Investors Rush to Mutual Funds, 65 Lakh Folios Added in H1FY19

Mutual Funds have witnessed over 65 lakh new folios in the first six months of the current Fiscal Year. This takes the total to an all-time high of 7.78 crore at the end of September 2018. It is clearly seen that a large number of investors are showing interest and are inclined towards making investments in mutual funds.

Folios are numbers designated to individual investor accounts, though an investor can have multiple accounts.

Over 1.6 crore investor accounts is counted in 2017-18 fiscal, over 67 lakh folios in 2016-17 and 59 lakh in FY 2015-16.

As per the data from AMFI (Association of Mutual Funds in India) on total investor accounts with 41 fund active players, the number of folios rose from 7,13,47,301 at the end March 2018 to a record of 7,78,86,596 at the end of September this year, resulting in a gain of 65.39 lakh folios.

Over the last few years, investor accounts have increased from retail investors, and especially from smaller towns. Also, a huge inflow in equity schemes is noticed. Folios in equity and equity-linked saving schemes (ELSS) grew by 56 lakh to 5.91 crore. Further, folios in Income funds rose by 5.2 lakh to over 1.12 crore.

Folios in balanced category surged by close to 4 lakh to 63 lakh during the period under review.

Overall, mutual funds have seen an inflow of over INR 45,000 crore during the period of April-September of the current fiscal (2018-19), where equity schemes alone attracted inflows of INR 60,475 crore.

On the other hand, a net withdrawal of INR 85,280 crore was witnessed from income schemes. Besides, gold ETFs continued to see a net outflow of INR 274 crore.