Entry Load Ban and its Impact in India

India’s mutual fund sector has traditionally been dominated by investments from the institutional investors, namely banks and financial institutions, non-financial corporates and foreign institutional investors. However, mutual funds are primarily vehicles for retail investments. Retail investments accounted for 51% of India’s mutual fund industry AuM in 2012-13 growing from 43% in 2008-09. While the growth in share may be due to a temporary decline in institutions’ share, retail investments has grown continuously in recent years. More importantly average holding period has gone up in recent years. The practice of charging mandatory entry load was abolished by SEBI to reduce churning, since distributors would encourage investors to prematurely terminate their investments and make new investments as that gave them more commission. Since equity funds earned the highest commission, we analyze the changes in average holding period for equity investments from retail investors. It can be seen that proportion of investments held for over 2 years has gone up, for both retail investors and HNIs. This has come largely at the cost of investments held for between 1 and 2 years. The share of investments held for less than one year has remained more or less same during this time. This is perhaps due to the fact that distributors would typically not ask investors to churn their investments within a year of investment, but afterwards. This trend therefore suggests that the abolition of entry load has indeed resulted in investors holding on to investments for longer duration, and thereby engaging less in churning. We discuss this and other key issues pertaining to the Indian Mutual Fund Industry in a new report.