English is a very beautiful language. And unlike excel allows you to be as unprecise as you wish.

Imagine running an advertisement driven business. You need everybody to advertise. So if you choose one scheme – you are antagonising 54 other schemes in that category. SO if you are serious, you should not run a ‘Best scheme…’ award ceremony. The fact that there can only be a few very well run schemes – and that to say from Hdfc Mutual fund, and Templeton, and say one scheme from AIG – houses which do not spend too much money on advertising, what can you do?

Plenty, thanks to English! Using words now becomes important.

‘Consistently well performing fund over…(here lies the catch you can choose from 3 months to 3 decades!).

‘Best performing fund in its Class (class of fund houses starting with the letter F)

‘This fund may have a subdued performance in the recent past (again 3 months to 3 decades) but that is no reason why it should not be in your portfolio’ (hey dude, they have an ad budget)

This fund house does not believe in a concentrated portfolio (read: they have given 11% return when the category average is 22%)

This fund house has an excellent reputation (say the same thing about one out of 41 houses)

‘xyz Opportunities fund’ is a great place to invest…(hey now they have an ad budget, cannot afford to ignore them)

When you are investing…you need just one or 2 fund schemes (read: then why should I invest in an ‘oppurtunities fund’ – well the reader does not ask, does he?)

..will talk of more such double talk by the industry…we all do it..

Ravana had only 10 heads …..how many do we need to wear?

  1. OMG! Can understand the pressure of not being able to create a negative list – Worst performing fund in the past 10 years. It will kill possiblities of advertising. Thanks. Eyeopener.

  2. I know you are hitting on VR. I seriously think one should not run a MF ranking website which also has MF ads. The conflict of interest is too much – doesn’t it seem to be common sense???

  3. NO NOT HITTING AT VR. At the whole AD driven industry. Take morningstar it takes money from a mutual fund and rates it. I like the MERCER model – it takes money from the BIG INVESTOR and does a ranking of back office, fund manager effectiveness, fund manager asset allocation – MONEY PAID BY USER. That is a good model. not advertiser pay, readers, pay.

    by making the user pay, you can concentrate on good funds. You do not have to say xyz opportunities fund is a good fund. You can say for 99% of the investors, opp funds are immaterial.

    I tell my clients u need 4-5 schemes from 2-3 fund houses. Ignore the other 36. Can i say if all of them advertised / I hope they advertised. HOWEVER THIS IS NOT A GREAT BUSINESS MOEDL. I make money in training, so can afford to give such hi sounding gyan..

    if i were living by selling…life would be difficult to be arrogant 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>