CAL Investment Grade Fund vs NAMAL Income Fund

CAL Investment Grade 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 two charge almost the same management fee, 0.50% and 0.60% 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 Investment Grade Fund returned +4.78% against NAMAL Income Fund's +0.92%, a gap of 3.86 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 Investment Grade Fund has annualised volatility of 0.29% against NAMAL Income Fund's 1.86%, meaning NAMAL Income Fund's unit price has swung roughly 6.3 times as much day to day. Their largest peak-to-trough falls over the period we hold prices for were −0.05% and −2.68%. 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 Investment Grade Fund ranks 6th on 180-day return and NAMAL Income Fund 19th, against a category median of +3.71% over the same window. On fee they sit 2nd and 12th cheapest of the 19, where the median is 0.50%. On how much the price has moved, CAL Investment Grade Fund is 3rd steadiest and NAMAL Income Fund 15th.