Choosing a Mutual Fund Scheme
With thousands of mutual fund schemes available, this guide provides a repeatable process for choosing among them. It starts with the category decision (driven by your goal’s time horizon, as covered in tackl.finance’s retirement and asset allocation notes) and the SEBI-mandated Riskometer as a sanity check, then covers how to evaluate past performance correctly — rolling returns and consistency across market cycles rather than chasing a single best-year figure, and benchmark comparison for actively managed funds. We cover why the direct-vs-regular cost difference compounds significantly over long horizons, what fund manager tenure and AUM (in both directions) signal, portfolio concentration and cross-fund overlap, a brief introduction to risk-adjusted return metrics (standard deviation and Sharpe ratio), exit loads and ELSS’s genuine 3-year lock-in, and close with the most common mistakes — chasing last year’s winner, over-diversification through overlap, ignoring direct plans, and skipping periodic review.