Professional Management
Mutual funds offer investors the opportunity to earn an income or build their wealth through professional management of their investible funds. There are several aspects to such professional management viz. investing in line with the investment objective, investing based on adequate research, and ensuring that prudent investment processes are followed.
Investing in the securities markets will require the investor to open and manage multiple accounts and relationships such as broking account, demat account and others. Mutual fund investment simplifies the process of investing and holding securities.
Affordable Portfolio Diversification
Investing in the units of a scheme provide investors the exposure to a range of securities held in the investment portfolio of the scheme in proportion to their holding in the scheme. Thus, even a small investment of Rs. 500 in a mutual fund scheme can give investors proportionate ownership in a diversified investment portfolio.
As will be seen later, with diversification, an investor ensures that “all the eggs are not in the same basket”. Consequently, the investor is less likely to lose money on all the investments at the same time. Thus, diversification helps reduce the risk in investment. In order to achieve the same level of diversification as a mutual fund scheme, investors will need to set apart several lakhs of rupees. Instead, they can achieve the diversification through an investment of less than thousand rupees in a mutual fund scheme.
Economies of Scale
Pooling of large sum of money from many investors makes it possible for the mutual fund to engage professional managers for managing investments. Individual investors with small amounts to invest cannot, by themselves, afford to engage such professional management.
Large investment corpus leads to various other economies of scale. For instance, costs related to investment research and office space gets spread across investors. Further, the higher transaction volume makes it possible to negotiate better terms with brokers, bankers and other service providers.
Mutual funds give the flexibility to an investor to organize their investments according to their convenience. Direct investments may require a much higher investment amount than what many investors may be able to invest. For example, investment in gold and real estate require a large outlay. Similarly, an effectively diversified equity portfolio may require a large outlay. Mutual funds offer the same benefits at a much lower investment value since it pools small investments by multiple investors to create a large fund. Similarly, the dividend and growth options of mutual funds allow investors to structure the returns from the fund in the way that suits their requirements.
Thus, investing through a mutual fund offers a distinct economic advantage to an investor as compared to direct investing in terms of cost saving.
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