The pandemic situation in India has worsened over the past few weeks. With the world’s highest-ever surge at 3.32 lakh reported on April 22, India’s active COVID-19 cases have breached the 24 lakh mark. Experts believe that we are at least 3-4 weeks away from reaching the peak of second wave. Many parts of the…
In the past, small-cap stocks have faced various hurdles such as demonetization, mutual fund categorization, economic slowdown, etc. which led to the underperformance of the category. Now the second wave of COVID-19 and renewed lockdown restrictions pose a threat to its growth potential. Though the small-cap stocks made a significant recovery from the last year’s…
Contra Funds are a subset of value style funds. As the name suggests, these funds take on an ‘against the herd’ approach on stocks and sectors that are temporarily going through a rough phase where their performance is affected and have distortions in their valuations. The category aims to capitalise on these distortions and take contrarian bets to…
The second wave of COVID-19 is not showing any signs of a slowdown yet. India now stands 2nd among the worst affected countries by active cases and 1st in daily new cases. For the economy, it is déjà vu all over again – health infrastructure getting overwhelmed, rising instances of job loss, businesses being shut,…
We witnessed the novel coronavirus infection peak in September 2020 on home soil; and from there on cases started to decline steadily even as many other nations continued to report an escalation. Consequently, many restrictions were lifted and it seemed like we would soon achieve victory over the deadly virus. But the expression, “Don’t celebrate…
The beginning of the financial year is the best time to begin your tax planning exercise. Doing so allows you to explore various tax-saving avenues and pick the most suitable one that aligns with your investment objective, risk profile, time horizon. Equity-linked Saving Scheme (ELSS), Public Provident Fund (PPF), Tax Saving Bank Deposit, Life insurance…
The S&P BSE Sensex continues to trade near the 50,000 mark, overcoming the temporary blip caused by the fears surrounding the second wave of coronavirus infections in India. This may point to investors ruling out the possibility of renewed lockdown clamps in the country. Recently, the RBI governor expressed confidence that the new wave is unlikely to…
It is not very often that we hear of extraordinary returns in mutual fund schemes; such returns are generally associated with investments in direct equities. As you know 2020 was a highly volatile year for the equity market due to the impact of COVID-19 outbreak on the economy. Despite this, the market witnessed a broad-based…
After scaling all-time highs the Indian equity market has turned volatile amid resurgence in COVID-19 cases. However, since the government has not announced any major lockdown restrictions and with the pace of vaccination drive picking up, the impact on the equity market may not be as severe as the one witnessed last year. Despite this,…
In a relief to debt mutual funds and its investors, SEBI has relaxed guidelines on the valuation of perpetual bonds. Few days back, SEBI had issued a circular asking mutual funds to treat AT-1 bonds (Perpetual bonds) as having 100-year maturity. This sent shockwaves in the bond market because it was expected to result in…
