CAL Income Fund vs CAL Medium Risk Debt Fund

Both funds are run by Capital Alliance Investments Ltd, so this is a comparison within one house rather than between two. That removes a variable: the same investment team, the same operational setup and the same trustee arrangements sit behind each. What is left to separate them is what each fund is mandated to hold and what it charges for doing so.

The two charge almost the same management fee, 0.50% and 0.50% 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 Income Fund returned +5.48% against CAL Medium Risk Debt Fund's +3.54%, a gap of 1.93 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.

They have not moved by the same amount. CAL Medium Risk Debt Fund has annualised volatility of 0.20% against CAL Income Fund's 0.41%, meaning CAL Income Fund's unit price has swung roughly 2.1 times as much day to day. Their largest peak-to-trough falls over the period we hold prices for were −0.04% and −0.08%. Volatility describes how the price has behaved, not how likely a loss is, and a fund that has been steady can still fall.

Among the 19 income / fixed income funds we price daily, CAL Income Fund ranks 2nd on 180-day return and CAL Medium Risk Debt Fund 12th, against a category median of +3.71% over the same window. On fee they sit 2nd and 2nd cheapest of the 19, where the median is 0.50%. On how much the price has moved, CAL Income Fund is 7th steadiest and CAL Medium Risk Debt Fund 1st.