New fund offerings: how to pick a winner

Mutual funds, over the past few months, have been falling over each other launching new equity schemes. Spread across the gamut of offerings, they come in all shapes, sizes and propagate success formulae alien to competitors.

If you are a mutual fund investor, it is easy to lose perspective amid the jargon that accompanies each launch. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff?

Follow age-old investing thumb rules for starters. Fund performance, quality of management and, most importantly, getting your own investing priorities right. Easier said than done. Simply because it is easy to make your investment decision based on good past performance, But that is no guarantee for future performance.

Having said it is any day a better proposition to trust a fund with a good track record and backed up by good management, than to invest your money in a new fund in the same category. The point is that there are few innovative product launches that differ from what is already available in the market.

And even if you miss out on a new fund offering, it is not the end of the world. This is why. Unlike a corporate IPO priced at Rs 10, a par value of Rs 10 for a mutual fund IPO makes no difference to your return potential.

In the first case you may consider yourself unlucky, if you failed to get in at the IPO and watch the share price zoom to say, Rs 50. In contrast, in a mutual fund, the net asset value (NAV) of a scheme represents the underlying value of the assets held by the scheme and is, thus, irrelevant in terms of your return potential.

To make things clearer, a scheme's performance from the time you get in is what determines your returns. In short, in terms of price, there is no difference between investing in a new fund offering and investing in an existing scheme.

Some new funds, which are open for the initial subscription, are Benchmark's Split Capital Fund, Sahara Wealth Plus, JM Emerging Technologies Fund, Birla GenNext Fund and Standard Chartered Classic.

Benchmark Spilt Capital Fund is a three-year closed-end fund which caters to two class of investors "" if you are a Class A investor, your capital is guaranteed and over and above that you would be entitled to 40 per cent of the Nifty gains during the period.

For class B investor, your returns are capped at 65 per cent for a three-year period if the Nifty remains flat or rises. If the market falls, however, returns would fall proportionately but would turn negative only when the decline is more than 40 per cent.

This is because about two-third of the capital is invested in debt instruments which provides a cushion to such investors. The fund is a great option for investors paranoid about capital as well as those upbeat on stock markets and want to leverage their .

Sahara Wealth Plus' unique selling proposition is a performance-based fee structure. The fund will charge the variable (1 per cent) fees only if it manages to outperform its benchmark. While the idea of variable fee does sound tempting, the fund house does not have a great track record yet to inspire confidence.

Standard Chartered Classic, though being the maiden equity offering from StanChart, sounds more inviting as the fund manager Bobby Surendranath has a track record of managing equity funds successfully at Zurich Mutual before it was acquired by HDFC Mutual Fund.

JM Emerging Tech and Birla GenNext fund seek to invest in emerging businessess. Both are targeting a potent segment in the market with great growth potential. Since expectations are running high and stock prices have already run up quite a bit in these segments, they could, however, be more vulnerable to earnings disappointments.