CAL Five year Optimum Fund vs NAMAL Income Fund

CAL Five year Optimum Fund is run by Capital Alliance Investments Ltd and NAMAL Income Fund by National Asset Management Limited, so this compares two houses as well as two funds. Both are income / fixed income 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 clearest difference is the management fee. NAMAL Income Fund charges 0.60% a year against CAL Five year Optimum Fund's 1.00%, a gap of 0.40 percentage points. On LKR 100,000 held for a year that is about LKR 400 more retained by a holder of NAMAL Income Fund, before any difference in what the two funds actually earn. The fee is deducted from the fund's assets before the unit price is struck, so it applies whatever the market does — which makes it the one number here that is knowable in advance.

Their 180-day returns are close, +1.40% and +0.92%, which is common between two income / fixed income funds holding similar instruments over the same stretch. When returns converge like this, the fee and the price variability below are what actually separate the two over time.

Both have moved by a similar amount, with annualised volatility of 1.47% and 1.86%. 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.

Among the 19 income / fixed income funds we price daily, CAL Five year Optimum Fund ranks 18th on 180-day return and NAMAL Income Fund 19th, against a category median of +3.71% over the same window. On fee they sit 16th and 12th cheapest of the 19, where the median is 0.50%. On how much the price has moved, CAL Five year Optimum Fund is 14th steadiest and NAMAL Income Fund 15th.