Many investors are worried that they do not get same-day NAV when they invest in mutual funds. There are days when markets are down by 1%, 2%, or even 3-4%, and it’s an excellent opportunity to invest in equities at lower NAV!
However, due to the recent changes by SEBI, Now the NAV is allotted on the realization of funds by the fund houses before the prescribed time of 3 pm.
It simply means that most investors cannot get the same-day NAV (except in a few cases). That frustrates the investors, who feel they are losing out on this opportunity because markets may go up the next day and will not get a lower NAV.
I am also seeing many articles and youtube videos teaching investors – “How to get same-day NAV in mutual funds” without even understanding if it’s worth the effort. There are some ways through which you get same-day NAV, like if you invest through the AMC portal directly or invest using UPI in the MFU platform or invest very early, by 10 or 11 am, so that your money reaches AMC the same day.
But is it worth the effort?
So we thought of doing a small study on this topic and investigating if investors are losing out a lot or not.
In our study, we found out that the same-day NAV or next-day NAV does not matter for investors over the long term, and it has almost no impact on their wealth creation in equity funds.
Now let me share some stats and what we found.
For this study, we picked three pretty old equity funds, which were
- ICICI Pru Discovery
- Franklin Prima Plus
- Birla Equity Hybrid 95
Also, these are at least 18 yrs old funds, and we downloaded the NAV of these three funds since inception. We have the data for a total of 4350 NAV points.
As a next step, we assume that there is an investor who wants to invest when markets are down. For that, we picked all those days when the NAV of these funds came down by 1%.
Then we also found out how many times the NAV of that fund was again down the NEXT day!!. Let me show you the data.
So if you look at the NAV data of ICICI Pru Discovery, there was a total of 543 out of 4350 days when NAV was down by more than 1%.
What happened the next day?
- 258 days, the fund NAV was UP with an average upmove of 1.02% (average of those 258 days)
- 285 days, the fund NAV was DOWN with an average downfall of -1.37% (average of those 285 days)
It simply means that, on average, the next day’s NAV was lower than the day of investment, and it was a good thing to get the next day’s NAV rather than the same day’s NAV.
Same-day NAV or next-day NAV? Which created more wealth?
Let’s assume that a person invests Rs 10,000 in the fund whenever the NAV of the fund is down by more than 1%, and then there are two cases.
- Case 1: Investor same-day NAV
- Case 2: Investor gets next-day NAV
We found out that the wealth created was MORE in case 2. However, the difference was not significant enough to brag about. Let me show you the numbers
- Case 1: Investor same-day NAV : Rs 3,47,08,084
- Case 2: Investor gets next-day NAV : Rs 3,48,48,780
The difference between same-day and next-day NAV is roughly 0.41%, so by getting next-day NAV, the investors create 0.41% more wealth; in this case, it was a good thing for investors not to GET the same-day NAV.
Let me also show you how wealth will increase over time in both cases.
Conclusion and What we can Learn
By the time you may have figured out that while investors visualize that the day NAV can again go up, they forget that the next NAV can go down also, and they can get an even cheaper NAV.
Over time, if you are a regular investor who is there for the long term, sometimes you may get a little higher NAV the next day, and sometimes you may get a lower NAV, which eventually cancels out the impact. So here are the learnings:
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- If you get next-day NAV, there is almost a 50% probability of getting an even lower NAV.
- Over a long time, the amount of wealth you will make will not be very different in the case of same-day or next-day NAV.
- The worry and frustration are not worth it, and you shall not worry about what NAV you are getting.
- If markets jump by 2-3% on a given day and you want to book profits, then it’s better to sell the next day, as the chance of getting a better NAV is higher on the following day due to the same logic.
- While you may lose out a bit on a single transaction, there will be other transactions when you benefit, and in totality, you won’t lose out at all. The study shows that you are better off getting the next day’s NAV to improve your returns, but it’s a small margin.
- Next time markets are down by a reasonable amount, investing on that day is more important than which day NAV you are getting. So focus on systematic investment more than anything else.
Note that we are not discussing in this article if it’s morally right or wrong for AMC to give you the next day NAV. Those are indeed technological challenges that need to be solved. In this article, we just wanted to do number crunching to find out which path is better, and I hope we did the job.
We will love to listen to your comments on this topic and if you think otherwise.
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