Bhagyashree Pande

Mumbai, June 11: The mutual fund investors have been the biggest losers with the allround slide in the equity markets. But from among the top 10 mutual fund losers, it is the ING Investment’s Management’s Growth Portfolio which tops the list of equity-heavy schemes that have lost substantially during the past six months of the slide in equity stocks.

Included in the list of equity mutual funds, which have lost heavily, are SBI mutual fund’s Magnum Multiplier Plus ’93, LIC MF’s Dhanvikas, Alliance Equity - Growth, JM MF’s Equity Growth and others. (See adjoining list).
ING’s Growth Portfolio — with a corpus of Rs 63.71 crore — topped the list of losers by recording a whopping 47 per cent decline in its net asset value (NAV). The NAV on January 1, 2001 was placed at attractive 13.74 which on June 8, 2001 was a negative Rs 7.27.

SBI Magnum Multiplier Plus ’93 with a corpus of Rs 210.57 crore saw its NAV slide to a negative of Rs 9.87 from Rs 14.62 in January — a decline of 32 per cent.

LIC Dhanvikas (corpus of Rs 35.67 crore) saw its NAV almost halved to Rs 5.82 on June 8 from a negative NAV of Rs 7.93 in January.

During the last six months, the declining trend of around 17 per cent in the BSE 30-share Sensex has seen the values of equities and equity-heavy mutual funds NAVs eroding significantly.

According to available information, the investment of these funds were more in stocks of Wipro, Infosys, Zee Telefilms, Satyam, Digital and other technology stocks which have taken a greater beating in NAV values as compared to schemes which held a larger old economy portfolio. The NAV values of 10 open-ended schemes as seen in the table, have crashed by 23 per cent in the past six months in tune with the Sensex movement.

ING Mutual funds - ING Growth portfolio scheme eroded by nearly 47 per cent between January 8, 2001 and June 8, 2001. This erosion was due to the fund’s portfolio composition of 62 per cent of computer software, entertainment and telecom stocks viz Wipro, Infosys, Satyam Computer and Zee Telefilms.