I’m planning to park some money in overnight funds, which is why I have been asking about them on this thead.
A list of currently open Indian overnight funds appears below, sorted in descending order by “Net Assets”.
My reason for posting this list is to ask for advice about which mutual fund houses to choose, or alternatively, which mutual fund houses to avoid. I am not very familiar with Indian finance and the history of such firms. Some of them may be known to be unreliable, in which case I would appreciate a heads-up. And are there any objective numerical criteria by which one could evaluate the safety of these funds?
This list was obtained from Value Research
(https://www.valueresearchonline.com/funds/selector/) and generated on
31-May-2020 13:15.
I followed the instructions on How to Choose a Liquid Mutual Fund
starting with
Go to Value Research online. Scroll down to the bottom of the page. You will see Fund Selector under research tools right in the middle of the page.
Based on what I have read (which may be incorrect or incomplete), including the material on this thread, my understanding is that overnight funds are on balance as safe as anything out there. I wrote some points of comparison between savings accounts/FDs and overnight funds earlier in the thread, including but not restricted to safety issues. Whether those comparisons are correct, I do not know.
But in any case, I do not know of any records of people losing money in overnight funds, though people have had problems with other debt funds. E.g. the Franklin Templeton schemes that were recently shut down.
Regardless, it’s still possible that the fund manager could go insane and Bad Things could happen. Therefore, I was thinking of spreading the money across a bunch of funds. I was thinking that 10 funds would be a nice round number, though I don’t know if I can find 10 fund houses that seem reliable. Without further information, I’ll probably choose those overnight funds which have the largest Net Assets, because in India, there is safety in numbers. I’ll probably ignore the Franklin India and Yes funds. I also made a list of the fund houses, which, when sorted in descending order by total Net Assets, looks much the same as the Overnight Funds list.
Having said that, as the table below shows, overnight funds have not been in existence in India for very long. Three overnight funds were launched in 2013, HDFC, SBI and UTI. The rest were launched between 2018-2020.
In the last few days, I’ve been attempting to create accounts on the sites of some of these mutual funds. It seems one has to create a folio and in some cases deposit a minimum amount in the folio before one can create an account, though I have not found this discussed anywhere.
But for most of the fund houses, I’ve had a dismaying amount of difficulty with the sites, which in a number of cases seem to be poorly designed and operated, and in some cases cannot even be relied upon to render reliably. One would think that people with so much money could do a better job.
For example, SBI would not accept my email address - it told me to type in a correct email address. I submitted a complaint, but have heard nothing back. My email address is custom. Sometimes I have found (but only in India) that sites are hardwired to only accept email addresses ending in .com, for no reason whatever.
And I also spent hours struggling with the ICICI Prudential web site, which might best be described as erratic. After creating my account, it wouldn’t let me log in. And somehow my phone number got selected as my username, though I had no recollection of selecting a user name. Then it wouldn’t let me reset my pasword, even though the information was correct, claiming there was no such username and email combination. After a day it stopped claiming that and started showing a random error web page. After that, it let me in and I was able to reset the password, though I still kept having trouble with it randomly logging me out for no reason. The helpline people seems totally uninterested in any of this. And this is the web site of one of the largest Indian fund houses.
Overall, I found this a bit disturbing, and I hope it does not have security implications. And I also hope their financial managers are better than their web designers.
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Fund Name |
Launch |
Net Assets (Cr) |
HDFC Overnight Fund |
2013-01-01 |
18087.0 |
SBI Overnight Fund |
2013-01-01 |
13529.0 |
ICICI Prudential Overnight Fund |
2018-11-15 |
11738.0 |
Aditya Birla Sun Life Overnight Fund |
2018-11-01 |
7071.0 |
Kotak Overnight Fund |
2019-01-15 |
6687.0 |
Nippon India Overnight Fund |
2018-12-18 |
4987.0 |
UTI Overnight Fund |
2013-01-01 |
4254.0 |
Axis Overnight Fund |
2019-03-15 |
2810.0 |
IDFC Overnight Fund |
2019-01-18 |
2484.0 |
DSP Overnight Fund |
2019-01-09 |
1986.0 |
Tata Overnight Fund |
2019-03-27 |
1902.0 |
Franklin India Overnight Fund |
2019-05-08 |
1071.0 |
L&T Overnight Fund |
2013-01-01 |
964.0 |
LIC MF Overnight Fund |
2019-07-18 |
943.0 |
Edelweiss Overnight Fund |
2019-07-23 |
913.0 |
Sundaram Overnight Fund |
2019-03-20 |
725.0 |
HSBC Overnight Fund |
2019-05-22 |
489.0 |
Mirae Asset Overnight Fund |
2019-10-15 |
463.0 |
Mahindra Overnight Fund |
2019-07-23 |
284.0 |
Canara Robeco Overnight Fund |
2019-07-24 |
258.0 |
Invesco India Overnight Fund |
2020-01-08 |
222.0 |
BNP Paribas Overnight Fund |
2019-04-12 |
222.0 |
JM Overnight Fund |
2019-12-03 |
220.0 |
Indiabulls Overnight Fund |
2019-07-08 |
190.0 |
Baroda Overnight Fund |
2019-04-25 |
170.0 |
PGIM India Overnight Fund |
2019-08-27 |
169.0 |
BOI AXA Overnight Fund |
2020-01-28 |
83.0 |
Union Overnight Fund |
2019-03-27 |
32.0 |
ITI Overnight Fund |
2019-10-28 |
9.0 |
YES Overnight Fund |
2019-08-23 |
6.0 |