What is Nifty BeES?

Nifty BeES, a combination of a share and a mutual fund unit, trades on the capital market segment of NSE.

Nifty BeES (Benchmark Exchange Traded Scheme)—the first exchange traded fund (ETF) in India—seeks to provide investment returns that closely correspond to the total returns of securities as represented by the S&P CNX Nifty Index. Nifty BeES, a combination of a share and a mutual fund unit, trades on the capital market segment of NSE (National Stock Exchange). Each Nifty BeES unit is 1/10th of the S&P CNX Nifty Index value. Nifty BeES units are traded and settled in dematerialised form like any other share in the rolling settlement. Thus, it allows you to trade real-time on NSE and gives you real-time indicative NAV (net asset value).
Nifty BeES offers the benefits of diversification, index tracking and low expenses. Nifty BeES can be bought / sold like a share through any NSE terminal at prices available on the screen. The underlying portfolio of Nifty BeES very closely replicates that of the S&P CNX Nifty. Hence, Nifty BeES tracks the movement of S&P CNX Nifty.
Nifty BeES is a no load scheme. The annual expense ratio including management fees is a maximum of 0.80% of the Daily Average Net Assets, which is one of the lowest for any mutual fund scheme in India. The costs reduce further to 0.65%, for assets over Rs.5 billion.

What are the advantages?

Simple
Economical
Convenient
Liquid
Neutral
Transparent
Instant Diversification
Equitable Structure

As it is listed and traded on the NSE, Nifty BeES can be bought / sold throughout the trading day just by a call to your broker. This gives you the power to react swiftly to changes in the market. You can even place limit orders. Nifty BeES can be held in your DP (depository participant) account with other portfolio holdings.

The structure of Nifty BeES attracts liquidity from various sources such as buying / selling by investors. The performance of Nifty BeES is simply the result of performance of shares in the S&P CNX Nifty Index and demand & supply in the market. There is no fund manager bias.

As Nifty BeES replicates the S&P CNX Nifty, investors can know at any given point of time where and how much is invested in each stock. Investing in just one unit gives exposure to fifty shares of the S&P CNX Nifty. This allows investors to spread risk with one single decision.

The unique “in-kind” mechanism of creating / redeeming Nifty BeES by exchanging a pre-defined portfolio ensures that long-term investors do not bear the cost of short term trading as observed in traditional Open-ended structure. This insulates long-term investors from short-term trading activity.

Investing in an ETF is much simpler compared to investing in a stock or actively-managed mutual fund. One can also consider doing an SIP in Nifty BeES.

Why not buy specific company’s stocks?

You might be very interested in investing in specific company’s stocks because thats what everyone does and the people on TV are so experienced and say that they have 100% strike rate in picking winning stocks.
Do they really? No. This is a common problem when it involved finance matter (just like in astrology). They don’t talk about predictions that failed. Instead they make you focus on how their choice of one particular stock earned them 60% returns. They don’t talk about the 10 other stocks which made investors lose more money than they earned in that 1 winning stock. People are easily affected by “confirmation bias” and it greatly affect their investments.
Remember no one can select winning stocks every time. And you won’t know in advance which prediction would work out and which wouldn’t. If you invest in all the predictions they make, you would end up making more loss than profits.

How about mutual funds?

Mutual funds are managed by humans who check the fundamentals of a company and try to guess when to invest in a company and when to exit it. But like I said they are no better than the financial experts you see on TV.
Add a small fee that you need to pay the fund manager to handle your money, called “Expense ratio”. You would end up losing money before even making a bit of profit. All this for just some mediocre stocks picked by some human.

How is Nifty BeES different?

Nifty BeES is an index fund – your value of the investment would increase if Nifty increases, and it would fall if Nifty decreases. The value of Nifty is closely tied to how the Indian economy performs. If all the industries are doing well, nifty would definitely increase.
Whenever a company is removed from the index and a new company is added to the index, the ETF automatically makes the adjustment in the investment. It is exactly as if you are investing in these 50 front line companies. When invested in the long term you would definitely have increased your investment multiple times.

How is it less risky than buying a company’s stocks?

It is definitely less risky than buying a separate company’s stocks. Because you are investing in 50 stocks spread over about 22 sectors. How much more diversification do you need? Even if one particular sector is not performing well, say metals/sugar, there would be other sectors which would be performing well, like IT industries because of higher dollar price. Your investment would grow even if a few sectors under perform. In case of a total bear market, your investment wouldn’t fall as badly as investing in a few companies.

Why not buy these 50 companies individually?

You can buy all the 50 constituents of the Nifty Index individually and get the same effect. But the advantage of buying Nifty BeES instead is you can invest a very small amount every month and it would grow at the same rate as Nifty. To buy even a single share of all Nifty companies you would be needing a much higher investment.
Managing the weightage of the different companies and reshuffling the portfolio whenever a company is taken out of the index and a new one is inserted, would be a headache. Which is easier, tracking 50 companies in your portfolio daily or tracking a single ETF once a month, just for 5 minutes to see how much profit you earned? Thats why the ETF has computer programs which do this automatically. And since it doesn’t have any human to make any decisions, you are protected from someone’s mistakes.

How do you buy it?

Buying Nifty BeES is very similar to buying a company’s stocks. Ask your broker or goto your online trading website and search for the scrip “NIFTYBEES” and buy the required quantity. Some brokers even have an option to invest a fixed amount or buy a fixed number of shares every month, called Monthly SIP (Systematic Investment Plan).
If your broker has that option, choose that and automatically every month your money is invested in Nifty BeES and you don’t have to even think about it. When you retire 30 years later, you would be sitting on a nice, fat load of profits than any of your friends. And the best part is, you wouldn’t have to pay a single rupee as taxes for any of this profit you earn (after 1 year of investment).

Just trust me on this and invest in Nifty BeES regularly. This is more than enough for 95% of a common man’s investment needs. Especially for beginner, start with Nifty BeES for 3 years and see the difference it makes vs your friends who invested in some new company.