CAL Balanced Fund vs Senfin Financial Services Fund

CAL Balanced Fund is run by Capital Alliance Investments Ltd and Senfin Financial Services Fund by Senfin Asset Management (Pvt) Ltd, so this compares two houses as well as two funds. Both are balanced funds licensed by the Securities and Exchange Commission of Sri Lanka, which means they are doing broadly the same job, and the differences below are differences in how each house has chosen to do it.

The two charge almost the same management fee, 0.75% and 0.75% a year. In a category where the funds hold similar instruments, a fee difference is often the largest durable difference between two products; here it is not, so the comparison rests on what each holds and how much its price has moved.

Over the 180 days to the date shown, CAL Balanced Fund returned −8.58% against Senfin Financial Services Fund's −10.02%, a gap of 1.44 percentage points. That is one window: a different 180 days would very likely order them differently, and neither figure predicts the next six months. Both are price returns on the bid side and exclude income a fund distributed rather than accrued into its price.

Both have moved by a similar amount, with annualised volatility of 24.52% and 20.29%. For two funds in the same category that is the expected result, and it means neither has taken noticeably more price movement than the other to arrive at its return.

CAL Balanced Fund opens at LKR 100 where Senfin Financial Services Fund requires LKR 1,000, so for a smaller first investment only one of the two is available at all.

Among the 8 balanced funds we price daily, CAL Balanced Fund ranks 6th on 180-day return and Senfin Financial Services Fund 7th, against a category median of −6.93% over the same window. On fee they sit 1st and 1st cheapest of the 8, where the median is 1.00%. On how much the price has moved, CAL Balanced Fund is 7th steadiest and Senfin Financial Services Fund 5th.