Debt mutual funds deliver stable long-term returns

NAVs take a hit in recent months, but funds pay off in long run

NET asset values (NAVs) of debt schemes of mutual funds have adversely been hit by recent heightened volatility in the debt market.

But a long-term performance check indicates the recent bumpy ride poses little problem if an investor is invested, and has been investing systematically and continuously over the long-term in debt funds.

This is revealed in a FC Research Bureau analysis of 18 open-end medium-term, long-term and flexible income funds which had more than 10 years of track record and whose latest corpus (assets under management) was more than Rs 1,000 crore each. Short-term income funds, ultra-short term income funds and liquid funds were not a part of the analysis.

NAVs of the last working day of August this year and the previous four years were taken as the base NAVs for calculating returns on that day pertaining to year-todate, one-year and five-year periods.

As on August 30, for the 18 analysed income funds, the median of the year-todate absolute returns was 2.33 per cent and that of the one-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of return was 6.38 per cent. A median means the level above which, and below which, half of the figures analysed exists. So a 2.33 per cent median return, in this case, meant half the funds in the analysed universe gave a return above 2.33 per cent and the other half gave a return below 2.33 per cent.

The low-return rates were clearly due to the whirlpool of volatility debt funds have got sucked into primarily due to the rupeedollar-based liquidity-tightening measures in the banking system over the past couple of months.

On the longer-time horizon, however, the 18 income funds had a median five-year CAGR of 8.14 per cent. This is significant because it is far from being a poor rate of return when one looks at what the median five-year CAGRs of return was, for the 18 funds, at the end of August of last four years. At the end of August 2012, it was 8.25 per cent; on August 30, 2011, it was 7.50 per cent; while it was 6.72 per cent and 6.87 per cent at the end of August 2010 and 2009, respectively.

Clearly, the long-term performance of income funds, at a given point in time every year in the past five years (including this year), has been stable and consistently high. In the short-term, however, their NAVs can fluctuate wildly between both the two extremes of bad and good performance. For instance, at the end of August 2009, the median year-to-date absolute return was a negative 3.48 per cent, while the median one-year CAGR of return was 13.03 per cent.

Just last year, at the end of August, the median yearto-date return was 6.53 per cent, while the one-year CAGR of return was 9.74 per cent. The conclusion, the analysis throws up, is that short-term volatility in NAVs of income funds need not be a reason to stay away from investing in them under a systematic investing approach nor is it a reason to get out of the income funds abruptly without completing a long-duration of investment of about five years.