DETERMINANTS OF MUTUAL FUND SELECTION BY RETAIL INVESTORS

Abstract

Investment is an attempt to carefully plan evaluate and allocate funds to various investment outlets that offer safety of principal and excepted returns over a long time of period If the investment is properly undertaken the return will be commensurate with the risk the investor assumes The retail investors select mutual fund as one of the best suitable investment avenues for their surplus amount as it provides liquidity diversification and professional management for the fund invested The investor without basic financial newlineknowledge and awareness about mutual fund characteristics struggle to take a wise investment decision As investment decision is positively related with financial literacy an effort has been made to know the level of financial literacy and its influence towards mutual fund selection Each investor is unique in his character newlineknowledge and ability to tolerate risk Retail investors differ in financial planning their needs and expectation about their investment Investment size and choice of investment decisions depend on their personal characteristics and their attitude newlinetowards risk Retail individual investors fall under highly distinctive clusters To select a suitable mutual fund scheme the investors have to consider the qualities of the fund such as performance report risk and return aspect past track records load structure portfolio constituents and transparency factors Based on this background newlinethe study titled DETERMINANTS OF MUTUAL FUND SELECTION BY RETAIL INVESTORS has been made newlineThe universe for the study is mutual fund investors the sample was selected adopting nonprobabilistic convenient and judgement sampling method With the help of a well structured questionnaire the needed primary data has been collected from the sample of 720 retail investors of Coimbatore district The collected data newlinewere analysed using SPSS 21 version The analysis reveals that all the three aspects namely level of financial literacy and conceptual awareness of mutual fund investor their personality traits and fund qualiti