ICICI Pru has launched an index fund based on the highly volatile Nifty Junior
Fund houses are in a race to launch index funds to shore up their assets under management (AUM). The latest to join is ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund which has floated a new open-ended fund named Nifty Junior Index Fund. The new fund offer (NFO) opened on 10th June 2010 and closes on 21st June 2010. ICICI had launched ICICI Pru Index Fund in February 2002. The scheme is benchmarked against the S&P CNX Nifty.
Over the past decade, there have been only about 20 index funds. But suddenly in the last few months, four new index funds have hit the market. Taurus Mutual Fund launched Taurus Index Fund; IDFC Mutual Fund introduced the passively managed IDFC Nifty Fund in April 2010; and in May 2010, IDBI Asset Management Company (AMC) launched IDBI Nifty Index Fund as its first fund offering.
ICICI Pru's fund will be benchmarked against the CNX Nifty Junior Index and will invest 90% of its corpus in the underlying Nifty Junior Index stocks and 10% in debt and money market instruments. The CNX Nifty Junior consists of 50 stocks and represents about 12% of the free-float market capitalisation as on 31 December 2009.
The scheme carries a 0.25% exit load if redeemed or switched less than seven days after investing. Investors can choose growth or dividend option. The Fund bears a maximum annual expense of 1.50%, depending on the corpus of the fund.
Index funds are supposed to exactly replicate their benchmark and outperform most actively managed funds.
Most of the index funds are benchmarked against Nifty or Sensex. The Nifty Junior index is much more volatile than these two main indices. Nifty Junior rises sharply in a bull run and falls as sharply when the market crashes. From the bottom of October 2008 to the peak of April 2004, the Nifty was up 113% whereas the Nifty Junior was up 206%. Earlier, the Nifty Junior had crashed 73% from January 2008 to October 2008 while the Nifty had declined 61% in the same period.
The Fund will compete against the much cheaper 'Junior BeES' launched by Benchmark Mutual Fund, which launched India's first mid-cap index fund in the year 2003.
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