CAL Investment Grade Fund vs NDB Wealth Income Plus Fund

CAL Investment Grade Fund is run by Capital Alliance Investments Ltd and NDB Wealth Income Plus Fund by NDB Wealth Management Ltd, 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 0.50% 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 Investment Grade Fund returned +4.78% against NDB Wealth Income Plus Fund's +2.88%, a gap of 1.90 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 0.29% and 0.38%. 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 Investment Grade Fund opens at LKR 100 where NDB Wealth Income Plus Fund requires LKR 5,000, so for a smaller first investment only one of the two is available at all.

Among the 19 income / fixed income funds we price daily, CAL Investment Grade Fund ranks 6th on 180-day return and NDB Wealth Income Plus Fund 14th, 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 Investment Grade Fund is 3rd steadiest and NDB Wealth Income Plus Fund 6th.