Mutual Funds

A mutual fund is a professionally managed firm of collective investments that collects money from many investors and puts it in stocks, bonds, short-term money market instruments, and/or other securities. The fund manager, also known as portfolio manager, invests and trades the fund's underlying securities, realizing capital gains or losses and passing any proceeds to the individual investors. Currently, the worldwide value of all mutual funds totals more than $26 trillion.

Since 1940, there have been three basic types of investment companies in the United States: open-end funds, also known in the US as mutual funds; unit investment trusts (UITs); and closed-end funds. Similar funds also operate in Canada. However, in the rest of the world, mutual fund is used as a generic term for various types of collective investment vehicles, such as unit trusts, open-ended investment companies (OEICs), unitized insurance funds, and undertakings for collective investments in transferable securities (UCITS).

Advantages

The advantages of investing in a Mutual Fund are:

• Professional Management
• Diversification
• Convenient Administration
• Return Potential
• Low Costs
• Liquidity
• Transparency
• Flexibility
• Choice of schemes
• Tax benefits
• Well regulated

Types of Mutual fund Scheme

Wide variety of Mutual Fund Schemes exists to cater to the needs such as financial position, risk tolerance and return expectations etc. The table below gives an overview into the existing types of schemes in the Industry.

Net Asset Value

The net asset value, or NAV, is the current market value of a fund's holdings, less the fund's liabilities, usually expressed as a per-share amount. For most funds, the NAV is determined daily, after the close of trading on some specified financial exchange, but some funds update their NAV multiple times during the trading day. The public offering price, or POP, is the NAV plus a sales charge. Open-end funds sell shares at the POP and redeem shares at the NAV, and so process orders only after the NAV are determined. Closed-end funds (the shares of which are traded by investors) may trade at a higher or lower price than their NAV; this is known as a premium or discount, respectively. If a fund is divided into multiple classes of shares, each class will typically have its own NAV, reflecting differences in fees and expenses paid by the different classes.

Some mutual funds own securities which are not regularly traded on any formal exchange. These may be shares in very small or bankrupt companies; they may be derivatives; or they may be private investments in unregistered financial instruments (such as stock in a non-public company). In the absence of a public market for these securities, it is the responsibility of the fund manager to form an estimate of their value when computing the NAV. How much of a fund's assets may be invested in such securities is stated in the fund's prospectus.