Franklin India Ultra Short Bond Fund is one strange fund, some might even call special! About 80% of its portfolio has a credit rating lower than the highest and yet the fund has somehow managed to escape unscathed from major credit default events. How does it do it? What kind of investors should invest, when…
Continue reading →Interested to know which mutual funds retail investors prefer, how high Networth Individuals invest? Let us take a look at the Association of Mutual Funds in India – AMFIs AUM-Category / Age-Wise and Folio Data as on June 30th 2019. I had recently used this to find out how popular index investing is in India…
Continue reading →A lot of people start contemplating retirement because a ‘back of the envelope’ calculation shows them that they now have created a corpus high enough to meet their annual expenses. Fed up of the high-stress job, fed up of grinding away alone in ‘Gulf’ with family back in India, having built a home, children now…
Continue reading →This is my list of handpicked mutual funds for Oct 2019 (fourth quarter). New and old investors can use it according to their specific needs. Called “PlumbLine”, this was started in Sep 2017 for beginners to accompany the freefincal robo advisory template. This edition has a full makeover with brand new graphs and insights on…
Continue reading →From October 1, 2019, RBI has made an external benchmark based interest rate mandatory for certain categories of loans. What does this mean? How will this impact you? Let us find out starting with the basics. What does an external benchmark based loan mean in simple terms? The interest rate on your home loan/car loan/personal…
Continue reading →This is an in-depth performance review of SBI Equity Hybrid Fund. We find out how consistently it has outperformed its benchmark and peers. Known as SBI Magnum Balanced prior to SEBI MF categorization, it is the seventh oldest balanced fund or aggressive hybrid fund and largest with assets of 29,354 Crores. Let us check how the fund…
Continue reading →I asked new mutual fund investors of FB group Asan Ideas for Wealth on 12th Sep 2019, “What have you learnt by investing in equity mutual funds over the last couple of years?” New mutual fund investors were defined as those who started investing from Jan 2017 or later. A total of 115 members shared…
Continue reading →Axis Nifty 100 Index Fund is an open-ended index that aims to achieve a return close to Nifty 100 subject to tracking error. The NFO opens today (Sept 27th to Oct 11th) and then will be available for continuous purchase. This is the first Nifty 100 (N100) index fund – we have N100 ETFs from…
Continue reading →Here is a free ebook on health insurance prepared by Venkatesh Jayaraman. Use it to understand the features of a health insurance policy and choose one suited to your needs. The ebook was shared a few days ago by the author on Twitter. Mr Jayaraman kindly consented to not only share it with freefincal readers…
Continue reading →SEBI registered fee-only investment advisor, S R Srinivasan (SRS) discusses his journey to financial freedom for the benefit of freefincal readers. This is the second part of his guest post. In the first part published yesterday, he talked about his approach and investment choices. If you have not read it, please head over there first…
Continue reading →SEBI registered fee-only investment advisor, S R Srinivasan (SRS) discusses his journey to financial freedom for the benefit of freefincal readers. You may recall that he recently wrote about the List of Mutual fund categories that you can avoid! (incidentally, this went viral!). SRS believes in numbers based insights and naturally, I find this appealing….
Continue reading →This is a performance review of Axis Midcap Fund. We find out how consistently it has performed against its benchmark and peers to find out if one can invest based on recent good performance or give it some more time to perform. Regular readers may recall that last week we had looked at Axis Small Cap…
Continue reading →The reduction in corporate tax to 25.17% with no minimum alternate tax (MAT) for domestic companies (that are not incentivised) and 17.01% (plus no MAT) for new companies announced on 20th Sep 2019 is indeed a huge announcement. However, one should not confuse the zoom in market indices as a sign of economic revival or…
Continue reading →We often focus a lot on regular inflation while planning for our goals and cash flows. But a very important aspect which gets missed is ‘Lifestyle Inflation’. This is the concept where a person increases their expenses when there is an increase in their income, in addition to the regular increase in the cost of…
Continue reading →We find out how many equity mutual funds beat category benchmarks in September 2019. We also find out how many did so at lower risk! The category benchmarks are those used in the Sep 2019 Equity Mutual Fund Performance Screener (see list below). Yesterday we saw only 20 funds managed to beat the index at lower…
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