Pre-purchase consumer preference towards open ended mutual fund investment

Pages: 55-59
Jyotsna Yadav (Department of Management Studies, Singhania University, Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan)

India has an amorphous middle-class of about 300million people who can afford to by life, health and disability and pension plane products. Of this only 20% have insurance. Even in this small group who do have insurance, only 25% of their need and financial capacity is covered. The remaining 80% have no insurance cover. This paper shows that publicly disclosed mutual fund portfolio holdings contain valuable information about stock fundamentals and future returns. We develop a model to efficiently aggregate this information across actively-managed funds with differential skills to predict individual stock returns. It also understands that how financial markets are also affected by the ‘financial behaviour’ of investors. With the reforms of industrial policy, public sector, financial sector and the many developments in the Indian money market and capital market, Mutual Funds which has become an important portal for the small investors, is also influenced by their financial behaviour. Hence, this study has made an attempt to examine the related aspects of the fund selection behaviour of individual investors towards Mutual funds. It helps to understand the consumer behavior towards various financial services like insurance and mutual funds. The report enhances the knowledge on how various marketing concepts are learned. This paper will also help to understand the investors facet before investing in any of the investment tools and thus to scrutinize the important aspects for the investors before investing t hat further helped in analyzing the relation between the features of the products and the investors requirements. There is enough scope for the investors to invest money in mutual funds for the longer returns with a lesser risk factor. After analyzing the data we can say that a Mutual Fund is the most suitable investment for the common man as it offers an opportunity to invest in a diversified, professionally managed basket of securities at a relatively low cost. This study attempts to establish a model by which to measure attitudes and behavior towards investment risk when positive information is presented, investor perception on structured notes is lower with higher expected remuneration. The present study is descriptive in nature, as it seeks to discover ideas and insight to bring out new relationship. Research design is flexible enough to provide opportunity for considering different aspects of problem under study.