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Another new fund flavour. Will it work? It is the business of asset management companies to gather assets because they make money on the money they manage. To claw assets out of investors, AMCs come out with products of different flavours - balanced funds, contra funds, flexi-cap, MIPs, rural...

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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...

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ML Research Desk 23 November 2006
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...

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HSBC and Lotus have filed for identical offerings Mutual funds have turned into commodities. We have often documented how funds are copying each other’s ideas. Now two fund houses -- HSBC and Lotus -- are launching schemes that are mirror images of one another. The schemes are called HSBC Tax...

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A survey points to the overwhelming outperformance by emerging market indices over the actively-managed funds investing in places like India This magazine has consistently argued that index funds are among the best options available for investors looking to invest in the stock market for the...

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Capital protection fund is a new gimmick by mutual funds to attract money from you. Stay away from them In the 1990s, there were mutual funds that offered guaranteed returns. Every single one of these funds lost a substantial part of their capital. Amazingly, the regulator, Securities and...

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Looking for some thrill? A roller-coaster ride in an amusement park would be a cheaper and better alternative than this fund Mutual funds are getting more daring, coming out with schemes that defy all logic. ING Vysya has launched a three-year close-ended fund that will churn its portfolio,...

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Analysis by ML Research Desk 26 October 2006
Monthly Income Plans have disappointed over three months, six months and one year. Are MIPs worth buying at all? Has the possibility of excess returns gone out of this asset class? Analysis by ML Research Desk Mutual funds are known to capitalise on market fads and fancies to garner money...

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DSP-Merrill Lynch has just filed an offer document to launch a mutual scheme that would invest in gold-based exchange traded funds. It becomes the third fund house after UTI and Benchmark to seek permission to launch gold funds. The fund idea is novel but would it make sense to go for it as and...

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Index funds should be cheaper. But they are getting more expensive, while the regulator remains unconcerned Index funds are among the best options for investors who do not have the time to research stocks and monitor their portfolio. But fund companies do not promote index funds because they...

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Putting money in a new fund? Some 67% of the funds have underperformed their benchmarks in the first nine months of this calendar year, finds ML Research Desk Mutual fund performance is always benchmarked to a market index that they choose. Almost all our fund screens have so far proved that...

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Balanced funds are in vogue - under a different garb Balanced funds have not lived up to their name because most of them follow a disbalanced strategy of investing. Is that why fund companies want to bring them back under a different name? What else explains the strategy of two balanced funds...

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Be careful about having blind faith in Systematic Investment Plan Tata Mutual Fund is launching a scheme based on the idea of Systematic Investment Plan called Tata SIP equity fund. SIPs, as any investor knows, are one of the better ways to create a winning portfolio. The idea is simple....

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Undeterred by the poor performance of contra funds, a new contra fund is coming to raise money. As we had pointed out two issues ago, five fund houses currently offer schemes with a so-called contrarian investment objective. Of these, four have consistently underperformed their benchmarks. Will...

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The fund management companies are mum about it but they have been stunned by the way the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has hit them with two new rules. One, the annual fee that asset managers pay to SEBI has been raised from Rs. 25,000 to 0.3% of the money collected in New Fund...

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In our first issue, we mentioned that fund of funds are not such a great idea. Since our analysis, fund of funds have failed to turn out inspiring results Maybe it was a bad case of market-timing or a bad fund selection by the fund of funds (FoFs), but we were not off the mark. The first...

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There is a rush among mutual funds to create fancy investment strategies and incorporate hedging for virtually any kind of portfolio. Should that worry you? Hedging is supposed to protect a fund from extreme market moves. But the idea of hedging through derivatives itself has started to get a...

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They advise you not to time the market. But asset allocation funds do exactly the same thing under a pseudo-scientific label The market has been overvalued and volatile for months before the carnage of May and June. Should that worry equity funds since they ask you to invest for the long...

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Kotak Mutual Fund calls it Rising Star, Sundaram calls it Select Small Cap and ING Vysya calls it Competitive Upcoming Businesses. They have different names. But all these funds have the same objective: invest mainly in small-cap stocks. How do they define it? Kotak wants to invest in mid-cap...

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Two mutual funds are launching Gold ETFs. They are electronic financial products unlike gold, which is a physical product. It needs to be judged by four key factors. How does it stack up? UTI and Benchmark Asset Management are both launching gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs). It is a new...

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