Here are seven ELSS mutual funds that have beat consistently outperformed Nifty large Midcap 250 Index over the last 3, 4 and 5 years. Again, only 7 out of 31 ELSS funds have qualified. If you are looking for an ELSS mutual fund in 2019, then this can be used as a shortlist. Before we…

Here are 5 large cap funds that have beat the Nifty 100 Total Returns Index. Rather, only 5 out of 36 large cap funds studied in the Dec 2018 freefincal equity fund screener have managed to beat Nifty 100 consistently over 3, 4, 5 years in terms of risk and reward. I am quite surprised more than half the…

The NFO of ICICI Prudential India opportunities fund (open-ended) is set to open on Dec 26th 2018 (to Jan 9th 2018). This fund is a thematic special situations fund with high risk than a diversified equity fund. Here is why you should avoid this fund or wait and watch for it to perform. ICICI Prudential India…

Here are 11 aggressive hybrid (balanced) mutual funds that have beat Nifty 100!! The point is to illustrate how easy it is to get such fund shortlists using the freefincal mutual fund consistency screener. The Dec 2018 was published a couple of days ago. As readers may be aware, I have been comparing the performance of aggressive…

There is no compounding in mutual funds! Do not get fooled by “power of compounding”, “miracle of SIPs” and “8th wonder of the world” illustrations!  The term “compounding” has no separate meaning than to represent compound interest. Since mutual funds offer no interest, the notion of compound interest or compounding does not apply to them. Here…

The union cabinet today has cleared five changes to the national pension scheme (NPS). The most important of which is that the NPS now has EEE status and the corpus that you can withdraw is tax-free. EEE means, that the money you invest in the scheme (up to a limit) is exempt income tax (1st…

Ever wondered which are the most popular direct plan mutual funds? This is a list of the largest (AUM wise) equity and debt direct plan funds. The data is sourced from AMFI and is as on Sep 2018. The post is inspired by a series of questions by Anath at Facebook group, Asan Ideas for…

Many young mutual fund investors assume that their portfolios should have more of mid cap and small cap stocks or mutual funds because these will outperform large caps over the long run. As usual, such assumptions are based on “intuition” without rigorous data support. In this post, let us compare large cap, mid cap and…

This is a performance review of Mirae Asset Tax Saver Fund and a comparison with the most popular ELSS fund Axis Long Term Equity. If you are looking for an ELSS fund, rather if your portfolio needs an ELSS fund then Mirae Tax Saver might fit the bill. Sometimes, you need to choose mutual funds…

In this post, I discuss how balanced advantage funds are different from aggressive hybrid funds and when and how investors should choose from these categories. One of the wrong questions that investors ask is, “how much return can I expect from this fund or this category of funds?”. Well, they should first be asking, “how…

In this open-letter to mutual fund AMCs, I ask why they not pushing risk-free debt mutual funds when it is so easy to do so?! Yes, a mutual fund with essentially no interest rate or credit risk. In spite of disclaimers and clear wordings in the scheme documents, investors like to assume that the NAV…

One of the most common investor mistakes is to assume that the alpha of a fund or stock or portfolio represents the excess return over a market index or relevant benchmark. This is technically and factually wrong and especially important when someone compares funds or stocks based on alpha or any one of standard metrics…

Yes, that is right!  After 10 years of investing, my equity return is 9%, well 9.46% to be exact. But I am not worried, and I hope you are not too. Here are some takeaways from this journey and a comparison of my retirement equity portfolio with Nifty Next 50 and the Nifty Blend Index…