Marico has an interesting portfolio of products built slowly over a long period

Between 1996 and 2002, consumer products companies suffered badly due to poor off take. From 2003, they have enjoyed tremendous volume growth as overall economic growth and consumption picked up. In this boom, it is the smaller consumer products companies that have done better than the larger ones. Marico is one...

Three new arbitrage funds have been filed. Do they make much sense?

Three fund houses have filed for launching arbitrage funds: Canbank, Tata and Standard Chartered. Some time ago, SBI came out with its Arbitrage Opportunities Fund and, before that, UTI launched its Spread Fund. Do arbitrage funds make sense? Arbitraging means taking advantage of tiny mis-pricing between the cash and the...

Sector funds focus their attention on the stocks of just one sector. Buying them is a bad idea, as we had pointed out earlier. But if you must buy one, which one should you go for? ML Research Desk offers the options

The theoretical case for sector funds is very strong because it can be based on two very strong tenets of investing: one, focus and concentration on a few stocks works wonders;...