There are close to 2,000 schemes on the mutual fund street. Even if you remove the 108 liquid and ultra short-term funds that are used to park short-term surplus cash and 859 fixed maturity plans that are closed-end and are to be used sparingly, there are still 521 equity funds, 176 debt funds and 132 hybrid funds to choose from.
So how do you even begin to pick just 5-8 schemes required to build a portfolio? That’s where Mint30 (earlier Mint50) comes in. Launched in January 2010, Mint50 was a curated basket of select 50 schemes chosen after looking at their quantitative and qualitative parameters.
Every year, before the start of our annual mutual funds review in January, we do an audit of how the basket of funds has performed. Of the 50 schemes in the previous Mint50 list, two were passive funds and aimed to mimic their benchmark indices; of the remaining 48 schemes, 69% outperformed their category averages.
We took all schemes’ old categories and measured them against peers of their original categories before the recent re-categorisation exercise started, to give a fair comparison. 90% of Mint50 schemes outperformed the benchmarks that we assigned. The Big Change: Mint50 is now Mint30. We have shrunk our basket to 30 schemes.