Avid readers of our publications would be aware that quite often, we advise investors to have a small and concise portfolio of mutual funds. Investing in too many funds doesn’t always make sense because apart from the likelihood of having an unnecessary overlap of holdings, there is also the problem of manageability. The more funds you have, the more time and effort you’ll have to spend in looking after them. If you’re investing via SIPs, you will have to keep a tab on every new transaction in each one of your funds. And then there’s the tedious process of calculating short-term as well as long-term gains made on your investments for taxation purposes.
Well, that’s one thing you don’t need to worry about much. You can use the Value Research Portfolio Manager’s Capital Gains tab to find out exactly how much your unrealised and realised gains are.

Let’s suppose you invest in equity as well as debt funds via SIPs. Now, the tax treatment on gains made on both of these types of funds is different. Long-term gains on equity funds are tax-free, but short-term gains are taxable. In the case of debt funds, both long-term and short-term gains are subject to tax. By itself, this is complicated. It gets even more complicated when you invest through SIPs, because each individual SIP is treated as a fresh investment. And when you realise your gains, the units that were bought first will be deemed as the ones sold first. So it might be possible that only a part of realised gains will be tax-free long-term gains (in case of equity funds).

We know this is too much to think about and calculate for most individual investors, which is exactly why we’ve developed the Capital Gains tab in our Portfolio Manager. All you need to do is record each transaction into the Portfolio Manager, the calculation will be done automatically for you. The Capital Gains tab shows you the name of your investment, initial date of purchase, total cost of the fund, current market value, unrealised short-term gains/losses, unrealised long-term gains/losses, realised short-term gains/losses, realised long-term gains/losses as well as gains/losses from dividends.

The Capital Gains tab puts the numbers right in front of you. No need to sit down with a list of your investments, a pen, paper and a calculator. Just create a free account on www.valueresearchonline.com and get started with our Portfolio Manager. It’s easy, handy and all you need to smoothly manage your investments.