Ever since I revealed that I invest for my son’s marriage in the year-end personal financial audit, several friends, and readers have chided me about this: ‘Why do you want to invest for your kids marriage?’ ‘Our kids should fund their own marriage’ ‘Weddings should be simple affairs devoid of all lavishness’ Journalist Sunderajan Padmanabhan…

At some point or another mutual fund or stock investors would have encountered the acronym, CAGR  – Compounded Annual Growth rate. I would like to discuss what this stands for, its limitations and how to use it to interpret mutual fund or portfolio performance in a series of posts. Imagine a fixed deposit that is…

If I were to redeem an amount today from your mutual fund holding, What would be the short term capital gain? What would be the long term capital gain? What is the tax corresponding to these gains? what amount is free to be redeemed from an ELSS fund? How would I lose due to exit load? Here…

With an aim to encourage readers to analyse and evaluate mutual fund performance on their own, using my excel files when possible ;), I would like to post the analysis of a fund from time to time. In the past, I have covered HDFC Top 200 twice: Step by step analysis guide Rolling returns analysis…

While investing periodically for long-term goals, an investor should be aware of two factors: The power of compounding oh-hum, boring!  I am sure most people reading this are tired of see how a small investment grows to an unimaginably large value … after several decades! Volatility Most of us must invest in volatile instruments like…

Recently I had posted an analysis of Franklin Indian Blue Chip fund (FIBCF). In response, Swapnil suggested that I compare the fund with Sensex or Nifty including dividends. In the same post, I was able to include a comparison with the Nifty total returns index, as the data is conveniently available  (as Swapnil pointed out)….

You might be wondering why the title refers to mutual fund ‘categories’.  Would it not be more enticing and perhaps more useful had it read, ‘how to select mutual funds suitable for your financial goals’? Perhaps so.  However, I choose to focus on how to select mutual fund categories first, for two reasons I am…

Mutual fund investments are subject to market risk!  Haven’t we heard that one before?! If we wish to analyze the performance of a mutual fund, we should know how to evaluate returns and how to evaluate volatility. Volatility, not risk. Risk pertains to your financial goal.  Volatility pertains to the instrument. There are many ways to…

Regular readers of freefincal would recognize that the blog now has a decent set of resources for mutual fund evaluation and analysis. I would like to encourage the use of these tools and calculators by publishing analysis of a few mutual funds from time to time. The aim is to make it clear that mutual…

How different is a large cap equity mutual fund from an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that tracks an equity index?  The portfolio of an index ETF is likely to be nearly identical to that of the index at any point of time. Typically the portfolio of all large cap mutual funds will have a good amount of…

Use this automated mutual fund rolling returns calculator to evaluate the consistency in performance of a mutual fund over any interval from April 3rd 2006 onward. You can compare results with benchmarks like Sensex, CNX Nifty, CNX Small-cap, and CNX Mid-Cap. This version is a major improvement over the previous Excel Rolling Returns Calculator.  The analysis…

Use this tool to analyze the returns from monthly SIP investments in mutual funds for investment periods ranging from one to seven years.  For comparison, SIP returns of an equity index (choose among Sensex, Nifty, CNX small cap and CNX mid cap) is also calculated. Features  Choose the mutual fund you need to analyze, click…

In the last couple of days AMFI has changed it web address! From www.AMFI.com,  it is now http://portal.amfiindia.com Therefore, I had to make this change in the mutual fund NAV history downloader. Also, while working on a mutual fund SIP returns analyzer, I noticed minor bugs in the mutual fund account statement generator and returns calculator….

This is an update to the Excel Mutual Fund NAV History Downloader posted a few days ago. I have now included the possibility of retrieving NAV history from the AMFI website in addition to Yahoo! Finance. Can retrieve NAV history of all mutual funds from AMFI up to April 3rd 2006 If you need NAV history from…

Unfortunately, Value Research Online changed their website format shortly after this tool was released. I often wonder if they did that because of this tool! So this tool does not work anymore. I only keep this post for sentimental reasons. If you wish you to analyse your mutual funds try these: Mutual Fund Rolling Returns…