PrimeInvestor - Articles and Reports

mutual fund taxes
Investment basics
Srikanth Meenakshi

Understanding Mutual Fund Taxation

When we invest in mutual funds, the profits we make are subject to taxes. The good news though is that, in many cases, this taxation is somewhat better (lower) than the regular income tax that we pay. The basic reason for this is that the government considers these profits as a different form of inflows/income compared to regular salary or interest incomes.

Understanding the impact of taxation is important – obviously, since our real returns from a mutual fund investment is what we get after tax. But, more importantly, understanding taxation will help us design our portfolio in a manner that could potentially reduce our tax burden and increase our ‘post-tax’ returns.

In this article, we will take a look at how such profits are considered, how taxation differs across mutual fund categories, what the actual tax rates are, and such other topics. This article, as in other articles in this series, has been written assuming very little prerequisite knowledge from the reader.

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Why invest in Mutual funds

When we decide to do something in our life, there could be many reasons that guided our decision. But more often than not, there is

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Mutual Funds – A Primer

In this article, my endeavour is to talk about mutual funds from a practical point of view. Wherever possible, I have used examples and illustrations from real life to explain the ideas that I tried to communicate.

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PrimeInvestor smallcase portfolios
General
Srikanth Meenakshi

PrimeInvestor smallcase portfolios

We have just launched two portfolios on the smallcase platform – an active-investing stock portfolio with a unique, growth-oriented theme, and a passive-investing portfolio but one that is dynamically managed by us.

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30% Crypto tax
Short Takes
Srikanth Meenakshi

30% Crypto tax

The 30% Crypto tax is the Indian government at its passive aggressive best (or worst, depending on your view point). The text of this tax law coupled with what the finance minister said in the post-budget interview leads me to think that the government holds the crypto ecosystem in absolute disdain.

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money wise, deepak shenoy
General
Srikanth Meenakshi

Book review – ‘Money Wise’ by Deepak Shenoy

Pre-ordering a book before publication is like buying units of an NFO. You are committing money before you know what you are going to get. But in the case of ‘Money Wise’ by Deepak Shenoy, I knew it was a sure bet. Having known the author and reading his works for several years, I had a pretty good idea about what I would receive, and hence as soon as the book was announced, I jumped on it with an instant order.

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four books
General
Srikanth Meenakshi

Four books

None of these four books are particularly ‘PrimeInvestor’ topic – relating to personal finance or FinTech. Nevertheless, I thought I’ll share my thoughts on these books – 4 of them – in a brief note. Some of these books are quite popular, and all of them are worth your time, if the topic interests you.

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Cred Mint, CRED, review of CRED Mint
General
Srikanth Meenakshi

CRED launches CRED Mint

Cred Mint, as noted earlier, is a peer-to-peer lending platform. What this means is, simply put, people lending to each other by using an intermediary service. By using Cred Mint, a customer can either borrow or lend to other Cred customers at “attractive” rates. For lenders, Cred is promising interest rates “up to 9%”, which is significantly higher than bank FD rates today.

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speculate, benefits of speculation
General
Srikanth Meenakshi

Why you should speculate in the market (and how to)

Speculation must be like seasoning on a dish – a little bit goes a long way, and the sure fire way to ruin the taste for it, is to overdo it. What is speculation? Before I defend my opinion, let me clarify what I mean by speculation. To me, speculating on investments should be a combination of these things: It should be short-term oriented. By short-term I mean, anything where you can see the results within 6 months. Investing in a micro-cap fund as part of your MF portfolio is not speculative in my mind. But betting on a stock to go up (or down) in a time-frame of 3-6 months would be speculative.

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paytm money
Short Takes
Srikanth Meenakshi

Frivolous features

You can tell when a platform marketplace is getting too crowded when useless, misleading ‘features’ get added on to the software in the quest for ‘differentiation’. I ran into a prime example of just such a thing when someone sent me a screenshot of a page from the Paytm Money app.

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dhandho investor
General
Srikanth Meenakshi

“The Dhandho investor” – A review

We’ve heard of fusion music, we’ve heard of fusion cuisine, so why not a fusion book?

Colour me naive, but when I picked up ‘The Dhandho Investor’ – a book with an Indian author and an Indian name, I thought it would be about Indian markets and for Indian investors. It was not. Although the author is Indian, and there are many ‘Indian’ anecdotes in the book, it is aimed at an American audience.

But that should not stop you from grabbing it and reading it. It’s a delightful book – expertly written with ideas that you can use in any free market economy.

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