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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →I occasionally talk to my son about money, inflation and investing. So I decided to test how much he has understood. Here is the video. Also, the video version of Can I start Index investing with 50% Nifty 50 and 50% Nifty Next 50? is now available. Note to Tamil speakers: I am creating Tamil videos of…
Continue reading →Here is why I think this market “correction” is a great opportunity to rebalance our portfolios and increase equity exposure (video version included below). However, this opportunity is available only for this who have a clear target asset allocation. That is how much of the portfolio should be in equity and how much should be…
Continue reading →Somethings never change! When the markets are moving up, everyone wants a piece of the action. When it starts to move down, they get restless and start complaining about lack of returns. The problem is (1) lack of a clear purpose behind the investment and (2) wrong expectations. I have Rs. 500 SIP running in…
Continue reading →As readers may be aware, over the last few months I have presented evidence that the Nifty Next 50, Nifty 100 and Nifty 100 Equal Weight indices are hard to beat and only about half the funds in any given category manage to do so. However, the Nifty Next 50 is extremely volatile; there are…
Continue reading →Here is a list of mutual funds that have outperformed Nifty 200 & Nifty Midcap 150 Total Return Indices as on October 2018. The data is sourced from the October 2018 Equity Mutual Fund Performance Screener. The Nifty 200 is a common benchmark in the ELSS, large and midcap, and multi-cap categories. Nifty 200 consists of…
Continue reading →This is a performance review (with video) of ICICI Prudential Balanced Advantage Fund ( I Pru Bal Adv) against broad market benchmarks like Nifty, Nifty 100 and 200 and composite benchmarks. I Pru Bal Adv is one of the finest dynamic asset allocation funds and here is why. I thank Ravikiran Suryanarayana for this post idea….
Continue reading →Are we now in a bear market? Can we get an idea using long-term technical indicators? In my opinion, there are two robust ways to time the market for lowering investment risk: either use technical indicators/macroeconomic indicators or use a combination of both. Starting this month, I shall be publishing a market analysis based on both…
Continue reading →One of the most common investor mistakes is to assume that higher the equity in the portfolio, higher the reward. Studying balanced mutual funds or aggressive hybrid mutual fund will tell you that this is wrong. In this article, I compare the risk vs return of Aggressive Hybrid Mutual Funds vs diversified mutual funds & show…
Continue reading →This is a simple, non-technical description of what are mutual fund star ratings and how they are calculated with the help of an analogy – employee performance appraisal. This is meant for beginners and newbies and I have avoided all jargon. It is only when we understand how star ratings are calculated, can we understand their…
Continue reading →The fall in the markets over the last few weeks gives us a small window of opportunity to learn about risk in mutual funds. In this post, I list the funds and fund categories that fell the most and those that fell the least between Aug 28th 2018 and October 14th 2018. Although this is…
Continue reading →So all it took was just a few days of southbound market movement for questions like, “Should I Stop My Mutual Fund SIPs? Market is falling every day!” to start! Yesterday, I saw five such questions in Quora and readers have sent me similar emails. So if you are asking this question, here is why…
Continue reading →One of the common newbie questions regarding mutual fund SIPs is: What is the best date to start a mutual fund SIP? Nothing wrong with the question, but as in most cases, the answers are often wrong. In this post, I discuss the data of 4147 10-year Sensex SIP retuns computed between Jan 1991 and Sep…
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