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…
Continue reading →This is a performance review of ABSL Frontline Equity Fund. We compare the risk and reward of this fund with its benchmark and popular large cap peers. Launched in Aug. 2002, Frontline equity is the largest actively managed large cap fund as on date. Like many of its peers, this too had the freedom to…
Continue reading →It is every parents’ dream and duty to ensure our children can do what they want to in life. It would also be great if our children do not start their earning lives with an educational loan Therefore it is important that we plan and invest right for our child’s future. Here is a simple…
Continue reading →Can I retire at 40 with one crore in India? Is it possible to retire early in India with just one crore? Since the answer is not a simple “yes” or “no” let us do a how to retire early at 40 feasibility check with some reasonable and close to reality assumptions. First, it is…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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,…
Continue reading →Invesco India Contra Fund is a value-oriented contrarian fund launched in April 2007. In this post, we review its performance with its benchmark and category peers. With an AUM of 3000 plus crores, it has moved into the 7th (out of 17) position in the value-oriented funds category. Such funds can frustrate for investors during market…
Continue reading →Most of us at some point or the other would have told ourselves: “how I wish my income was higher!” The reasons are obvious: high expenses, EMIs that we can almost drown in, the fear of not investing for our goals etc. Why just dream about it? In this post, I agree that a secondary source of…
Continue reading →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 →