Life's learnings and realizations for whatever they may be worth.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Financial Services & The Con Job

I have just one simple question: Which is the best performing Debt Fund. If you can answer that question then I can bet my life's savings on you. Let me try and simplify that for you, "Which is the best performing Debt Fund based on last 1 years performance", easy right, try it out. I will make it easier, following are links from various websites.

NSE website: http://nseindia.moneycontrol.com/mutualfundindia/performance_tracker/snapshot.php?option=dshort&op1=ab

Rediff webiste: http://money.rediff.com/mutual-funds/advanced

MoneyControl: http://www.moneycontrol.com/mutualfundindia/

ICICIdirect: http://content.icicidirect.com/NewSiteContent/Research/SelectFund.asp

ShareKhan: http://www.sharekhan.com/stock-market/mutual-funds/9f4133f9-9c39-4bad-b719-c9566dc96486/MFAdvanceSearch.htm

In all the queries, there are no more than 2 funds that show up as common in top 10. There are at least 6-8 categories of debt funds and not all of the seem to show up in the same category on all the listings. Everybody seems to have their favourite fund houses and will not carry some of them. The names of fund also don't seem consistent or there are too many similar sounding names. The names themselves are way too long and every website uses a different abbreviation.

It almost feels like the personal finance industry business model is to confuse you enough so that they can easily con you. In the end, I spent a good saturday afternoon trying to unravel this mystery but I am as lost as ever. Any help will be really appreciated.