A STUDY ON INVESTOR AWARENESS AND PREFERENCE OF MUTUAL FUNDS WITH REFERENCE TO INDEX FUNDS

Indian Investors have a number of choices to invest their savings. Mutual Funds provide one of the options of investment to the individual investors. Though Mutual Fund investments are riskier as compared to post office deposits and bank fixed deposits they provide the benefits associated with the stock market investment to the investors. Mutual Funds pool money from various investors and invest those pooled amount in the stocks and shares of various Companies through stock market according to the investment objectives of the mutual funds. A common investor might not have the resources and expertise to invest in the share market .This is where the mutual fund houses come into the picture. They pool the money of numerous small investors and the experienced fund managers try to give maximum return to these small investors. There are various types of mutual funds. Some of these are equity funds, debt funds, balance funds, tax-saving funds, index funds etc. Index funds are those schemes of mutual funds which invest in the same shares indexed in the particular index in the same weightage of the shares forming the index. The paper studies the investors’ awareness and preference of mutual funds as compared to other investment options. The study further examines the investors’ awareness about various schemes of mutual funds including that of index funds.