I keep reading that the stock market is not doing well. Should I withdraw money from my mutual funds? Do advise.

Ans: The best part of mutual funds is that you can invest through a systematic investment plan (SIP) where you need not time the market, especially if you are looking at a long term perspective (3-5 years or more)

Ans: Hello Ms Nitika,

First of all as an investor and also managing your family finances, you need to answer following questions before deciding on additional investments in equity markets:

1) Goal or financial goal or purpose of doing investment.
This will matter a lot as a goal of child education and retirement needs to see with different perspective and also should have asset allocation and market cap exposure accordingly.

2) Time Horizon of your goals- this is very important as it will help you to select the asset class and it's allocation based on your time period of financial goals. This is where investor makes biggest mistake of misalignment of asset time cycle and goals time period. If you allign this properly, your journey will be quite smooth.

3) Optimum Return expectations on your capital invested-
If you are saving and investing for some better future to fulfill your goals offcourse you will ask something in return which should be respectable higher returns than inflation for long term period( more than 7 years). If you are investing in India than equity return assumptions and calculations should be based on 12% return expectations and debt it should be 6.5%. Remember that you should assume practical return assumptions ( not the highest or what your friend says) as you can put any number in the excel sheet for your mental satisfaction😃

4) Risk taken on your capital-
Risk is a very negative word being taken in india but actually it's the risk appetite and risk acceptance of an investor which makes his outcome/ returns favourable. Understand one thing that if you want high returns you have to assume high risk and there is no option for it or an investor has to be happy with sub optimal returns if he is not ready to take risk.

Risk according to me is the capacity of a person until where and when he will not have any palpation in his stomach and he can absorb the downside easily( both realised and majority of time unrealised).

You should remember one thing that after deciding on above parameters, TIME IN THE MARKET IS MORE IMPORTANT RATHER THAN TIMING THE MARKET. As an investor, wealth is created over a period of decade and have your allocation to equity accordingly and enjoy the journey of markets which is going to be up and down.

After looking at all these parameters you can think of taking allocations to equity stocks or equity mutual funds and decide how much additional allocation to equity stocks or equity mutual funds is comfortable to you. If you dont have any prior expertise in investing in mutual funds or equity markets, its better to hire an advisor to help you do that or start with allocation in Equity Diversified mutual funds which will help you to take exposure in stocks.

And after all that, i would say it's your behaviour and emotions management which will help you create wealth in the equity market.

I hope this helps. Happy investing

Ans: if you are investing for long term then dont wait for market to fall, stay invested

Ans: Hello;

This is exactly the reason why we advocate investing through mutual funds and leave the headache of managing market volatility to the fund manager.

Most seasoned investors get damn scared of sudden black swan events and the massive erosion in wealth, albeit notional, takes a toll on their health which is worse the notional money loss.

Being disciplined, systematic and objective in your investments pays you highly.

Tactical asset allocation should be utilised only by skilled and experienced investors because most common people and even some experts find it difficult to predict future market movements.

If your horizon is long term then no need to get bogged down.

Alternatively start systematic investments in mutual funds through regular SIPs.

Happy Investing;