Recently, I met a friend, who is a professor in Delhi, at an iftaar party. He triumphantly told me that he had finally opened a systematic investment plan (SIP). I had been encouraging him to invest in mutual funds for some time to start his goal-based investments for his daughter’s higher education with the help of a financial planner.
I congratulated him for finally giving thought to planned investing and casually asked him which mutual fund he had chosen to invest in. To my surprise, he drew a complete blank. He didn’t even clearly remember the fund house’s name, forget about knowing the scheme’s past performance, track record or other details. It finally turned out that he had ditched the idea of going to a planner and had instead gone to his agent, a “trusted” uncle, who had tied him into an expensive life insurance policy with a monthly premium, which he mistook as an SIP.
The mutual fund industry has done well in familiarising individual investors with the concept of Mutual Funds Sahi Hai and SIPs. But wading through a sea of some 1,500 mutual fund schemes and agents bent upon hoodwinking gullible investors to reach the right product or scheme is not easy.
That’s why we thought it’s imperative to give our readers a helping hand and, in that spirit, we have revived OLM 50, a list of 50 handpicked schemes based on in-depth internal research, after a gap of about seven years. Outlook Money’s Deputy Editor Kundan Kishore has chosen a smattering of schemes across various categories to ensure they cater to your every need, short- or long-term, and asset allocation. We will review the list every quarter to ensure continuity in your portfolio and to alert if it warrants a change. We hope this list serves you well.
OLM 50 will also be handy for the armed forces personnel who are often transferred and posted in faraway places with poor connectivity and lack of an advisory ecosystem. Our special package captures their challenges, the facilities available to them, ways to maximise them and why they need to do more and how.
The market continues to be on a roller coaster, as is its nature, but the earlier you learn how to ride it, the more profitable it can be for you.
Another risky ride to negotiate in the investing space these days are digital assets. Like them or not, they are difficult to ignore. From exploring your talent to monetising your art, non-fungibwvle tokens (NFTs) are showing the way to budding artists. The space looks interesting, at least to the Gen-Z and millennial creators, but how it plays out in the future is still not clear, especially with the government taking a conservative stance on these assets, not to forget the devaluation jolt that the NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first text got, its price dropping from millions of dollars to just a few thousands. It’s handle with care for now like all things investing!
Nidhi Sinha
Editor, Outlook Money
nidhi@outlookindia.com