What Is a Mutual Fund?
A mutual fund is a type of financial vehicle made up of a pool of money collected from many investors to invest in securities like stocks, bonds, money market instruments, and other assets. Mutual funds are operated by professional money managers, who allocate the fund’s assets and attempt to produce capital.
Mutual funds give small or individual investors access to professionally managed portfolios of equities, bonds, and other securities. Each shareholder, therefore, participates proportionally in the gains or losses of the fund. Mutual funds invest in a vast number of securities, and performance is usually tracked as the change in the total market cap of the fund—derived by the aggregating performance of the underlying investments.
Mutual Fund Taxation
Mutual funds are one of the most buzzing investment options among as they help you achieve your goals. Mutual funds are also tax-friendly. As you might know, investing in fixed deposits is a great disadvantage, particularly if you fall under the highest tax bracket, as the returns are added to your overall income and taxed at your slab rate.
Mutual funds offer investors with returns in two forms; dividends and capital gains. Dividends are profits shared by companies when they are thriving. When the companies are left with surplus cash, they may decide to share the same with investors in the form of dividends. Investors receive dividends proportional to the number of units held by them.
A capital gain is the profit realized by investors if the selling price of the security held by them is greater than the purchase price. In simple terms, capital gains are realized due to the appreciation in the price of the fund units in mutual funds. Both dividends and capital gains are taxable in the hands of investors.
Equity Funds
The largest category is that of equity or stock funds. As the name implies, this sort of fund invests principally in stocks. Within this group are various subcategories. Some equity funds are named for the size of the companies they invest in: small-, mid-, or large-cap. Others are named by their investment approach: aggressive growth, income-oriented, value, and others. Equity funds are also categorized by whether they invest in domestic (U.S.) stocks or foreign equities. There are so many different types of equity funds because there are many different types of equities.
A mutual fund may blend its strategy between investment style and company size. For example, a large-cap value fund would look to large-cap companies that are in strong financial shape but have recently seen their share prices fall and would be placed in the upper left quadrant of the style box (large and value). The opposite of this would be a fund that invests in startup technology companies with excellent growth prospects: small-cap growth. Such a mutual fund would reside in the bottom right quadrant (small and growth).
Advantages of Mutual Funds
There are a variety of reasons that mutual funds have been the retail investor’s vehicle of choice for decades. The overwhelming majority of money in employer-sponsored retirement plans goes into mutual funds. Multiple mergers have equated to mutual funds over time.
Diversification
Diversification, or the mixing of investments and assets within a portfolio to reduce risk, is one of the advantages of investing in mutual funds. Experts advocate diversification as a way of enhancing a portfolio’s returns while reducing its risk. Buying individual company stocks and offsetting them with industrial sector stocks, for example, offers some diversification. However, a truly diversified portfolio has securities with different capitalizations and industries and bonds with varying maturities and issuers.
Easy Access
Trading on the major stock exchanges, mutual funds can be bought and sold with relative ease, making them highly liquid investments. Also, when it comes to certain types of assets, like foreign equities or exotic commodities, mutual funds are often the most feasible way—in fact, sometimes the only way—for individual investors to participate.
Economies of Scale
Mutual funds also provide economies of scale. Buying one spares the investor of the numerous commission charges needed to create a diversified portfolio. Buying only one security at a time leads to large transaction fees, which will eat up a good chunk of the investment. Also, the $100 to $200 an individual investor might be able to afford is usually not enough to buy a round lot of the stock, but it will purchase many mutual fund shares. The smaller denominations of mutual funds allow investors to take advantage of dollar-cost averaging.
Conclusion
Mutual funds are a popular investment avenue among investors, as they are easy to invest in and give higher returns as compared to other traditional asset classes such as FDs or saving bank deposits. At the same time, portfolio diversification techniques as well as availability of the options of SIP, STP and SWP make them a viable investment instrument. Further, you are not required to proactively monitor your stocks, as your fund manager does the task for you. As a result, mutual funds have become a much sought after investment avenue today with record investments in the recent months. If you have still not invested in mutual funds, make your investments soon.