A fund does well. You fall in love with the fund house. You have a large mid and small cap scheme from them. They all tank together! Diversify. And remember being good at one thing doesn’t make you good at the other.
Ten MF mistakes I recommend you avoid...
A fund does well. You fall in love with the fund house. You have a large mid and small cap scheme from them. They all tank together! Diversify. And remember being good at one thing doesn’t make you good at the other.
Applying the same metrics to judge different asset classes. What matters to equity funds doesn’t matter to debt funds. Arb funds are fully hedged - the individual stocks don’t matter, they do in equities. Understand what matters for each asset class.
Assuming all passive funds are good because they are cheap. There are terrible passive funds out there too. They track bad indices. Or they track good ones but have a lot of tracking error. Passive requires its own set of research.
We have categories in MF but sadly all funds in a category are not comparable. Just because a website compares them doesn’t mean you should look beneath. BAF categories have funds that are static, dynamic bond funds have rolldowns. Just an example.
Everyone publishes 1y/3y/5y returns but they mean little. They matter only if you invested on this day 1/3/5 years ago. And one good month can make the entire 1/3/5 series look good. Rolling returns indicate the average investor experience.
The single most badly used statistic in MF. And the single most published. It indicates nothing about the future returns of a fund. In debt, in fact, it indicates the opposite. Ignore it.
What works for the globe should work for India. Different market, different rules. For instance ETFs have huge structural benefits in the US but in India index funds are a better structure because we don’t have a great market making infra.
Read fund manager commentary. Read market views. Read twitter blogs. But don’t open your portfolio. The single most important thing to check, is what do you hold. And it’s disclosed monthly. See it.
Buy because someone is buying, sell because a WhatsApp group says so. Personal finance is personal. 100 - age doesn’t work. Two 26 year olds may have diff liabilities, family backgrounds, professions. How can their portfolio be the same.
Lots of talk about MF fees. Do you know how much you pay in switching costs between taxes and exit loads? Every churn costs us more than we estimate, so think hard about it before you hit redeem or switch.
More from Finance
A 🧵on the basics of block and bulk deals.
Block and bulk deals are large purchases of stocks by investment banks, mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, FIIs, and promoters. Tracking block and bulk deals can help give you a sense of what these large players are thinking.
A single transaction where shares more than Rs 10 crores or the number of shares traded are more than 5 lakh is considered a block deal.
Block deals are carried out in separate trading windows. This trading window operates in two shifts of 15 minutes each:
Morning trading window from 8:45 AM to 9:00 AM.
Afternoon trading window from 2:05 PM to 2:20 PM
Block deals happen in different windows to reduce volatility and sudden price movements. Given that they are traded in a separate window, they do not show up on the volume charts.
Brokers facilitating the transaction are required to inform the exchange. You can track bulk and block deals on NSE & BSE:
https://t.co/pwTyzWTnUL
https://t.co/g9BbHiEag3
Block and bulk deals are large purchases of stocks by investment banks, mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, FIIs, and promoters. Tracking block and bulk deals can help give you a sense of what these large players are thinking.
A single transaction where shares more than Rs 10 crores or the number of shares traded are more than 5 lakh is considered a block deal.
Block deals are carried out in separate trading windows. This trading window operates in two shifts of 15 minutes each:
Morning trading window from 8:45 AM to 9:00 AM.
Afternoon trading window from 2:05 PM to 2:20 PM
Block deals happen in different windows to reduce volatility and sudden price movements. Given that they are traded in a separate window, they do not show up on the volume charts.
Brokers facilitating the transaction are required to inform the exchange. You can track bulk and block deals on NSE & BSE:
https://t.co/pwTyzWTnUL
https://t.co/g9BbHiEag3

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Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"
The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.
1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!
2) "Repressed memory" syndrome
3) Facilitated Communication [FC]
All 3 led to massive abuse.
"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.
Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.
FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
For three years I have wanted to write an article on moral panics. I have collected anecdotes and similarities between today\u2019s moral panic and those of the past - particularly the Satanic Panic of the 80s.
— Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) September 29, 2018
This is my finished product: https://t.co/otcM1uuUDk
The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.
1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!
2) "Repressed memory" syndrome
3) Facilitated Communication [FC]
All 3 led to massive abuse.
"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.
Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.
FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
I'm going to do two history threads on Ethiopia, one on its ancient history, one on its modern story (1800 to today). 🇪🇹
I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):
The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹
Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹
References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹
I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):
The famous \u201cLucy\u201d, an early ancestor of modern humans (Australopithecus) that lived 3.2 million years ago, and was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia, displayed in the national museum in Addis Ababa \U0001f1ea\U0001f1f9 pic.twitter.com/N3oWqk1SW2
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) November 9, 2018
The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹

Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹

References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹
