A Study of Risk Orientation of Retail Investors in Indian Mutual Fund Industry with Special Reference to Rajasthan, India

Abstract

Mutual Funds markets are constantly becoming more efficient by providing more promising solutions to the investors. Mutual funds industry is responding at a good pace and understanding the investor’s perception, still they are continuously following this race in their attempt to differentiate their products responding to sudden changes in the economy. The need of an hour is to analyze investor’s perception and expectations, and share important information to support financial decision making of mutual funds. Financial markets are becoming more exhaustive with financial products looking for new innovations and to some extent innovations are also visible in designing mutual funds portfolio but these changes need arrangement in accordance with investor’s expectations the risk they perceive, the knowledge they possess about the mutual fund industry. The risk orientation represents the risk bearing capacity and interest of the investors. Even though, the mutual funds is a risk less investment avenues in the capital market, it is also involved with market risks. The risk orientation among the investors is highly essential to invest on mutual funds and their investment behaviour. Thus, it has become essential to study mutual funds from a different angle, i.e, to focus on investor’s expectations and discover the unidentified parameters that account for their dissatisfaction.In order to achieve the objective of developing an understanding about retail investor’s risk orientation, and knowledge regarding the mutual funds a well structured questionnaire was designed. Responses of retail investors and were collected through filled questionnaire with pre-explained objectives of research. The pre-structured questionnaires were distributed among those investors only who had prior experience of mutual fund investment. For this selective systematic sampling was taken for consideration. For reliability of questionnaire 524 individual investors were selected from six cities of Rajasthan namely Ajmer, Jaipur, Udaipur, Jodhpur, Bikarer and Kota. Main focus of questionnaire was to obtain responses of retail investors regarding how they evaluate mutual funds services in terms of risk orientation, and knowledge on their investment. The main objective of this research paper includes:Objective 1 To examine whether the life cycle influences the Risk Orientation of retail investors in the state of Rajasthan.Objective 2 To study the perception of risk involved in Mutual Fund by retail investors.Present research paper identifies the Risk orientation, among the Retail investors Regarding Indian mutual fund industry with the help of Regression Analysis and Chi Square test and factor Analysis. A study at aggregate level tested by chi-square test is also depicted.