YOU have a portfolio that is large and unwieldy. How do you go about streamlining it? What should you keep, and what should you divest? We help you get started with the process, and provide guidelines to trim your portfolio. The aim is to get a lean, mean, portfolio machine.
Time to get organised
To trim an overgrown portfolio is to get all the information in one place. The one place can be a convenient online portfolio manager, a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, or even a sheet of paper. However, the advantage of online consolidation is that the information auto updated with the latest price and dividend declarations.
The information we would need to assimilate in one place:
1. AMC name
2. Scheme name
3. Type of scheme – equity or debt, also if it is a tax-saving scheme
4. Age of scheme – how long has the scheme been in the market
5. 3 and 5 year performance of the scheme
6. Rating of the scheme – any one of the popular scheme ratings
7. Dividend plan or growth plan
8. Date of investment
9. Holding profile – whether it is held singly or jointly, on whose name
10. Amount of investment
11. Current value of investment
Also read: 'I have 21 MF - is that too many?'
Not all fund houses send statements regularly, and not all of us are diligent in storing them safely. However, if you had mentioned your email address in your mutual fund application form, you can receive a statement on your email.
Recently, Computer Age Management Services (CAMS), a back-office entity, has introduced a consolidated mail-back service that provides a holding statement for all the investments made using an email address. You have to just go to www.camsonline.com, click on “Investor services”, and then choose “Mailback services”. CAMS provides consolidated statements across the mutual funds that it serves as well as those served by Karvy, another large mutual fund back-office unit.
Tools: Allocate your assets
Cautionary note: The resulting statement might not represent the entire set of holdings of an investor for these reasons:
1. There are four such mutual fund back-offices. While CAMS and Karvy account for a bulk of mutual funds, there is Franklin Templeton (servicing FT schemes), and Deutsche (servicing JP Morgan schemes). If you have investments in FT or JPM, your holdings will not show up in the CAMS-Karvy statement
2. Inaccurate email address – We have often observed that investors either do not give their email addresses while applying or the address is wrongly entered.
One way to avoid these issues would be to use the primary investor’s PAN number as the identification for such a mail back services. Let’s hope that such an option would be available in the future.
Next page: Trimming down the portfolio
By Srikanth Meenakshi, Shankar Bhatt, FundsIndia.com
FundsIndia.com is an online value-added investment platform that specializes in mutual funds and deposit products
Disclaimer: While we have made efforts to ensure the accuracy of our content (consisting of articles and information), neither this website nor the author shall be held responsible for any losses/ incidents suffered by people accessing, using or is supplied with the content.
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