Bumper year

The dramatic rally on the street has helped asset management companies (AMCs) peak at Rs 25,655 crore year to date (till mid November) through 47 equity NFOs amid a 28 per cent jump in stock market benchmarks. This includes Rs 14,500 crore raised by the government from Bharat-22 ETF. This is a surge of 12 fold from last year's total of Rs 2,115 crore. Exceptional times By all accounts, 2017 has been a watershed year for mutual funds. Robust inflows have continued all through the year, and the monthly amount of investments has been on a rise on a sustained basis. While old time-tested funds have obviously found more takers, AMCs have been quick to launch new fund offerings. New products have met with warm reception in 2017. Excluding the mammoth Rs 14,500 crore Bharat 22 ETF offer, all the other open-ended equity NFOs raised about Rs 1,351 crore. Together with the Bharat 22 ETF, open-ended new equity offers raised a whopping Rs 15,851 crore. This figure may go up further when other offers come in. Up till now, there is data of only about a dozen open-ended equity NFOs this year. Besides Bharat 22 ETF, the other big-grossers are Union Focussed Largecap Fund (Rs 352.12 crore), IDBI Small Cap Fund (Rs 227.65 crore), BNP Paribas Focused 25 Equity Fund (Rs 216.37 crore) and IDBI Midcap Fund (Rs 207.73 crore). Open-ended equity NFOs had raised a mammoth Rs 14,859.50 crore in 2014, when the CPSE ETF had raked in Rs 3,000 crore. Bharat 22 ETF is the second ETF after CPSE ETF to be launched by the government in March 2014. The ETF route has been successfully launched for raising funds through disinvestment of government's share in public sector undertakings. A bumper 2017 collection goes to show that 2014 records are broken. On the close-ended side, equity NFOs have managed to mop up about Rs 9,804 crore through as many as 36 products this year so far. Based on 2017 year-to-date figures, this is the biggest fund-raising via closed