JP MORGAN INDIA TAX ADVANTAGE FUND

JP MORGAN INDIA TAX ADVANTAGE FUND

JPMorgan Asset Management India on Thursday launched its open-ended equity linked savings scheme (ELSS) – the JPMorgan India Tax Advantage Fund, which is benchmarked against the BSE 200 Index. The new fund offer opens on 18 December and will close on 16 January 2009.

The scheme is essentially an equity fund with a three-year lock-in period. The investment objective of the scheme is to generate income and long-term capital appreciation from a diversified portfolio of predominantly equity and equity-related securities.

The scheme is eligible for tax deduction under section 80 C of the Income Tax Act.

Minimum initial application costs Rs. 500 per application and in multiples of Rs. 500 thereafter.
The fund is also the first green launch by JPMorgan Asset Management in the country. The attempt will be to minimise the use of paper by encouraging prospective investors to download all applicable literature from the website and print only as per specific requirement so as to ensure minimum wastage of paper.

Said Krishnamurthy Vijayan – CEO & whole-time director, JPMorgan Asset Management, "In a typical NFO, lakhs of application forms and other material is printed & distributed and less than probably 0.5% of them get utilised.

Imagine the number of trees we cut to run just one NFO. We must all become more conscious about this destruction. With this in mind, we decided that the JPMorgan India Tax Advantage Fund would be a green NFO."


MY TAKE :
JP Morgan has a unique way of assigning fund managers to its equity schemes. The AMC assigns four managers to each scheme. And like its previous two equity diversified funds, this fund will have four managers as well.However, looking at its existing schemes performance, this has not really worked well. And the brief history of this equity fund house does not make this new offer a compelling choice as it is difficult to ignore the existing 32 open-end tax saving funds, some of which have impressive track records.

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