual Fund SIP XIRR Tracker, I have integrated it with Pranav Date's Nifty Historical Data (Price, Total Returns, PE, PB and Div Yield) Downloader.

This now offers a range of about 70+ benchmarks from the BSE and NSE to compare mutual fund performance. read more