I have always said that investing in Indian mutual funds is a dumb idea given the lack of regulation , under performance, high fees and front running and fraud conducted by mutual fund managers. It is best to invest in a good ETF with low fees such as the Nifty Bees ETF which was one […]
The Indian Mutual Fund and Asset Management Companies are facing tough times and foreign asset managers are exiting in droves. Fidelity has put up its $2 billion of funds on the auction block trying to find a buyer as it exists India. This is only after a couple of months when Blackstone another of the trillion dollar asset managers existed the Indian business. In 2008 during the boom times, every Tom Dick and Harry of the asset management business wanted to get a piece of the Indian pie. The local brokerages were commanding super high valuations while growth and profits seemed endless.
Mutual Fund Companies have seen a steady growth driven by the growing financial assets being generated by the fast growing Indian economy.But the Mutual Fund Industry like other sectors such as Real Estate and Telecom too has come under the spotlight for some illegal activity.While you can’t call the industry corrupt because of some fraudulent activities it does raise questions on the industry ethics.Top Mutual Funds in the country like HDFC and L&T have been fined by the stock market regulator SEBI for front running.For those who don’t understand what the term means,front running is an illegal activity whereby a fund manager or fund official makes personal gains by making trades on his account before doing a trade for the fund.This causes losses for the fund investor and is akin to stealing.However like other corrupt practices in the stock market industry,SEBI lets them go with small fines which don’t deter more such frauds.It is also not unknown that some fund managers connive with company promoters and market operators to rig and do circular trading.Not only is this a problem,another massive problem with the industry is its underperformance as compared to the benchmarks.While earlier mutual funds were known to outperform the benchmarks like the Nifty,a recent Crisil study has dispelled this myth.Given these disadvantages of mutual fund ,it is time to invest in Indian ETFs though not a lot of variety exists in the Indian stock market yet.
Mutual Funds are one of the most common ways to invest in equity and debt and a large mutual fund industry is involved in this endeavour.There are large number of high paying professions in Wall Street which depend on the mutual fund industry which include stock brokers and sales persons.However the amount of cost of mutual funds is not proportionate to the gains they give out.This is the reason that Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and passive funds which have lower expense ratios and expenses are gaining billions of dollars in money.The reason is that a large number of mutual funds regularly underperform the benchmarks.This has caused massive heartburn amongst investors who have to pay large amounts of fees for the services of the professional fund managers.This has been the trend historically and found amongst numerous countries as well.Besides the costs of the sales and distribution of these mutual fund with their hefty commissions also falls on the investor ultimately.However the prevailing custom of investing in mutual funds is not easily broken despite the underperformance of the mutual fund industry.Most of the advantages of mutual fund can now be found in ETFs which have much lower costs.They also remove the disadvantages such as the possibility of a bad mutual fund manager.
Asset Management Companies in India have come a long way since the preliberalization era when only the government owned Unit Trust of India was the sole option for Indian investors.Like the other Finance Companies in India,Investment Management Companies too have grown massively in size as well as numbers.The massive Indian market which is still quite primitive in terms of financial inclusion has attracted a host of domestic and foreign investment companies.Only 4–5 per cent of household assets are in mutual funds and the top eight cities in terms of households penetrated account for 75 per cent of retail AUMs.there are only about 35 fund ‘families’ in India, as compared to the global numbers like 700-odd fund ‘familes’ in the US, 60 fund ‘families’ in China and around 70 in Japan.The Lehman crisis took a toll on the weaker asset managers but the industry continues to thrive as modernization of the Indian economy will lead to a transfer of asset from the informal sector to the formal sector.The Total Assets under Management in India as of June 2011 stands at Rs 7.43 lakh crore ($160 billion).The industry has 43 active players with Reliance MF being the largest investment company in India followed by HDFC MF.