Retail Investors: Retail investors have re-imposed their faith on equity mutual funds: Arnav Pandya
Do you think the investor confidence is still intact or there is some kind of sluggishness now that we can see in the numbers? Although the SIP numbers have been an all-time high, but then what kind of these SIP contributions are and what does it mean?
I do not think that there has been any let-up as far as the investor interest for investing into equities through the mutual fund route is concerned because if you look at numbers from all perspectives, one, the SIP book is not only steady but it is steadily rising.
So that trend continues, which means that even though you will be finding that a large number of old SIPs are being stopped, an increasing number are also being started, which is pushing up the amount which is coming into the mutual fund kitty through the SIP route. So that is one single thing.
Whenever we look at this data, I think we need to look at it in the proper perspective on an overall basis because just picking one item out of the entire set might not give the correct picture.
So as far as investor interest into equity funds are concerned, the mass data shows very clearly that data is robust. At least as far as investors thinking is concerned, they have not pulled out large amounts from equities or rather from equity-oriented mutual funds.
On the other hand, if you look at the data on the debt side, there, I mean, you will find that there is a large pullout from liquid funds, which is normal because that is because most companies and other entities pull out money to pay their final advance tax payments, which comes on 15th of March.
At least on an overall basis, retail investors have re-imposed their faith as far as mutual funds are concerned.
Which category within equity mutual funds have seen maximum inflow?
There are various categories, for example, after a long period of time, you also find that large-cap funds are seeing a good amount of inflows. That is nearly a thousand crores coming into large-caps.
The mid-cap, the small-cap, the flexi-cap category are the ones which are consistently seeing inflows which remain high. So this is the positive thing that even in this kind of volatile situation, we find that investors are sticking to their plan which is of investing across a basket of mutual funds or equity-oriented mutual funds across various market caps.
And you can see virtually nearly all of these categories have seen a consistent amount of inflow coming in from investors.
