School of Commerce and Management Studies, Central University of Himachal Pradesh, India.
Abstract
Click Here:Access Full TextMutual fund investments are growing rapidly. A mutual fund is a type of collective investment vehicle that pools and collects money from many individual investors and employs that money to earn returns by investing in government securities, money market instruments, bonds, and stocks. Mutual fund, on the whole, professionally manages the money pooled from the investors and offers various advantages like economies of scale, diversification of risk, lower trading cost, convenience, liquidity, and so on. Despite these advantages, mutual fund involves various investment risks, such as settlement risk, liquidity risk, trading volumes, and so on, as well as macroeconomic risks like changes in currency exchange rates, changes in interest rates, changes in government policies, political, economic, taxation, or other developments, increased volatility in the stock and bond markets, and so on. This paper tried to evaluate the risk perceptions and scheme preferences of mutual fund investors based on demographic variables. For studying investors’ viewpoints regarding mutual funds, primary data has been collected from a sample of 110 investors within the city of Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, known as the largest city in terms of ease of living index. The collected data has been analysed with the help of statistical and mathematical tools. Therefore, it may be concluded that investors want to get decent returns, but are uncomfortable taking on a high level of market risk; instead, they want to bear moderate risk. It is concluded from the study that a majority of the respondents of all groups of demographics prefer to invest in equity schemes compared to the debt and hybrid schemes.
Keywords: Demographic Variables, Individual Investors, Mutual Funds, Risk Perceptions, Scheme Preferences
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