The Mutual Fund Show | Hybrid Or Balanced Advantage Funds: What’s Better To Hedge Equity Bets?

KSHITIZ MAHAJAN: I don’t have any, one single fund as favourite but there are three-four good options which are available. As I said, one is your Kotak Balanced Advantage Fund which is one of the good funds that one should look at. Now, one needs to understand, people who are watching this show, that these funds balance between equity and debt on certain parameters. So, this fund-Kotak balances on the basis of price to earnings—that is, what is the price of a stock divided by what is the earning per stock, which is one of the parameters that this fund uses, and it does it on a monthly basis. That’s what it does. Then secondly, your Edelweiss Balanced Advantage Fund which I spoke about, it works on the function of your trend ratio which is short-term and long-term trends and your volatility ratio. So, they can move between 30% and 80% and they have given 17% to each and every ratio. They have also as rightly said by Raghav, in the Axis fund, been able to maneuver the last fall which happened in the first wave of Covid because the trend was showing that they should move out and they have moved out of equity fast and reduced the equity allocation. Third fund which is an ever-green fund which is from Raghav’s ex-company, the ICICI Balanced Advantage Fund. All credit to ICICI BAF, they have actually set the tone right for the industry to look at BAF as a category, it’s a very old fund and it works on the function of price to book value. So, book value is the total assets, which is total assets minus liabilities. So that’s come out to be a net asset what a company has. It works on the price to book value model and averages the portfolio on a daily basis. I would also say that one should look at a couple of funds not more than that and if somebody wants to really add, then they can look at the Motilal Oswal Dynamic Fund. This is very interesting, it works on an in-house index which is called MOVI- Motilal Oswal Valuation Index. They work on the parameters of price to earnings, price to book value and dividend yield. So, they work on all three parameters, and they have divided all the parameters in a one-third proportion each. So, depending on that, they divide between equity allocation and fixed income allocation. For the benefit of everyone because all these funds qualify as equity mutual fund, and they have an equity taxation benefit, if you see an equity allocation at 37-38%, balance has been done, 65% by arbitrage, which qualifies as an equity category. So, as a fund at the fund level, it is subjected to equity taxation only, but yes, your pure equity exposure is not more than 30-39% across these funds. Edelweiss yes, right now they have 67% allocation because as per their trend, it’s not showing that right now, they should further decrease in equity allocation but all funds have been consistent in their yearly returns as well as their five-year track record also.