Kya Credit Risk mutual funds sahi hai with Rajiv Shastri

Investing with Indexheads

In this episode, I geek out over the less understood and misunderstood world of debt and debt mutual funds. My guest this week is the brilliant Rajiv Shatri. Rajiv is an economist, debt market specialist, and former CEO of Essel Mutual Fund. In this episode we talk about:

1. The opacity of debt markets
2. Why the open-ended structure of debt mutual funds and T-day NAV may be flawed. We discuss whether there are ways to get over this which work both in the interest of the fund and investors.
3. Liquidity of different rated instruments
4. The role of rating agencies in valuing debt instruments
5. The pros and cons of listing debt instruments to aid price discovery
6. How the risk in credit risk funds is similar to small-cap funds but not the reward and why it's not worth investing in credit risk funds
7. Thoughts on the Bharat Bond ETF
8. Rajiv's view on longer duration interest rates and the economy
9. Is this the time to take duration risk?
10. Equity market cycles rhyme and if debt market behave similarly

He tweets @Rajivshastri and blogs on www.rajivshastri.com. Post the Franklin episode, Rajiv wrote a series of posts on ET Prime on the various structural issue with the Indian debt markets, debt mutual funds, and possible remedies. The pieces are absolutely brilliant and we highly recommend reading them.

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