Mumbai, March 17: SBI Mutual Fund, the asset management arm of the country's largest commercial bank State Bank of India, is planning to launch an open-end liquidity fund to be called as the `Magnum Instacash Fund'. SBI Mutual Fund has already secured approval from Sebi for the fund which was earlier titled as the Magnum Liquidity Fund.``This would satisfy the cash managers requirements for short term deployment of extra cash and we plan to launch this fund in the next few months. We are also working on an index fund but it is still at the drawing board and the parameters are all to be worked out,'' said the managing director of SBI Mutual Fund, Naimatullah.
Naimatullah said that SBI Mutual Fund already has a large family of funds and with the launch of a few others, the mutual fund should be able to complete the family of funds. ``With the plans to launch sector specific funds, we have already expanded the family of funds and we will keep on adding innovative products to our portfolio of funds. Thiswould allow an investor an opportunity to shift between a variety of funds and provide for their diversification needs,'' he said.
Yesterday, the mutual fund had announced plans to launch the country's first umbrella fund christened as the `Magnum Sector Funds Umbrella'. The umbrella fund will have four open-ended sector specific schemes under it namely, the information technology (IT) sector fund, the pharma sector fund, the FMCG sector fund and the contra sector fund.
SBI Mutual Fund manages a total corpus of more than Rs 3,000 crore and is the largest mutual fund after Unit Trust of India (UTI). Among the 18-odd schemes being managed by the fund, some of them have outperformed the Sensex in the range of 25-70 per cent.
Noteable among the schemes, the GIFTS-A, a close-end growth scheme, has given an astounding return of 90.27 per cent for the one year period ended March 12, 1999, and this amounts to an outperformance of the Sensex by 90.42 per cent. MMS-90, an open-ended growth scheme, has reported areturn of 56.06 per cent during the same period and has outperformed the Sensex by 54.25 per cent among other schemes.
``In our portfolios, around 60-65 per cent of all the portfolios is invested in three industries which are recession-proof: Pharmaceutical, software and FMCGs which are defensive and do not go down as the market become volatile,'' said Naimatullah.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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