Liquid Mutual Funds: How To Choose?

Liquid Mutual Funds are essentially money market (debt) funds that invest in small tenure money Market instruments including treasury bills, term deposits, certificate of deposits, commercial papers etc. Generally, liquid Mutual Funds are options to invest your money for small durations. The securities that are part of Liquid Funds have a maturity of fewer than 91 days. Liquid funds have no lock-in period so the assets invested are not bound for long, thus keep your money available. Liquid fund returns are volatile as they are dependent on the fund performance in the financial market. Selecting the best liquid fund is a difficult task, however, one can use certain parameters to judge them.

The basic parameters that can be used to select Liquid Mutual Funds are as follows:

• Returns or past track record
• Portfolio & Maturity Profile
• liquidity & Size of Fund
• Performance Rating by a rating agency

1. Liquid Fund Returns

Looking at returns at various liquid funds:

2. Portfolio & Maturity Profile Of Liquid Mutual Funds

The portfolio of liquid Mutual Funds contains securities that have a residual maturity of fewer than 91 days. While one can go and talk about credit quality (in simple words, how good are the securities in the portfolio) and try to differentiate portfolios, however, the real experience is that, unless there are real issues with the portfolio carrying some very bad quality securities, Liquid funds should not be an issue. Till date, there has been no known Default in liquid fund portfolios and companies don’t usually default on the short maturity papers. However, having said the above the portfolio of the fund would give ideas on the yield of the fund and its subsequent performance. It’s often said “past performance is not an indicator of future performance” and for liquid mutual funds, if one were to try to do some projections, all they have to do is to look at the portfolio. The kind of securities (Commercial Papers (CPs), Certificate of Deposits(CDs) etc.), credit quality and the yield gives an idea of what the return profile of the fund could be. The portfolio quality is a good indicator of the performance of the liquid fund. The maturity of all liquid Mutual Funds is usually a couple of days and much less than 91 days. In most cases it is similar.

3. Liquidity & Size Of Fund

The asset break-up between individuals and corporates is somewhat important to see if the liquid Mutual Funds can Handle large redemptions. Large redemptions (at times 100s or 1000s of crores can also be taken place by corporates) can place pressures on the portfolio. At times of liquidity crisis, it would be difficult to find buyers for such a large quantity.

In fact, to ensure that the portfolio does not get impacted on price, liquid funds moved from mark to market to accrual-based Accounting post the Lehman crisis in 2008.

Also, the size of fund protects investors here on Redemption pressures since SEBI has a rule that the highest individual holding in a scheme cannot exceed 20%. Hence, most schemes would be protected to an extent.

Top 5 Liquid Funds

Best performing liquid funds for 2024 are-

4. Performance Rating Of Liquid Mutual Funds

Performance ratings unless taking into account the current portfolio and the future outlook won’t be able to differentiate tomorrow’s winners from the losers. So, while backward-looking ratings can give an idea about past performance, one can use these as a measure at best for de-selecting a fund.

Conclusion

While looking for liquid mutual funds one needs to look a number of factors and then choose the relevant fund.

Disclaimer: Please consult your advisor and do independent research before making any investment decision.