A Study of Consumer Awareness, Perception and Practice Regarding Mutual Fund Investment

Individual saving means spending less on consumption than available from one’s disposable income.  What an individual saves can be held in many ways.  It can be deposited in a bank, put into a pension fund, used to buy a business, pay down debt, or kept under the mattress, for example.  The common element is the claim on assets that can be used to pay for future consumption.  If there is a return on the saving in the form of interest, dividend, rent, or capital gain, there can be a net gain in individual saving, and thus in individual wealth. In current scenario, the inflation rate is quite high and the interest rates are quite low so people don’t get satisfactory returns on their investments. While opting for traditional tax saving instruments like PPF and Fix Deposits the investor will get a return of 7% to 8% and sacrifice superior returns given by stocks. So study concentrate on Equity linked Saving Schemes offered by Mutual Funds.

A mutual fund’s business is to invest the funds thus collected, according to the wishes of the investors who created the pool. In many markets these wishes are articulated as “Investment mandates”. Usually, the investors appoint professional investment managers, to manage their funds. The same objective is achieved when professional investment managers create a “product”, and offer it for the investment to the investor. This product represents a share in the pool, and pre-states investment objectives. For Example, a mutual fund, which sells a “money market mutual fund,” is actually seeking investors willing to invest in a pool that invest predominately in money market

This healthy growth of saving has been boosted by the household sector which has contributed a substantially high percentage to total domestic savings. Traditionally, GIC, banks, LIC, and PFs have been intermediaries to mobilise domestic savings to the productive sectors of the economy. With the growth of capital markets and the emergence of alternative savings instruments, investors are tend to move towards liquid short term instruments as the units of the mutual funds along with corporate equities and debentures

Mutual funds have been the latest growing institution during this period in the household savings sector. Growing market complications and investment risk in the stock market with high inflation have pushed households further towards mutual funds.

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