Somebody landed on this site last week, read three pages, and messaged to ask which fund they should buy. Fair enough. That's what most people come looking for and we've written a great deal without ever answering it. It's a deliberate choice and it's worth explaining properly rather than leaving people to assume we're being cagey.
The regulatory part, first and simplest
We're a mutual fund distributor. That means an ARN, an examination, and a defined role: helping you invest, submitting transactions, servicing the folio. Our page on direct versus regular plans explains how we're paid for it.
Investment advice for a fee is a different registration entirely, held by a SEBI-registered investment adviser. We don't have it and we don't operate as if we do. Our guide on checking registration sets out the difference and how to verify anybody, including us.
So a page saying "buy this scheme" would be somebody without the right registration handing out something that looks like advice to an audience whose situations we know nothing about. That alone settles it.
The part that's actually more interesting
Suppose the registration weren't an issue. A published fund recommendation would still be close to worthless, and here's why.
A recommendation only means something once you know when the money is needed, what else the household holds, whether a buffer exists, whether there's expensive debt, and what the person actually did the last time an investment fell. Change any one of those and the sensible answer changes.
A page can't know any of it. So a fund name on a website is a recommendation to nobody in particular, which is a different thing from advice and shouldn't be dressed as the same. The lists you find elsewhere aren't wrong so much as unaddressed.
What "best fund" lists actually rank
Almost always past returns over a chosen period, sometimes with a rating attached.
Which period gets chosen does more work in that ranking than anything else. Shift the window by a year and the order changes, because different conditions favour different styles. Our page on how to choose a mutual fund makes the same point: past returns describe a period rather than a property.
Ranking by recent performance also has a built-in problem. Money arrives after the run that produced the ranking, which means people reliably enter late and then leave during the correction. The list did its job; the reader still lost.
So what do we actually do?
We answer the questions that come before the scheme, and in our experience those settle most of it.
- When do you need this money? Under three years and no equity scheme is appropriate, whatever anyone's list says.
- Is there a buffer? If not, that comes first, as our page on building an emergency fund sets out.
- Is there expensive debt? Clearing it has a certain outcome where no investment does.
- What already exists? Most people hold more than they remember.
- What would you do in a fall? This predicts outcomes better than any selection.
By the time those are answered, the category is usually obvious and the field of sensible schemes within it is small. That last step is a conversation about your situation, not a page.
The other thing a name would hide
A recommendation on a page carries an implication that the scheme is the important decision. In our experience it is somewhere around fourth.
Ahead of it: whether you are investing at all, whether the horizon matches, whether the instalment is a size you can sustain, and whether you keep it running through a bad stretch. Somebody who gets those four right with an ordinary scheme does considerably better than somebody who gets them wrong with an excellent one.
So a fund list doesn't just fail to help; it points attention at the least decisive part of the problem. That's the version of the objection I actually hold, more than the regulatory one.
What that conversation sounds like
Less exciting than people expect. We'll ask what the money is for, when, and what happened the last time something you owned went down. We'll tell you when the honest answer is a deposit rather than a fund, which we do often, and it costs us the business each time.
We'll also tell you when you'd be better off in a direct plan without us. That's on the site in writing, not just in conversation, which is a reasonable test of whether somebody means it.
And where a question isn't ours to answer, we say so. Tax liability goes to a tax adviser. Shares aren't something we deal in at all.
What we'd say if you pushed
People do push, reasonably, and the answer isn't a refusal so much as a redirection.
If you tell me the money is for a goal fourteen years away, the buffer exists, there's no expensive debt, and you've sat through a fall before without stopping, then the category is a diversified equity scheme and the field narrows to a manageable number. That's most of the way to an answer and none of it required knowing which fund house.
What's left after that is genuinely a smaller decision than people think. Two sensible schemes in the same category, held for fourteen years with the instalment rising, will not produce outcomes so different that the choice deserved the anxiety spent on it. The instalment amount matters more, and it's entirely in your control.
The one thing we will say about schemes
Not which to buy, but what to look at, which is a different kind of statement and doesn't depend on knowing you.
Cost is knowable in advance and applies every year regardless of outcome, which is why it deserves more attention than it gets; see expense ratio. Whether the scheme has actually done what its mandate says, over several years including a bad stretch, is checkable. And whether it fits your horizon is the question that decides everything, and only you have that input.
Those three are general truths rather than recommendations, which is the line we're drawing.
Why this isn't false modesty
It would be easy to read all this as a distributor being coy to force a phone call. Worth addressing directly.
We do want the conversation, obviously. We're also the ones who wrote that a direct plan is cheaper and who should use one, that a two-year goal belongs in a deposit rather than a fund, and that you should verify our registration rather than take our word for anything. Those are on the site in writing, and each one costs us something.
A firm that will publish those and still not publish a fund list is drawing the line in a consistent place. You're entitled to check that against what we actually do, which is the point of our guide on checking registration.
If you came here for a fund name
I understand the frustration, and I'd rather be useful than agreeable.
If somebody's list gives you a name and enough conviction to start, and the horizon is genuinely long, you'll probably do fine, because staying invested matters more than the selection. The risk isn't picking the second-best scheme. It's putting three-year money into equity because a page said the scheme was good, and finding out in year two.
That's the mistake a fund name can't protect you from and a proper conversation can. Myfolios is an AMFI-registered mutual fund distributor (ARN-145870) working since 2014, and that conversation costs nothing. Get in touch.
