Portfolio Is The Kingmaker!

Mutual fund investors choose to invest or reject funds based on a variety of criteria. DSIJ explains why a good portfolio remains the most important one of them.

The investing arena is full of unpredictability. The recent market volatility has spooked even the seasoned investors and instilled fear in the minds of novice investors. Despite using all the possible routes of investments, be it systematic investment plan, value investment plan or lump sum, investors have incurred losses.

Investors are still struggling to find a correct approach of analysing funds for investment, which will help them to safeguard from this volatility. The investors usually study different ratios of the fund, including expense ratio, size of the fund, i.e. assets under management (AUM), etc. to arrive at an investment decision.

Now let us study the factors that usually an investor evaluates before investing in a MF scheme and how it impacts the returns. Firstly, we would analyse the traditional aspects that investors follow to evaluate a mutual fund scheme. Are these factors helpful in zeroing in right fund to invest?

To check if there is any relation between these traditional factors and returns generated by funds, we studied 321 equity diversified schemes including sector funds.

Assets under management (AUMs):

The AUM is the total value of the investments of a MF scheme made by an AMC. Many times, we have seen that investors tend to invest in schemes having higher net assets. The reason behind this is that investors feel there is safety in the investment and expects higher returns from the funds with higher AUM.

To study this scenario, we have analysed the funds and their respective AUMs and their returns in the last one year. if we analyse the facts, the funds with the highest AUMs are not the toppers on the returns chart. This can be seen in the table below where we have shortlisted top 3 equity funds with the highest AUMs, irrespective of the category.