The Association of Mutual Funds in India (AMFI) on Tuesday launched three television commercials (TVCs) featuring cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar and Mithali Raj — primarily to create awareness and address investors’ concerns related to market volatility, new-age digital trends and unregulated schemes. The association has attempted to address the issue of losses and declines in portfolios of investors during market volatility, an embedded characteristic of stock markets, and simultaneously appealed to investors to simply focus on their goals, and remain invested, rather than redeeming their investments.
The industry body has also advised small and retail investors to refrain from putting money in unregulated schemes, which could lead to losses, and to avoid new-age trends on social media and other platforms for making investment decisions. “We, at AMFI, want to educate small savers to shift towards formal and regulated mode of investments, and opt for mutual funds as the preferred investment avenue. Last financial year, the mutual fund industry added 1.09 crore new mutual fund investors. A significant section of retail savers voiced their concerns about continued market volatility in the light of various global geo-political events,” said A Balasubramanian, chairman of Amfi.
According to a joint study by Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs (IICA) and Investor Education and Protection Fund Authority (IEPFA), which analysed 15 scams related to unregulated and illegal schemes, more than 10 crore Indians have been defrauded by top 15 pump-and-dump ponzi schemes in the last three decades, leading to an average loss of Rs 15.27 lakh per victim.
N S Venkatesh, chief executive of Amfi, said the films are primarily to educate women and young investors, particularly from rural and semi-urban areas, and guide them on investing their hard-earned money only in regulated schemes.
“We realised that a lot of young investors were swayed by the returns offered by new-age digital trends, without realising that these were unregulated. Many of them burnt their hands and their hard-earned money. Also, since a long time, women investors from semi-urban and rural India have been defrauded by fly-by-night operators, who run dubious deposit schemes promising very high returns,” Venkatesh said.