If you do not like to do complex financial planning calculations, here are some interesting and easy to use back-of-the-envelope financial planning calculations! About the author: Swapnil is a SEBI Registered Investment Advisor and part of my list of fee-only financial planners. You can learn more about him and his service via his website Vivektaru….

Motilal Oswal 5 Year G-Sec ETF is an open-ended scheme replicating/tracking Nifty 5-year Benchmark G-Sec Index. It is being marketed as a “safe” and “a low-cost alternative to FDs”. In this review, we show this is not true and what investors need to know about this ETF. Suppose you buy a five-year G-sec bond vis…

We compare the SIP performance of Aggressive Hybrid Funds versus CRISIL Hybrid 35+65 – Aggressive Index and NIfty 50 TRI. The CRISIL Hybrid 35+65 – Aggressive Index has 65% of the 200 TRI index and 35% of the CRISIL Composite Bond Fund Index. In the last year, that for a SIP started 12 months ago…

SEBI has today announced a new equity scheme category: “Flexi cap fund”. This comes after Septembers announcement of multicap asset allocation rules (25% each of large, mid and small cap stocks) was met with fear by investors and put many large fund houses in a fix, especially those with a large AUM: How SEBI’ss Multicap MF asset…

Each time we point out that Sensex or Nifty returns have reduced considerably over the last decade and caution investors to lower expectations, there are always a few comments that go, “why to invest in equity or equity mutual funds if there is no guarantee of returns? The risk of investing for a long time…

Profit-booking is a colloquial trade name for selling stocks or mutual funds. Many investors are confused by what it actually refers to and how it is different from terms like redemption and rebalancing. This is a simple explanation for newbies. Let us understand profit booking with an example. Suppose you purchased 100 stocks of a…

“Which SIP is best for five years?” is a question often asked by mutual fund investors new and old. We are introducing a new category, shorts where we shall provide crisp answers to such common mutual fund questions. We would like to first point out that this is an incorrect question. You cannot invest in a…

Shyam Sunder asks, “I have been investing in SBI Bluechip Fund via SIP for about six years now. The fund has underperformed its benchmark for the last five years. Should I stop my SIP and invest elsewhere?” Let us discuss this dilemma faced by many large cap mutual fund investors. At this point, it is…

The “mutualfundsahihai” ads are into their second innings and this time around, the young earners who dreamt of big returns appreciate that big risk comes first! So much so that AMFI now includes a line “MFs are for those who wish to understand risks” (and hopefully don’t*). There is more to mutual fund risk than…

Investors often wish to classify mutual funds beyond the SEBI designated categories. A natural way to do this is to try and classify them in term of returns: high-return funds, medium-return funds and low-return funds. With low, medium and high defined in terms of say, an SBI fixed deposit account. Will this work? Immediately a…

ICICI Prudential Freedom SIP also known as Freedom SIP is a combination of systematic investing (SIP) in certain source schemes (equity-oriented or hybrid) followed by a switch to a target scheme (hybrid) and systematic withdrawal (SWP) from it. Here is what you need to know about the freedom SIP and why you should avoid it….

Arbitrage mutual funds invest a predominant part of their portfolio in derivative and arbitrage instruments associated with the stock and bond markets. Aside from unnatural events (see below), their day to day volatility is similar to ultra-short-term funds. Thus typically arbitrage funds have debt fund-like NAV fluctuations and equity-fund like taxation. This makes it appealing…