The first fund launched by Morgan Stanley AMC turns open ended in January 2009
01-Dec-2008 •Research Desk
Morgan Stanley Growth Fund, a 15 year old close-end equity scheme, launched on January 1994 will become an open-end scheme from January 2009.
The scheme, during its launch, collected a corpus of Rs 981 crore and its current corpus is Rs. 1983.83 as on October 31, 2008. Being a close end fund, it was listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, Delhi Stock Exchange, National Stock Exchange, Calcutta Stock Exchange, Madras Stock Exchange and Ahmedabad Stock Exchange and to provide the exit option to its investors. After Jan 2009 this feature of trading on the respective stock exchanges will be discontinued.
After converting to an open-ended scheme, the fund can be redeemed or subscribed at the NAV based price. Moreover, the existing investors would be allowed to redeem their units without any exit load. The fund, like other open-end ones, will also be providing facilities like daily subscription, redemptions and switches.
The fund delivered a return of 8.78% since launch whereas its benchmark BSE 100 delivered a return of 6.96% (November 28, 2008). The year 2008 has been very harsh on all equity diversified funds and close-end funds were no exception, the fund delivered a return of -59.30 per cent. (November 28, 2008)
Since January 1994, when the AMC started its operations in India, Morgan Stanley Growth Fund was the first fund launched by this fund house. And after 14 years of its existence, in March 2008 the AMC launched its second fund Morgan Stanley A.C.E Fund which collected just Rs 80 crore.
