We have only a few changes this quarter with some interesting additions in the equity aggressive category and in debt as well. We have also added a couple of themed funds to capture a visible up trend in the economic activity.
As per the above table, we are not yet in a bear market, though it would seem to be just round the corner. But what the data shows is that the period taken to recover from the onset of a bear market back to regaining the previous peaks can be as short as three months or as long as 74 months.
The world of passive investment options is a growing one, and the ETFs available now number over 100.
Because passive investing has gained such a name for itself, you may think that anything passive is a great investment. No. There are ETFs which make good investments and those that do not, just like with active funds.
This week, we’re issuing an invest recommendation on another theme that’s starting to break out of a long slump. This theme makes for a good portfolio differentiator as most other diversified equity funds, as yet, have not moved overweight by much on it.
We had taken a positive view on commodities early on, and added the theme through our ‘Economic Revival’ category under Thematic Investing since our inception in January 2020. But we added a commodity fund as part of the Strategic/thematic section in Prime Funds later in March 2021. The call was a bit late but yielded good results. Now we would like to alert you to book profits on this equity fund (NOT sell) and prune it back to your original capital.
The headlines now are devoted to sliding equity markets and stock opportunities to ‘buy the dip’. But that’s not the only window of opportunity to make the most of a correction. With the hike in repo rates earlier this month and a clear path now for higher rates, debt markets too offer scope for timely investments.
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.
Not so long ago, if debt investors in India wanted to get a 7% plus return, they had to go to post office schemes with (poor service and) a long lock-in period like the PPF or GOI Floating Rate Savings Bonds with a 7-year lock-in period. These options, apart from the difficulty of accessing them, required investors to sacrifice liquidity for returns.
Some funds have a clear fundamental strategy that shows in their portfolio construct. When that strategy pays off, they deliver. But many good-to-hear strategies have failed for many mutual funds in recent years. This is partly due to fast-shuffling sector preferences in the market and partly due to high stock weights in the index that funds struggle to replicate. As a result, you see them underperforming key indices.
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