The Economic Times wrote a few days ago that the mutual fund advisory committee has suggested a 2% entry load. Business Standard wrote today that no such thing was discussed and the minutes were doctored. If true, this only shows lawlessness inside SEBI. Here is a video discussion between Sucheta Dalal and Debashis Basu both of whom were in SEBI committees in the past, about how the committees function and the whole issue of entry load
Welcome to another Moneylife Discussions this time on the mutual fund industry and the whole issue of entry load. Sucheta Dalal, Managing Editor of Moneylife and Debashis Basu, Editor and Publisher of Moneylife discuss the issue.
CB Bhave, former chairman of Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) scrapped the entry loan on MFs. However, this was an abrupt decision. There is no public record of who said what in the Advisory Committee meeting at that time. There is a lack of transparency as to what is happening in SEBI. “They should publish the minutes of the Advisory Committee meetings. It will also ensure that if a committee member is partisan—that becomes public,” said Mr Basu who himself has served as member of the SEBI advisory committee on mutual funds.
According to Ms Dalal, in all committees, whether it is advisory committees or expert committees, the majority representation is from industry or intermediaries, lawyers, chartered accountants, company secretaries—who all derive revenue from the industry. While the entire effort of everybody is to ‘sell’ products to retail investors, their representation is limited to one or two persons.
“Entry load is not correlated to the growth of the industry,” said Mr Basu, adding that there is one thing alone that can bring back investors—excellent performance and committed outreach. “Most of the fund companies don’t beat the benchmark. Mutual fund companies do not engage the savers and prefer to sell through third-party. They also need to tighten their belts,” he said.
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You are absolutely right - unless the Mutual Funds focus on the performance (and tht also -absolute-not just against the benchmark)-its difficult to get the investors back. When you meet these fund managers you are shocked to see how complacent they have become (realizing what a no brainer its to beat the stupid benchmark). They easily scare away their sales team or distributors asking any intelligent question or questioning the poor performance by throwing some technical jargon at them. The foucs must shift on the "Performance" rather than "Entry Load" etc.
More often than not a fund manager manages more than one scheme - for example a star fund manager of a very big fund house is managing three different mid cap schemes (which itself is funny - and the fund house employees literally put their foot in their mouth justifying having three mid cap schemes). Simply by law of averages one scheme will be a an outperformer three years down the line, one will be an average performer and the third one will be a poor performer. Investors will probably end up loosing money in 2 out of 3 schemes but the fund manager will be able to save his job beacuaue of one outperformer. The sales team will go ga ga about this scheme and say oh ! you should have invested in scheme A (a no brainer post mortem) - see last three years return. They will market this scheme A to all the investors showing last 3 years performance. More often than not Scheme B or C will outperfom for the next 3 years, fund manager has something to show to save his job and the investors are the only loosers in this game. Ideally a fund manager should manage only one scheme and should be full accountable for its performance.
But most of them do not even beat the benchmarks. And what benchmarks are we taking about. Did you know that scam-tainted shell company HFCL is among the India's top 500 companies? It is in NSE500 and BSE500