Equity mutual funds portfolio rises by 8 lakh in April-July

Equity mutual funds witnessed an addition of over eight lakh investor accounts or folios in the first four months of the ongoing financial year, primarily on account of strong participation from retail investors.

This is on top of an addition of 43 lakh folios in 2015-16 and 25 lakh in 2014-15. In the past two years, investor accounts increased mainly due to robust contribution from smaller towns.

Folios are numbers designated for individual investor accounts, though one investor can have multiple accounts.

According to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) data on investor accounts with 42 fund houses, the number of equity folios jumped to 36,846,743 at the end of July from 36,025,062 at the end of last fiscal, a gain of 8.21 lakh.

Overall, the industry's folios rose to an all-time high of 4.92 crore.

Growing participation from retail investors and huge inflows in equity schemes have helped in increasing the folio counts, experts said.

Mutual Funds have reported net inflows of close to Rs 12,000 crore in equity schemes in the first four months (April-July period) of the current fiscal.

The inflow is in line with BSE's benchmark Sensex surging 3.7% during the period under review.

The latest inflow has pushed the assets under management (AUM) of equity mutual fund to a record high of Rs 4.5 lakh crore at the end of July from Rs 4.28 lakh crore in June-end.

Mutual Funds are investment vehicles made up of a pool of funds collected from a large number of investors. The funds are invested in stocks, bonds and money market instruments, among others.