What a retail mutual fund investor holds

After witnessing a lacklustre performance for the last two years, mutual fund investors experienced a good gain in their investment in the year 2020.  

Investors, who had the courage to invest in the month of March, might be seeing a huge gain in their portfolio by now if they had not exited their investment. Year-to-date, March was the best month in terms of inflows to the equity-dedicated mutual funds. In the month of March, when the market was at its low, equity investors had invested around Rs 11,722 crore into mutual funds.  

Nonetheless, in the last five months, there has been a continuous outflow from the equity-dedicated mutual fund. In terms of the number of accounts, there are 9,33,07,480 accounts in the mutual fund industry on September 2020 (this data is released quarterly), of which, 90.1 per cent is accounted for retail investors, which means, 8,40,94,279 retail investor accounts at the end of September 2020.   

 Number of Accounts

Retail investors hold the least number in debt-oriented schemes, which is about 64.9 per cent of the total accounts. HNI investors are predominantly concentrated towards debt-oriented schemes (32.7 per cent), followed by liquid/money market schemes (20.8 per cent), and hybrid schemes (19.9  per cent).  

Categorywise Percentage of Accounts

The average ticket size for equity-oriented funds is Rs 1,21,007, while the average ticket size for debt-oriented funds is Rs 15,46,091. The average ticket size is relatively higher for liquid and debt-oriented schemes because it is dominated by the institutional investors, whose ticket size of the investment is large.  

Institutional investors had the highest ticket size at Rs 8.26 crore per account, while retail investors had an average ticket size of Rs 58,973 per account.  

Average Ticket Size of Investment

Equity assets have a longer average holding period as compared to non-equity assets. Around 48.8 per cent of the equity, assets have been held for periods greater than 24 months. Retail investors hold 54.61 per cent of equity assets for a period greater than 24 months.