Have you been watching the ads of ING Vyasa both on the electronic and print media of late?And have you been tempted to entrust your money with the Lion namely the ING Vyasa group?Atleast as far as mutual funds are concerned you should avoid them like a plague and here’s my piece of the cake on the group’s mutual fund activities:
The ING group entered the mutual fund industry in India with great fanfare in mid 1999 amidst some high powered advertising.I was one of those who got attracted by the promoter’s lineage and brand equity.Then followed the bull run of year 2000 and the NAV of their equity fund zoomed up.The markets especially the tech stocks duly crashed by mid 2000 and the equity fund from ING also crashed and all the skeletons slowly came tumbling out of the closet.What was touted as an equity fund actually turned out to be pure technology fund without any information regarding the same provided to the investors.
In addition most of the schemes of the ING fund have very few ( in some cases less than 10 )investors with one or two investors holding over 70 % of the corpus of any particular scheme.This in effect defeats the very purpose of a mutual fund which is to pool in money from a large number of investors.The above also puts small investors at a severe disadvantage as the fund will crash if one or two investors move out.It is only in year 2003 that SEBI has drawn some guidelines on this issue.
Coming to their balanced fund, this was launched in April 2000 and expectedly the NAV crashed to a low of around 6/- by end 2000.In year 2003, while all and sundry mutual funds NAVs have zoomed, the ING Balanced fund has managed to inch up only to around 8.50 even in the current bull run.Besides it fares very poorly when compared to balanced funds floated by other mutual fund.
The customer service level of the mutual fund at one time used to be atrocious and worse than that of UTI but they have certainly pulled up their socks over the last one year.What they do send you regularly are yearly fund reports in very glossy formats but wouldn’t you rather have the mutual fund doing well rather that bring out glossy reports which in any case indicates that the fund is not doing too well!
The ING group has now tied up with the erstwhile Vyasa bank and formed a new entity-The ING Vyasa group.The deal itself has been less than transparent especially in times when everyone is looking for more transparency in all transactions.
Overall take my word-don’t trust this lion with your money atleast as far as mutual funds are concerned. There are many other good mutual funds in the business in India and quite a few of them have the track record to prove their credentials.