Despite net outflows, equity mutual funds add 1.18 lakh new folios in Sept

ET Intelligence Group: Fund flows into equities have lately moderated, but that hasn’t stopped more people to look at shares as lucrative growth assets. How do we know? Well, the number of folios hasn’t shrunk at all. Rather, it has risen consistently for a year and a half.

Equity mutual funds added 1.18 lakh new folios in September, taking the tally to 63.9 million, data from the Association of Mutual Funds of India (AMFI) showed. Barring a minor drop in July, equity folios or accounts have been consistently increasing for the past 17 months. On the other hand, equity funds had net outflows of Rs 7,214 crore in the past three months, compared with net inflows of Rs 23,873 crore in the corresponding three months of last year.

Unlike credit-risk schemes that have lost favour with investors, equity schemes, especially multi-cap plans, have not lost their appeal with investors.

Equity funds have witnessed folio addition of 3.31 lakh per month on an average in the past one year. This translates into a growth of 0.52 per cent every month. Equity fund folios account for nearly 68.4 per cent of the total industry’s folio numbers, which are designated to individual investor's accounts with a fund house.

To be sure, an investor can have multiple folios.

Among equity schemes, multi-cap category has recorded addition of 26,929 folios. Even last year, the category recorded addition in folios. Multi-cap funds have the third highest total folio accounts of 9.5 million at the end of September. That leader-board has large-cap and ELSS funds on the top two rungs. These three categories account for nearly half of the total folio account of the equity MF.

In September, the highest folio addition has been to the sectoral/thematic and focused funds with a net addition of 59,425 and 43,226 folios, respectively.