Gold Funds

(Reuters) - Gold prices steadied on Wednesday after plummeting to a more than nine-month low, with investors awaiting U.S. inflation data for cues on the Federal Reserve's policy tightening path.

The data from Association of Mutual Funds in India (Amfi) shows that gold ETFs saw net inflows of Rs 446 crore in September

The country's favourite investment is influenced by a range of economic factors.

Gold saving funds and gold ETFs have seen net inflows to the tune of Rs 184 crore and Rs 680 crore, respectively, in April

12-15% allocation is a must to counter volatility in equities

As per Amfi data, investors put in a net sum of Rs 1,613 crore in 14 gold-linked ETFs in the just concluded financial year, while they had pulled out Rs 412 crore in 2018-19.

In this Samvat, investors earned 20.4 per cent from gold. The last year in which returns from gold were as good, was Samvat 2067 and 2068, though 2072 was not bad either

Allocation to yellow metal, helps MF investors offset hit on equity and debt investments

Mutual fund schemes investing in gold are struggling to attract investments with investors' preference shifting towards equity-oriented funds.In 2013, assets of gold funds stood at nearly Rs 12,000 crore amid weakness in the equity markets. Since then, overall assets in the gold fund category have seen a decline of 55 per cent to Rs 5,098 crore in July 2017.Four years ago, overall gold schemes' assets comprised 1.5 per cent of mutual funds' overall assets. This has now slipped to a mere 0.25 per cent given the surge in sector's overall assets to Rs 20 lakh crore.Investors have continuously been redeeming funds from gold funds. Rather, since the beginning of 2014, barring a few occasions, almost all months have witnessed incessant redemptions. In the last one year, when equity schemes have offered double-digit returns to investors, gold funds have made negative return of about 4.8 per cent. Even debt-oriented funds have made 7-10 per cent returns for investors during the past one ...