Amid growing volatility in the market on a range of factors including Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb 24, soaring fuel prices, financial markets have been hyper volatile in the past few months.
The impact on markets is more or less universal with considerable decline seen in stocks, indices and naturally — mutual funds too.
Here, we analyse the returns of equity sectoral funds in the categories of technology and pharma. The technology mutual funds in the past one month posted a return of 7 percent, whereas for past three months the return was in negative range i.e., -5.31 percent, as per Value Research data on April 6.
Tech mutual funds
Although these funds posted not-so-muted return of 7 percent in one month despite market volatility, but in the past three months, the total return was -5.31 percent.
The long-term returns of these funds, however, were reasonably good. One-year return of technology funds stood at 39.01 percent per annum, and three-year return was 34.77 percent per annum.
The funds include more than a dozen fund schemes such as Aditya Birla Sun Life Digital India Fund, Axis Tech ETF, ICICI Prudential Technology, Tata Digital India and Kotak IT ETF.
Among all the fund schemes, the returns for past three months ranged between -4.17 percent (top performing) and 5.78 percent (bottom performer), according to MorningStar data.
The top performing schemes in technology sector were Tata Digital India fund that gave a return of 7.23 percent in past one month and ICICI Prudential Tech Fund that posted 6.97 percent return.
However, their three-month returns were negative at -4.92 percent and -5.78 percent, respectively, according to MutualFundIndia.com data.
Returns posted by sectoral mutual funds in past three months
| Sectoral Mutual funds | 1-month return (%) | 3-month return (%) |
| Technology | 7 | -5.31 |
| Pharma | 8.13 | -3.48 |
(Source: Value Research)
Pharma mutual funds
The pharma mutual funds gave a return of 8.13 percent in past one month, whereas for past three months, they posted -3.48 percent return.
Amid volatility, their returns in past three months have suffered significantly. It is clear from the historical returns of past one year. In past one year, pharma funds posted annual return of 15.07 percent.
The pharma sectoral funds have 15 mutual fund schemes such as Aditya Birla Sun Life Nifty Healthcare ETF, Axis Healthcare ETF, DSP Healthcare Direct Fund, Edelweiss MSCI Domestic and World Healthcare Fund, among others.
Among healthcare funds, the best performing schemes in past one month were Mirae Asset Healthcare Fund that gave 7.32 percent in one month and Tata India Pharma & healthcare fund which gave 7.72 percent return in one month.
However, their three-month returns were negative at -4.98 percent and -2.80 percent, respectively, according to MutualFundIndia.com.