We all know investors fell in love with mutual funds in 2017. The amount of interest is evident from the record inflows attracted by the mutual fund industry. The industry witnessed an inflow of Rs 6.33 lakh crore in January to November period of 2017, up from Rs 3.75 lakh crore, in the same period, a year ago. Now, which mutual fund schemes did investors bet on the most?
We decided to take a look at the equity schemes which garnered the maximum money during the year. We compared these schemes' corpus as on December 31st, 2016 and November 30, 2017 (latest data available). We considered equity schemes including largecaps, midcaps, smallcaps and multicaps, sectoral schemes, ELSS funds and equity-oriented hybrid schemes also known as equity savings schemes. This gave us a list of total 279 schemes. The data was sourced from Ace Mutual Fund database.
Out of the 279 schemes, 256 schemes witnessed net inflows during 2017. Only 23 schemes witnessed a net fall in their corpus. From the list, we took out 15 most favoured schemes and five least favoured schemes during the year. (See table below).
While most of the top favourite schemes were large-sized schemes, two small schemes -- JM Equity Fund and HDFC Equity Savings Fund -- found their place in the list too. Two equity linked saving schemes or tax saving/planning mutual fund schemes -- Axis Long Term Equity Fund and Reliance Tax Saver (ELSS) Fund -- were also among the most favoured schemes. .
Balanced mutual fund category witnessed 139 per cent rise in its assets under management (AUM) in the year 2017. Equity schemes and equity linked tax saving schemes (ELSS) followed with a rise of 56 per cent and 53 per cent respectively. Equity schemes held total assets worth Rs 6.6 lakh crore as on November 2017. Balanced schemes have an AUM of Rs 1.55 lakh crore and ELSS have assets worth Rs 77,000 crore as on date.
We can clearly make out that investors have invested heavily in mutual funds due to rising markets and bullish sentiment. At the same time, schemes which saw net redemptions were very few and the amount of net outflow was not significantly big too. However, only a temporary downside move in markets will tell whether investors have matured enough to remain invested in mutual funds for long or not.
