Morgan Stanley gets second fund to India

Morgan Stanley Mutual Fund has come to the Indian market for only the second time in 14 years.

Morgan Stanley Mutual Fund has launched a ACE Fund (across capitalisation equity fund), an open-ended, multi-cap fund. This comes more than a decade after its first launch, Morgan Stanley Growth Fund (MSGF) in 1994. Talking to the media, country head of Morgan Stanley Narayan Ramachandran said that he does not look at the years gone by as a lost opportunity.

“We think of this as a 30-year market. Maybe we missed it by 3-4 years,” he said. Speaking about market conditions, fund manager Jayesh Gandhi said the market volatitlity would help stock picking and portfolio construction and significant bull market likely in late 2008.

Apart from the new launch, the fund house has also applied for the regulator’s permission to take the MSGF's open-ended plans to launch a liquid fund and a liquid plus fund. MSGF has a corpus of over Rs 4,000 crore and the tenure of the 15-year fund would end in February 2009.

The fund is listed on the stock exchanges and closed on Thursday at Rs 57. The net asset value of the scheme as on Wednesday was Rs 63. There are 7-8 lakh investors in the fund and has one of the largest investor bases with 16 lakh investors during its launch.

On Thursday, Mirae Asset Mutual Fund also entered with its maiden fund called Asset India Opportunities Fund. This is the independent foray by the Korea headquartered Mirae Asset Financial Groupwhich is overseeing investments worth $132 billion, mostly in Asia followed by Europe. Arindam Ghosh, CEO of MAMF said, “We are focused on providing the investors with a range of products both in equity and fixed income.” Mirae has brought in about Rs 200 crore as initial capital for the venture.