With interest rates at all-time lows, these are tricky times for fixed income (debt) investors. The consensus view seems to be that we are done with the rate cut cycle and the RBI may gradually start increasing rates. Most debt fund categories have delivered handsome returns in the past 2-3 years given the series of rate cuts. But if the rates start increasing, investors will have to moderate their return expectations. Given this backdrop, a lot of people have started talking about floating rate funds and how investors can use them in a rising rate environment. But the reality is that it is not quite that simple. Coincidentally, IDFC Mutual Fund has just launched its floating rate fund. So, we caught up with Arvind Subramanian, fund manager & head of credit research at IDFC Asset Management to learn how these floating rate funds work and if how investors should think of them in a rising rate environment. In this conversation Arvind talks about:

We also highly recommend you listen to this conversation with Suyash Choudhary of IDFC Mutual Fund on how to get your asset allocation right when investing in debt funds. This conversation perfectly compliments the conversation with Arvind on floating rate funds. 

If you have any questions about floating rate funds or debt funds, do post them here. 

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this conversation. Hit us up on Twitter. 

All the issues in the debt mutual fund space in the past 3 years have highlighted just how important it is to get your debt allocation right. But unfortunately, a lot of investors spend a lot of time thinking about equity in when deciding their asset allocation but take the debt part of the allocation for granted. And this has come back to haunt a lot of investors ever since the IL&FS crisis. 

In the previous episodes, we have spoken at length about why you need debt in your portfolio and the right way to think about debt. But we figured investors need a framework on how to go about getting their debt asset allocation right.  So, we caught up with Suyash Choudhary, the Head of Fixed Income at IDFC Asset Management. In this absolutely brilliant conversation, Suyash talks about:

You can check out these previous conversations on investing debt:  

Understanding what's happening in the debt markets with R Sivakumar, CIO of debt at Axis Mutual Fund

If you have any questions on the topics discussed in the episode, do post them here.

You can also check out the Varsity module on personal finance to learn more about the basics of debt mutual funds

Motilal Oswal AMC is launching a new 5-year constant maturity G-sec ETF, the first one in India. It’s an interesting product for a lot of reasons. And also given that ETFs have been around for a while and investors have a lot of misconceptions. Today, we caught up with Prateek to talk him about how ETFs works and the new Motilal Oswal 5 Year G-Sec ETF.

In this conversation Pratik talks about: 

If you wish to invest in the ETF: https://coin.zerodha.com/etf-sgb

Earlier episodes with Pratik:

Should you invest in index funds? - https://link.chtbl.com/owrqKj2y

One of the things that investors struggle with the most is with having the right expectations when investing and we've talked about this in the previous episodes as well. Mid-cap funds and small-cap funds tend to have higher returns than large-cap funds. But what most investors don't realize is that those higher returns come with a cost - that is higher risk or volatility. Most often than not, they just look at line charts comparing large-cap funds with mid and small-cap funds without looking at the deep and sharp drawdown and invest. If you look at the inflows and outflows of mid-cap and small-cap funds, you can clearly see that most retail investors tend to invest in these funds when they have already gone up and sell when they crash. So, in this conversation, I caught up with Rahul Singh, the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of Equities at Tata Asset Management. In this conversation Rahul talks about:

Prateek Singh is the founder of LearnApp, an online learning platform with courses on investing, personal finance, trading and more, do check it out.

To say this year has been a roller-coaster ride for the markets would be an understatement. A lot of new investors saw their first serious market crash since 2008, although it didn't last as long, it was brutal nonetheless. But what was surprising was the dramatic recovery even as all the economic data was dismal. We wanted to make sense of the disconnect between the real economy and the stock market and also how investors should look at investing going forward. So Prateek caught up with Anand Radhakrishnan, the Chief Investment Officer of Equity at Franklin Templeton India. In this absolutely brilliant and wide-ranging conversation, Anand talks about: 

Hope you folks enjoy this conversation with Anand.

Prateek Singh is the founder of LearnApp, an online learning platform with courses on investing, personal finance, trading and more, do check it out. 

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Mutual Fund investments are subject to market risks, read all scheme related documents carefully.

Index funds and ETFs are steading becoming popular among Indian investors as they realize the importance of costs and the fact that fund managers generating alpha is hard.  In the past year or so, we've discussed index funds and the merits of passive investing in multiple conversations but we haven't spoken much about Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

The folks at Mirae are betting big on ETFs and they are launching a fund of fund (FOF) that invests in Nifty 50, Nifty Next 50, and Nifty midcap 150 ETF. This has the 2 benefits of equity taxation for the FOF and also the rebalancing inside the FOF is tax-free. So we caught up with Siddharth Srivastava, the head of ETF products at Mirae Asset India to talk about all things ETFs, index funds, and Mirae's new fund offering. 

In this conversation we talk about:

Please enjoy this conversation with Siddharth of Mirae. 

We would love to hear your thoughts, feedback and suggestions on the podcast. Please do tweet your thoughts @CoinbyZerodha. You can also post your question on ETFs and mutual funds here on TradingQnA. 

In part 1, Vidya spoke about why mutual funds, having the right expectations, setting goals, importance of asset allocation, and how to pick an equity fund. We figured given all the issues, the topic of debt mutual funds deserves a separate episode unto itself. Debt is supposed to be the boring part of your portfolio that provides stability while equity provides growth. But we've seen that investors driven by past returns, star ratings, and poor understanding of the various categories of funds have seen losses in the debt part of their portfolios. In this episode Vidya talks about:

Do check out PrimeInvestor for some insightful perspectives on investing, fund selection, portfolio construction by Vidya and her colleagues.

You can also check out this LearnApp course on the basics of investing in mutual funds.

Since Feb 2020, we've seen historic and unprecedented volatility in the Indian markets. We saw the fastest fall in the markets and also one of the fastest recoveries in the history of the Indian markets. All this was within a space of a few months. Surprisingly, we are seeing a sharp uptick in the number of new investors enter the markets, but the mistakes some of them are making are the same old ones. Over the past few months, we've had conversations with some of the most experienced participants in the markets to put this insanely volatile market phase in perspective.

But we also realized that investors were lacking context on how to think about investing even before they put their first rupee to work. So we figured, there's no better time than this to do this. Given that Vidya has been interacting with investors for the better part of a decade in various capacities, we reached out to her and she graciously agreed to talk to us.

In this conversation, Vidya talks to Prateek about:

Once you have heard the conversation, you will have a framework on how to think about investing, why you need to invest, set goals and pick your first fund. 

Do check out PrimeInvestor for some insightful perspectives on investing, fund selection, portfolio construction by Vidya and her colleagues. 

You can also check out this LearnApp course on mutual funds. 

In part 2 of the conversation, we'll talk about the right way to pick debt funds, rebalancing and portfolio maintenance.

In this episode, Prateek (Founder of LearnApp) caught up with Radhika Gupta, the CEO of Edelweiss Mutual Fund. Radhika started her career with McKinsey and later joined AQR - the pioneering quantitative asset manager. She then started her own hedge fund which was acquired by Edelweiss Financial Services in 2014. She also led the acquisitions of JP Morgan Mutual Fund and Ambit's AIF business and became the CEO of Edelweiss MF.

In this wide-ranging conversation Radhika talks about: 

and a whole lot more...

Please enjoy this conversation with Radhika. Do let us know your feedback by tweeting to us @zerodhaonline. 

As we publish this episode the markets continue to remain volatile and the Nifty 50 and Nifty Midcap 100 are down about 25% while the Nifty Smallcap 100 index is down by 33% year to date. We understand that these can be nerve-wracking times for you. With that in mind, over the last couple of weeks, we've published conversations with some of the smartest and most experienced people in the Indian markets, people who've seen the previous bear phases. And in this episode, Prateek Singh (Founder of LearnApp) caught up with I. V. Subramaniam (Subbu), the MD, CEO & CIO of Quantum Advisors. Subbu has over 25 years of experience in the India markets and has pretty much seen every market phase in India, including the Harshad Mehta scam, dot com crash, the 2008 crisis among others. In this conversation, Subbu talks about:

and a whole lot more. 

Please enjoy this conversation with Subbu.