“Why are the so-called expert investors in India so disinterested in ESG funds?”. A young investor asked me this question at a recent event and it gave me food for thought. It is true that at PrimeInvestor, we are not fans of ESG investing either. We don’t go out of our way to cover ESG funds or ‘green’ bonds and deposits, unless they offer great returns.
As far as investment products go, ULIPs (short for Unit Linked Insurance Products) have the reputation of being the ‘bad boys’. While investor wariness toward ULIPs in their earlier avatar was justified, they have evolved since their pre-2010 days following changes made by IRDAI. However, ULIPs have still not entirely managed to shake off their reputation. In this article, we pit the present day ULIP vs. mutual funds – and compare them on parameters such as their function, how they invest your money, liquidity, expenses and tax treatment and see how they stack up.
For investors who can write a single cheque of Rs 50 lakh or more, Portfolio Management Services (PMS) have emerged a popular vehicle for investment into equities. In effect, PMS is identical to investing directly in shares, the main difference being that you have given absolute power to the PMS agency to buy/sell shares on your behalf and your portfolio choices are left to them.
Lately, it is not just India’s stock market that has been hopping all over the place like an impatient child. The bond market has been doing it too! India’s 10-year government bond yield, which sets the benchmark for all other debt instruments, climbed vertically from 5.8% in July 2020 to 7.61% in June 2022. But after that, it has been unable to make up its mind on whether to climb higher or pause for breath.
Funds investing internationally were the flavour of the season all of last year. That changed in February this year, when funds hit the ceiling set by the Reserve Bank on how much they could invest in overseas securities. When we first explained the scenario, expectations were that this cap would be increased in due course and international funds could open up again.
Chief Investment Officers (CIOs) or star fund managers bidding goodbye to an AMC, or even the MF industry, has become a commonplace occurrence in India. The recent bull market has seen many well-known fund managers, from Kenneth Andrade of IDFC to Sunil Singhania of Nippon quit their MFs to seek greener pastures in managing PMS schemes or AIFs.
It is true that debt funds have been a washout in the past 3 years. For an investment of 1-2 years, FDs would have marginally (although not significantly enough) returned higher than liquid and ultra short duration funds.
While one doesn’t know enough yet to comment on the veracity of these allegations, this does shine the spotlight on the issue of governance at mutual funds. There’s a lot of song and dance on whether listed public companies are managed in the interests of their shareholders. But what about mutual funds?
MFs are essentially custodians of public money, where both profits and losses are entirely passed on to unitholders. I give money to a fund manager to deliver a certain return from an asset class. But I am paying a fixed fee to him which he gets whether he does better or worse than the market. This pass-through nature of mutual funds means that the unitholder is most affected when the fund is mis-governed or mis-managed.
We upset a few of you with our call on some of the Axis funds last week 😊 Some of you commented on the blog and others raised tickets. We thought it would be better for us to respond through an article for the benefit of others as well.
Axis Mutual Fund issued a public notice removing and replacing two of its fund managers, Viresh Joshi and Deepak Agarwal, from seven of its schemes — Banking, Technology, Consumption, and Nifty ETFs and Axis Value, Quant and Arbitrage Funds. This move was accompanied by speculation that the managers were suspended on front-running charges. Axis Mutual Fund hasn’t explicitly mentioned front-running charges, but it has confirmed that it has been investigating “potential irregularities” with the help of external advisors.
In January, mutual funds investing overseas came up to a roadblock. As we had explained at the time on these curbs on international funds, Reserve Bank rules limit the amount mutual funds as a whole can invest in foreign securities. The cap stands at $7 billion for all foreign securities other than ETFs and $1 billion for ETFs. That $7 billion mark was close to being breached. And so, SEBI directed international funds to close off fresh subscriptions until a new limit could be worked out with the RBI. Please read our earlier article on this subject to understand the background.
At play here are the RBI’s limits on overseas investments and SEBI’s rules. Here, we’ll list out the concerns you would be having over these limits, what they mean, and what you should do.
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