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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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As usual, the new funds that collected thousands of crores are deeply under water. It's a new version of an old story The 3500-point crash of the Sensex in a month has decimated the NAVs of mutual funds that were mindlessly riding the bull bandwagon. The largest gush of money came into the...

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ML Research Desk 22 June 2006
Tata Mutual Fund has launched a truly new NFO. But being novel is one thing, being robust is another. Analysis by ML Research Desk At last, in a sea of me-too funds, Tata Equity Management Fund has something different. At a time when the market is at stratospheric levels and market volatility...

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Unknown to investors, mutual fund distributors are working against them - at the behest of funds. SEBI wants to end the abuse The role of mutual fund distributors, including large public and private banks, has attracted a lot of attention ever since it became evident that they played a major...

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Standard Chartered Enterprise Equity Fund will buy IPOs and flip it over. Since it may mainly make short-term, price-based bets, retail investors should stay away from it Mutual funds use clever names and marketing gimmicks to raise money. They also have a tendency to follow each other (see...

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ML Research Desk 22 May 2006
Not all funds are able to beat their benchmarks even in a bull market. Here are the laggards among the equity diversified schemes. Analysis by ML Research Desk Mutual funds are flocking to the market with New Fund Offerings and collecting money by the fistfuls from retail investors who think...

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Fund companies are offering a chance for geographical diversification. India now attracts the whole world's attention. From direct investors who put money in Indian business operations to financial investors who buy Indian equities, foreign institutional investors are scouring India for...

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Index funds are supposed to be cheap. But they are not. That is the best reason to avoid them Index funds do not attempt to actively trade stocks. They try to track the averages, not beat them, by buying and holding the securities in their benchmark indices. An index fund mirrored on Sensex...

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ML Research Desk 07 April 2006
The three-year record of sector funds is uninspiring as ML Research Desk finds out Focus and concentration are powerful tools while investing. If you had bought a bunch of bank stocks in 2003 or construction companies in 2004, you would have recorded extraordinary gains. And since identifying...

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Don't be carried away by the glib investing strategy of being a Contrarian. Going against the tide is not always a virtue, says Debashis Basu "Obvious thinking - or thinking the same way in which everyone else is thinking - commonly leads to wrong judgements and wrong conclusions" -...

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ML Research Desk 21 March 2006
Why are closed-end funds coming back? You cannot enter some funds. And you cannot exit certain others. That sums up the latest situation of the Indian fund world. Mutual funds are closing down open-ended funds and opening up closed-end ones. What does it mean? It is a clear indicator that...

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Funny how mutual funds label their products Mutual funds make fees on the money they manage. The more money they raise, the more money they make. To attract investors in a competitive market, they have to create new innovative themes and labels. Sometimes they become too innovative. Sometime...

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