You want to own Nvidia. The marketing material for a domestically available fund implies you will. The fund's name has technology in it. The brochure mentions artificial intelligence infrastructure. The factsheet benchmark is the Nasdaq 100. The fund has performed strongly over the past two years, closely tracking the headlines about the semiconductor boom and the AI build-out that drove Nvidia from USD 150 to over USD 900 per share during that period. What you actually own,

The previous two articles in this series covered what GIFT City is as a financial centre and how GIFT IFSC funds are structured. The natural next question, particularly from investors who live in India rather than abroad, is a simple one: does any of this actually apply to me? And if it does, should I use a GIFT City fund or just stick with the domestic mutual fund I already have? The honest answer has two parts. For most resident Indian investors, GIFT City funds are current

Most investors who move money into debt mutual funds do so expecting stability. Debt is supposed to be the safe part of the portfolio, the counterweight to equity's volatility, the place where you park money you cannot afford to lose in the short term. And yet, over the past several years, Indian investors have watched some debt funds post sharp negative returns, sometimes losing 5 to 10 percent in the space of a few weeks, at precisely the moments when the rest of the market

The term GIFT City mutual fund is a colloquial description used in the market, but it is worth being precise about the legal structure. Under IFSCA's Fund Management Regulations notified in 2022, two broad categories of funds are permitted at GIFT IFSC. The first is the Collective Investment Scheme, or CIS, which is broadly comparable to a retail mutual fund. A CIS under IFSCA's framework can be offered to retail investors (defined as those who invest less than USD 10,000) an

The Nifty 50 is a stock market index that tracks the performance of 50 large, liquid, and diversified companies listed on the National Stock Exchange of India, commonly known as NSE. It is owned and managed by NSE Indices Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NSE. The index was launched on 22 April 1996 with a base value of 1,000, representing market conditions as of 3 November 1995. An index is not a fund, a product, or a tradeable instrument in itself. It is a number, a cal

A target maturity fund is a passively managed debt fund that holds a portfolio of bonds all maturing on or before a defined target date. The fund itself also has a fixed maturity date, typically stated in its name, such as a fund maturing in 2027 or 2030. As each bond in the portfolio matures, the proceeds are either reinvested in other bonds with similar or shorter maturities that still fall within the target window, or returned to investors if the fund itself is winding dow

Every year, millions of Indian investors who hold mutual funds or stock market investments arrive at the filing season and face the same moment of uncertainty. They know they need to file an income tax return. They are reasonably sure they need to file ITR-2 and not the simpler ITR-1. But the form itself is long, the schedule for capital gains runs across multiple tables, and the instructions assume a level of tax knowledge that most investors have not had reason to develop.

For most of the past two decades, the indexation benefit on long-term debt mutual fund gains was one of the quietly significant advantages that made debt funds meaningfully better than fixed deposits for investors in higher tax brackets. The idea was elegant: if you held a debt fund for more than three years, the government allowed you to inflate your cost of purchase by the rate of inflation, reducing your taxable gain and cutting your effective tax rate on those gains to of

There is an idea in investing that feels counterintuitive the first time you encounter it: stocks that have been going up recently tend, on average, to keep going up for a while longer, and stocks that have been falling tend to keep falling. This is not a trading tip or a piece of market gossip. It is one of the most robustly documented patterns in financial research, studied across markets, asset classes, and decades of data. It is called the momentum effect, and momentum fu