Don’t be fooled by those who stand to profit from your investments!  SIP is NOT systematic investing! Starting a mutual fund SIP and continuing it through market ups and down has nothing to do with systematic investing. Buying mutual fund units on the same of day of each month is automation. It has nothing to…

ETMoney is an app which lets you invest into Mutual Fund Direct Plans without any commission or fees (as on date). To start investing in Mutual Funds you need to complete one time central KYC process as per SEBI guidelines. This KYC is valid across all platforms so even if you don’t want to invest…

In this article, I compare, category-wise, ten-year ULIP returns vs mutual fund returns. ULIPs are currently being sold as a “better alternative” to mutual funds because they are tax free. Investors by looking at the ULIP returns shown below must recognize the huge difference between the best and worst performer in each ULIP category. Since there is…

A new mutual fund investor has to verify ID and address proof. This is known as KYC or Know Your Customer. Here is how you can do online KYC using Paytm money. The facility of online KYC is crucial for direct mutual fund investors who are too busy to visit an AMC office or CAMs…

Here are 18 mutual funds with better than index return & lower than index risk over the last 1,2,3,4 and 5 years! I have calculated this with trailing returns and trailing standard deviation (a measure of volatility) using the freefincal equity mutual fund consistency screener. This is an alternative way of short-listing mutual funds. However,…

One question that new investors ask is, “since the NAV of a direct plan mutual fund is always higher than that of the regular plan, I will get a lesser number of units for the same investment. Is this not bad? Will I not get lower returns and lesser corpus?” In this article, we shall…

I received two interesting questions received on email. (1) As a new investor, how many mutual funds do I need to begin with? (2) Can I begin investing with a single multi-cap fund? Interestingly, the answer to the second question is “yes” and that is the also the answer to the first question – “one”. Yes, most investors,…

One of the most popular beliefs about a mutual fund SIP is that it reduces risk because the buying price is “averaged”. Many also believe a SIP helps achieve higher returns. We show that statements are not true and merely myths propagated by the mutual fund industry for profit. That a mutual fund SIP cannot…

Here are lessons from the best and worst performing mutual funds of 2018. None of the funds mentioned are to be considered for investment. Observing annual returns can make us understand risk better and sometimes introduce us to a new investment strategy adopted by mutual funds. In this 2018 return means return between Jan 1st…

This is a performance review of HDFC Balanced Advantage Fund, previously HDFC Prudence Fund. Does it still make sense to consider this fund or continue investing in it? Let us find out by comparing it with Nifty 50 and HDFC Hybrid Equity (Balanced) fund. This fund has had a colorful history  The fund was launched in…

Here are three simple steps to review the mutual funds we hold. When we select a fund, we look at past performance: last three years, five years etc. However, the moment we buy units of a particular mutual fund, all that matter is its performance from that point in time. For example, suppose we start a…

Jan 1st 2019 marks the sixth anniversary of introducing direct plan mutual funds (where no commissions are removed daily from invested value before publication of NAV). This is the returns and corpus lost to commissions by not switching from regular plans (where commissions are removed) to direct. Please show this to your friends who still…

ICICI Prudential Focused Bluechip was launched in May 2008 right in the middle of the 2008 meltdown Armed with a lean AUM and 20-twenty stock mandate, the management could navigate the crisis well and soon became the darling of both the sales and investment community. Here is why the going will be tough for this (and other…

Here is a strange but true fact about how mutual funds beat the index! It is also the reason why I keep stressing on downside protection. Mutual funds that beat the index consistently find it easier to beat the index when it falls than when it rises! Here are numbers from the Dec 2018 freefincal Equity mutual fund…

I have been posting one video a day for the last 40 days and YouTube has taught me about what mutual fund investors want during this time that Facebook (Asan Ideas for Wealth) did in years. Mutual funds investors do not want to listen to the truth about the risk associated with their investment in equity…