Investors lost as much as 20 per cent of their money put into equity focused mutual funds over the past one month as the benchmark stock index Sensex dropped about 11 per cent during the same period.
While the Bombay Stock Exchange's 30-share barometer index has come down sharply from a lifetime high of 14,724 hit on February 9 on concerns related to global meltdown and additional tax provisions in this year's Union budget, the loss have been even bigger for the equity MF investors.
"Markets have been disappointing over the past one month with equity fund MFs losing 12 per cent on average and the returns have been negative across the board (from all the funds)," Mutual Fund tracking firm Value Research CEO Dhirendra Kumar told PTI.
The returns have been in the range of eight to 20 per cent for equity funds in the past one month, he added.
An analysis of MF returns over the past one month period shows that open ended equity funds have given a return of as low as 20.36 per cent, while none of the equity and hybrid (equity and debt) fund segments managing to get a positive average return for this period.
Among the various equity fund categories, auto, banking, tax planning, diversified and index funds have given negative returns of 11-16 per cent, while returns from technology, asset allocation, pharma, FMCG have been between 9-10 per cent. Equity-focused hybrid funds have been a tad better with a negative return of 7.93 per cent, but pales in comparison to the negative return of just 3.2 per cent from debt-focused hybrid funds.
In comparison, most of the debt funds have managed a positive average return, although the average returns across various categories remained below 0.6 per cent.
JM Hi-Fi Growth, JM Equity, UTI Auto Sector, Taurus Discovery Stock, ABN Amro Future Leaders, LIC MF Equity, ABN Amro, Tax Advantage, Libra Taxshield and Reliance Tax Saver have been among the worst open-ended equity funds with negative returns ranging from 15-21 per cent.
Principal Global Opportunities and DSP ML Technology.com have been the best performers over the past one-month period with negative returns of over four per cent.
The performance of closed-ended equity funds have also been not much better with negative returns of as high as 16 per cent over the past one month.
Funds like Tata Capital Builder and ING Vysya CUB, Sundaram BNP Paribas Tax Saver '97 have give negative returns close to 15 per cent, while those from BOB ELSS, UTI MEPUS, Standard Chartered Enterprise Equity, UTI Wealth Builder and Prudential ICICI Fusion have been more than 12 per cent in the red.
Among the closed ended equity funds, SBI One India has given the best return of 2.7 per cent in the red, followed by Reliance Long Term Equity with a negative return of 6.2 per cent.
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