Personal Finance - Mutual Funds

Personal Finance revolves around planning your financials today so you can have a better tomorrow. This chapter explains the importance of having a personal financial plan and how you can build the sa ..

In personal finance, one of the key things to learn is the math that surrounds it. This chapter will help you understand the math bit, the application of it and to make life easier and financially sta ..

The time value of money is the concept that money available at the present time is worth more than the identical sum in the future due to its potential earning capacity. This core principle of persona ..

To get to the bottom of the retirement problem will help you in identifying your sources of income, estimating the expenses, implementing a savings program, managing your assets and risk and evaluatin ..

The ideal retirement financial plan should include a multi-asset portfolio, distributed around fixed deposits, gold, real estate, equities, cash, and cash equivalents. The overall aggregate value of t ..

Mutual funds have advantages and disadvantages compared to direct investing in individual securities. A share of a mutual fund represents investments in many different stocks (or other securities) ins ..

In a mutual fund, different people invest in a collective investment vehicle with a common investment objective and every investor is treated equally in terms of percentage return. At the start of the ..

Read this chapter to understand how to read and understand a mutual fund factsheet. ..

In this chapter, you will learn about the different categories of Mutual Funds. ..

This chapter focuses on the Multi-cap funds which are the diversified mutual funds that are invested in stocks across market capitalization. They are relatively less risky compared to a pure mid-cap o ..

11.1 – The origins of debt Over the next couple of chapters, we will cover the basics of debt mutual funds. As you may recollect from the earlier chapters, there are about 16 debt mutual fund catego ..

12.1 – Overnight Fund We are in living in strange times, as I write this, the market is down nearly 30% from its peak. I’ve seen markets get hammered for a variety of reasons – recessions, busin ..

13.1 – Debt jargons As we enter the 27th day of the nationwide lockdown, I hope you and your loved ones are staying home, staying safe. The number of COVID19 cases in India has crossed 17,000 with M ..

14.1 – Liquidity Risk In the previous chapter, we discussed the Franklin debt fund saga. Thanks to this episode, as investors, we now very clearly know that investing in debt fund should not be base ..

15.1 – Context I understand we concluded the previous chapter by hinting that we would discuss Index funds next. However, I’m taking a bit of a detour to introduce how one can invest in Bonds dire ..

16.1 Overview In chapter 6 & 7, we discussed the basics of a mutual fund and how a fund works. Just to recap, a mutual fund is a pooled investment vehicle that takes your money, invests and manage ..

17.1 – Arbitrage We were to move ahead and discuss MF attributes and gradually steer our way to identify techniques of building a mutual fund portfolio. While I was all set to do that, I just rememb ..

18.1 – Mutual Fund metrics By now, I suppose we understand different types of mutual fund categories and what goes under the hood of each of these funds. While we have not covered the entire gamut o ..

19.1 – Point to Point return  The previous chapter gave us a perspective of how returns are calculated given the time frame under consideration. So, now if I were to provide you with the following ..

20.1 – Expense Ratio In the last chapter, we discussed the ‘Rolling Returns’, and why rolling returns offer a better insight into the return pattern compared to a simple point to point return. C ..

21.1 – TER savings  I probably should have discussed this in the last chapter itself, but don’t know why (and how I missed it). While we discussed TER, Direct, and Regular plans, I should have pe ..

22.1 – Beta Over the last few chapters, we discussed various attributes of a mutual fund. We will continue the same in this chapter and focus on key risk measures of a mutual fund. Risk measures inc ..

23.1 – The Sortino’s Ratio In this chapter, we will discuss two other ratios related to the mutual fund performance/risk measures, i.e. the Sortino Ratio and the Capture Ratios. These are fairly e ..

24.1 – Recap I’d like you to take a moment and reflect upon the last 23 chapters in this module. I want you to recap the things we have discussed so far mentally. In a nutshell, here is what we ha ..

25.1 – Confused Portfolio In the previous chapter, we picked up an equity fund (Kotak Standard Multi cap Fund) and looked at the steps to analyze and Equity fund. The idea was to highlight the steps ..

26.1 – Assumptions We have reached a stage where we have discussed almost everything related to Mutual funds, leaving us with the last crucial bit, i.e. the mutual fund portfolio construction. I’v ..

27.1 – Overview Before we get started with this chapter, I need to inform you that this chapter (and the chapter on Index funds) is not authored by me (Karthik). These two chapters are authored ..

Dear Readers,  Like this previous chapter, this chapter is too is a guest chapter. We are honoured to have this super important chapter authored by Shyam, who runs Stockviz. We are grateful to Shyam ..

Please note, this is a guest chapter, and I’ve not authored this. This chapter on ETFs is authored by my colleague, Bhuvan. However, I’ll try and answer all the follow on queries that you& ..

30.1 – Why macroeconomics? The module on Personal Finance has come a long way with over 30 chapters. I can easily think of another 10 or 15 chapters to add, but I won’t do that 🙂 I think we ..

Any plan without considering your unique life circumstances will always be incomplete. In this post, I’ll highlight the important aspects that you should take care of when managing your personal fin ..

32.1 – Investments  This is the sexiest part of the personal finance journey and one that most people focus on. The amount of time people waste fussing over XYZ stock or mutual fund always surprise ..