NFO review: IDFC Multi Cap Fund

Adding another fund to its bouquet, IDFC Mutual Fund launched a multi-cap fund on November 12, 2021. The fund will invest across the large-, mid- and small-cap companies.

The scheme will close for subscription on November 26, 2021. It will be managed by Daylynn Pinto and Harshal Joshi and will be benchmarked against the Nifty 500 Multicap 50:25:25 TRI.

According to the AMC, the fund will follow a robust investment strategy with a focus on 3-D, i.e., diversity, discipline and dependability.

About the strategy
The multi-cap category is effectively a new one created by SEBI in September 2020. As of now, this category has just 12 funds managing assets worth over Rs 32,000 crore (as on October, 2021).

These funds are mandated to invest at least 25 per cent of their money each in large-, mid- and small-cap stocks. They are somewhat similar to their flexi-cap counterparts in terms of having exposure across market caps. However, flexi-cap funds do not have any restrictions regarding the minimum allocation that must be made to any market-cap segment. Therefore, fund managers of flexi caps enjoy a greater degree of flexibility when it comes to building the portfolio. Hence, at Value Research, we prefer flexi-cap funds over multi-cap ones. Generally speaking, most flexi-cap funds tend to have a lower allocation to mid- and small-cap stocks than that of multi-cap funds. Owing to this factor, the latter tends to be a bit more aggressive in relative terms.

The performance history of multi-cap funds is very short, as the current avatar of the category came into being just about a year ago. But a comparison between the performance of the multi-cap index (NIFTY 500 Multicap 50:25:25 TRI) and the more mainstream Nifty 500 TRI reveals that the former was an outperformer on a five-year rolling return basis till about the middle of 2019, thanks to its higher mid- and small-cap allocation. Of late, though, both have been neck and neck. But this performance has also come at the cost of high volatility and bigger drawdowns during the down markets, which again shows the higher mid- and small-cap exposure of the multi-cap strategy.

About the fund manager
Daylynn Pinto has over 15 years of experience in the Indian mutual fund space and has been associated with IDFC AMC since October 2016. Prior to joining IDFC AMC, he was associated with UTI Mutual Fund.

He is currently managing two other equity funds at IDFC Mutual Fund and one of them is amongst the top-rated funds in its respective category (4-star rated) while one is a 3-star rated fund as per the rating system of Value Research.

About the AMC
As of October 2021, the AMC managed assets worth about Rs 1.23 lakh crore across 36 open-end equity, debt and hybrid schemes. In the actively managed open-end equity funds (excluding fund-of-funds, index funds and ETFs) segment, the fund house manages an asset base of over Rs 20,600 crore spread across 8 funds.