The supreme court recently ruled that allowances that are ordinarily paid to all employes should be considered for deciding the EPF contribution and not just the basic pay as usually done. This means normal allowances like house rent, dearness transport, fall under the definition of “basic wages”. A look at how much your EPF corpus…
Continue reading →Here are twenty mutual funds (out of 144) that have consistently outperformed Nifty Next 50 total returns index. I did the short-listing using the same criterion followed in the freefincal equity mutual fund consistency screener. Readers may recall a List of Equity Mutual Funds with most consistent performance (Feb 2019) published with the respective category benchmarks based…
Continue reading →If you do not trust retirement calculators or would like customize calculations, or would like to understand how they work, here is how you build your own in just 15 minutes! So let us get right into it. You can watch the video version linked below in case few steps are hard to implement. Inputs…
Continue reading →In this article, Avinash Luthria explains how even DIY investors can benefit from a discussion with a fee-only SEBI registered investment advisor (RIA). Avinash is a RIA himself and is part of my list of advisors and fee-only India Avinash presents a quiz for investors to assess their knowledge of finance and investing and goes on to discuss an insightful…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →This is a performance review of Sundaram Mid Cap Fund (previously Select Mid Cap Fund) one of the most consistent performers in the mid cap fund space. Since its launch in July 2002, it has grown to become to fourth place in terms of AUM (~ 5700 Crores) and is one of the few mid…
Continue reading →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,…
Continue reading →There is no need for investors to consider the two new index from DSP: DSP Nifty 50 Index Fund & DSP Nifty Next 50 Index Fund as there are good existing options. Amusingly, in its promotional campaign DSP has admitted that beating the market will be tougher in future! We should avoid a new index fund…
Continue reading →I argue why there is no need for financial advisors to be competent because most investors are not worth it and the ones who are worth it do not need advisors! A few years ago, I was engaged in a debate with a colleague. I said, teachers should push themselves to become better and better otherwise…
Continue reading →Many 35-40+ investors face a crisis: they realise need for equity in the portfolio but have a huge fixed income corpus. In this guest post, Ananth, a member of FB group, Asan Ideas for Wealth discusses how one can handle this problem. Ananth made this important observation in response to this video: I started investing late,…
Continue reading →This is a performance review of Franklin India Smaller Companies Fund. They launched the fund as a closed -ended fund mid and small cap fund in Jan 2006 and became open-ended from April 2011. From June 4th 2018, it became a small cap fund in line with SEBI regulations. We compare the risk and reward of…
Continue reading →Gilt mutual funds are those that predominantly invest in government bonds (gilts).For a citizen, such bonds carry no credit risk, that is the risk of perceived or actual delay or default in interest payment*. However, this brings to the table a new of problems that investors need to know of. If you cannot stomach the possibility…
Continue reading →Here are five index funds based on Sensex and the Nifty that have beat their indices in the last year! Therefore, investors should avoid such funds! Since an index fund has expenses associated with management and commissions (in the regular plan), it is impossible for an index fund to produce a return more than the index…
Continue reading →Here is how you can combine NIfty 50 (Nifty or N50) and Nifty Next 50 (NN50) index funds to create large and mid cap index portfolios. Since both N50 and NN50 index funds have been around for many years, index investors can use these two instead of new or low AUM ETF or index fund…
Continue reading →It is well known that small cap stocks and therefore small cap mutual funds are high-risk instruments with potential high return. The small cap investor may feel like riding a roller coaster on Red bull – stupendous gains or losses over a short period, followed by years of no returns. So it is a natural choice…
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