Tata Mutual Fund launched a new fund in October 2018 called the Tata Small Cap Fund. This fund closed on 2nd November. This fund is announced to be benchmarked against the Small Cap 100 TRI Index. This index is maintained by Nifty for the stocks of companies with small market capitalizations. The surprising thing is that Tata Mutual Fund, which has been around for several years now, never had a fund dedicated solely to small cap funds.
Before we get into the pros and cons of this fund, let us take a quick look at its basic structure. It is a growth plan which offers dividend options as well. You can invest in it directly (through direct plan) or through an agent (regular plan). The minimum investment amount is Rs. 5000 and in multiples of Re. 1 thereafter. It doesn’t carry any entry load, but there is an exit load of 1% of NAV (on the day of redemption) if the investor is exiting within
2 years of the investment.
Given the background of the last year, an investor’s first thought might be about the fall in most small cap and mid cap funds in this year. But according to the fund manager, Mr. Chandraprakash Padiyar, the time is now right to get into small caps, owing mainly to how low their valuations are at present. Mr. Padiyar has a number of years of experience with UTI AMC and Alchemy before he joined Tata Mutual Funds.
It is also useful to take note of the fact that SEBI has now mandated that the small cap universe would start after the 250 th company in the market (in terms of market capitalization). As a result of this re-categorization, many stocks which were earlier categorized as midcap would now be labelled as small cap, thereby increasing the universe from which this fund could select its investments.
Typically, small cap stocks belong to companies which are starting off on their journey and have a long distance to cover in terms of growth. Their stock prices also reflect this same opportunity for growth, which is why Tata Mutual Fund is hoping for great returns on this fund, because 65% of its corpus would be invested in small cap stocks. The outlook for small caps is also positive because of the continuous corrections they have seen for more than a
year, which makes their present valuations very attractive.
The biggest advantage of this fund is that unlike the existing funds in the small cap segment, this fund is much smaller in size. This is likely to make it more flexible and better placed to draw good returns. The older funds in this space look a bit unwieldy because of the size they have grown to. This seems to be one of the strong points of this fund.


