Part 8 of the Classroom series on mutual funds tells you how to keep track of your investment in funds in a hassle-free manner and make sure you get your account statements regularly.
Q. How do I monitor my mutual fund investments?
A. Monitoring your portfolio of mutual funds is easy as all mutual fund schemes declare their net asset values (NAV) daily. There are scores of third-party platforms such as Moneycontrol, Morningstar and Valueresearch that publish fund performances on a daily basis. Just visit one of these websites, search for a fund you’re looking for – could be your own fund, could be one where you are contemplating to invest in and so on – and you will get to see the fund’s past performance.
The easiest way to track your own portfolio is to simply ask your distributor or financial advisor to give you a statement of your holdings. If you invest through an online platform, then your job becomes much easier because the moment you log in online, you can see your portfolio and how it has been doing.
Alternatively, you can call up individual fund houses or go to a large registrar and transfer agent’s website and request an account statement. This account statement will give you a status report of your investments that includes your name, address, mode of holding, which funds you’ve invested in, the cost at which you bought them and their latest value. The two major R&Ts that offer this facility are Computer Age Management Systems (Cams) and Karvy Computershare.
Q. How do I get my account statements?
A. Technology has made it very simple to get account statements these days. Here are a few methods to get your account statement. There are many ways of getting an account statement.
As soon as invest in a fund house, it sends you an account statement. It sends you either a physical one or through email if you have registered one. Your fund house also sends you a statement over email after every systematic investment plan (SIP) made.
At the beginning of every month, you also get a common account statement (CAS) if there has been any action in any of your mutual fund folios in the previous month, such as a SIP or lump-sum investment made, a dividend declared or if some redemption has happened. If you have a demat account, then you get a common account statement from any of the two depositories (National Securities Depository or NSDL and the Central Depository Services India or CDSL. This CAS also contains all details of transactions done in the previous month on all capital market instruments as well as your consolidated holdings.
If you do not have a demat account, then the registrar & transfer (R&T) agents will send you a combined CAS of just your mutual fund holdings.
Additionally, you can also call up your fund house or your MF’s R&T and request for an account statement. You can also visit the websites of the two large R&Ts in the MF industry (Computer Age Management Systems or Cams and Karvy Computershare) and request a CAS across all your mutual fund holdings. All you have to do is enter your Permanent Account Number (PAN) and your email address and all your MF holdings mapped to these two details get pulled out and into a statement and emailed to you. Some fund houses have also started a missed call service. Just call up the number from your registered mobile number and you will soon get an account statement.
Q. If I miss an account statement, can I request my fund house to send me a duplicate?
A. Yes, of course. You can get as many copies as you’d like. It’s always better to register your email address and mobile phone number with all your mutual funds to be able to avail such mail-back facilities. As described above, you can visit your R&T’s website, key in your PAN and your email address and enter a password, which you will need to use to unlock the file later that lands in your inbox.
Q. It’s the end of a financial year and time to file my taxes. But it’s so tedious to compute my capital gains. Is there an easy way out?
A. Yes. Visit the website of the two largest R&Ts in the MF industry (Computer Age Management Systems or Cams and Karvy Computershare), key in your PAN and your email address and you will soon get the capital gains account statement in your inbox. This statement is available across all your mutual fund holdings. It is a very convenient way of getting to know how much capital gains tax you need to pay across your MF holdings. It’s particularly useful when you do a lot of systematic transfer plans wherein you shift money from your liquid funds to equity funds. Every such STP entails the sale of your liquid fund units and mostly generates a capital gain.
Q. What are folio numbers? And how do they hold the key to good monitoring and low paperwork?
A. A folio number is a unique identity number – typically in alpha-numeric codes – given to your mutual fund investment. The folio number is specific to a single fund house only. If you have investments in four mutual fund schemes across four different fund houses, you will get four different folio numbers.
But what if you invest in four funds within the same fund house? Here, if you do not quote your folio number when you invest incrementally (additional investments done over a period of time), you are allotted multiple folios. Try to have a single folio with every fund house you invest in. The benefit of having minimal folio numbers is that you get all your details in a single account statement. Although you get a CAS, you can also avail a single folio statement. And for this, it pays if all your investments in a single fund house are within a single folio.
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