 "Equity fund heads juggled top picks in 2015")
Driven by addition in equity fund folios, mutual fund (MF) houses have registered a surge of more than 4 lakh investor accounts in April, taking the total tally to 4.8 crore.
This is on top of an addition of 59 lakh folios in 2015-16 and 22 lakh in 2014-15. In the last two years, investor accounts increased mainly due to robust contribution from smaller towns.
Folios are numbers designated to individual investor accounts, though one investor can have multiple folios.
According to the data from the Association of Mutual Funds in India (Amfi) on total investor accounts with 43 fund houses, the number of folios rose to 48,071,814 at the end of last month from 47,663,024 in March-end, a gain of of 4.09 lakh.
Growing participation from retail investors, especially from smaller towns and huge inflows in equity schemes have helped in increasing the overall folio counts, experts said.
The equity category witnessed an addition of nearly 1.6 lakh investor folios to 3.62 crore in the first month of the current fiscal.
Mutual funds have reported a net inflow of Rs 4,438 crore in equity schemes in April, making it the highest in five months. Overall, funds have seen an infusion of Rs 1.7 lakh crore.
The inflow is in line with BSE Sensex rising 265 points or 1.04% during April.
Mutual funds are investment vehicles made up of a pool of funds collected from a large number of investors. The funds are invested in stocks, bonds and money market instruments, among others.
