Mutual funds sahi hai — the advertising blitzkrieg aimed at wooing retail investors seems to be working. Consider this: equity folios crossed the 80-million mark by the end of 2018. In fact, while AMFI launched the awareness campaign in 2017, individual asset management companies collectively spent over Rs.3.50 billion on advertising last year. Their optimism is understandable — the 43-player industry’s  assets under management (AUM), which crossed Rs.10 trillion for the first time in 2014, took less than three years to double beyond  Rs.20 trillion by August 2017! That investors are taking seriously to MFs can be gauged by the tripling of net inflows into equity funds from Rs.532 billion to Rs.1,578 billion between 2014 and 2018 (See: Inflows swell). It is this copious flow that helped the market buffer FII sales of Rs.732 billion in 2018 as domestic investors bought stocks worth Rs.1,097 billion. However, the volatility in the market and regulatory changes by Sebi did have a bearing on the MF industry with only 12 of the 154 large-cap funds managing to beat the benchmark last year (See: The long and short of it).