A helping hand from numbers leads to objective opinions and confident decisions!!!

Now that you are done with quickly deploying money in debt mutual funds in last few days of FY 2022 - 2023 to take advantage of indexation benefits which stand withdrawn from 1 st April 2023 onwards, what would you do with any money coming your way which you do not want to put in growth (risk) investments like equities? If you go by news, the money would move back to bank deposits now that fixed income investment area has been tax-levelled. We’ll see in a while what numbers say. Though for me, bank deposits beyond the insurance amount are a strict no. That said buying GILTS from RBI Retail Direct portal does deserve a serious thought now. But first let’s look at some subjective benefits of keeping money in bond funds. I could think of two: -           Liquidity. Bond funds are very liquid, while I cannot say for sure whether direct government bonds will be that liquid as I have never sold a GSEC in secondary market. In fact, not bough...

Now that FY 2022 – 2023 is comfortable behind us, here’s an evaluation on how things went for various investments (or asset classes if your prefer) last FY. No 1 position goes to GOLD. Yellow metal delivered nearly 14.5% return if you bought it through very liquid fund of fund (FOF) route. Holdings via SGB route may have done better considering there is an interest component also, but for now we will consider returns from FOF as sacrosanct.   Next best performer:   The much bashed cash equivalent, basis overnight mutual funds yielded around 5.35%. Even though positive, there’s a huge gap from returns delivered by gold, the best performing investment.   Long term bonds, basis 10 year constant maturity Gilt Funds yielded 3.45%.   Nothing great, but lot better than listed equity investments – which yielded just 0.09%, going by Nifty 50 index mutual funds.   If you want to be a contrarian, you know where your money should be going for the current ...