Evaluating Fund Performance

Harish Gupta, a 35-year-old sales executive who works with a multinational firm in Delhi, holds three equity diversified funds in his portfolio.

He wants to assess the performance of these funds to decide whether he should stay invested in them or offload them. Here is how our website www.valueresearchonline.com can ease his task of making this decision.

Fund compare. On the home page of the website go to the tool named Fund Compare. Go down the list of funds and select the fund that you own. Then click on the 'Add' tab. Repeat this to add all the funds that you hold. Thereafter click on the 'Get Data' tab. The basic details of all the funds in your portfolio appear. These include the risk grade, rating, 1-year return, and expense ratio of the funds.

Now if you wish to examine each fund in greater detail, click on the name of each.

Snapshot. This is the default tab that opens when you click on the name of a fund. Here further details such as the latest net asset value (NAV), net assets, and trailing returns of the fund over various investment horizons are provided. Category average returns over the same time horizons are also given in the next column to enable you to make quick and easy comparisons.

Performance. Here you get to see the rating and the return grade of the fund. You can also look up statistics such as R-square, Alpha and Beta. Measures of volatility and risk adjusted return are also provided.

Lower down on this page, you can also look up the periods when the fund turned in its best and worst performance. Next, trailing returns of the fund over different time horizons ranging from 1 week to 5 years are given.

Annual returns from the fund are juxtaposed against the category-average returns and returns from the major benchmark indices such as Nifty and Sensex (again to facilitate comparison). Quarterly returns over the last 5-6 years are also available.

Portfolio. On this page data on the fund's asset allocation and portfolio concentration are provided. Savvy investors can look up valuation-related numbers such as portfolio P/B ratio and portfolio P/E ratio, and also top stock and sectoral holdings.

Analysis. In this section you can read an informed analysis on the fund written by a Value Research analyst. You can also read a brief biodata of the fund manager on this

With this amount of statistics, data and information displayed in a user-friendly format, evaluating the quality of the fund becomes a cakewalk for investors like Gupta page of the website.

.(source: valueresearchonline.com)