South Asian Journal of Marketing & Management Research

A mutual fund is a financial intermediary that pools the savings of investors for collective investment in a diversified portfolio of securities. A fund is ‘mutual’ as all of its returns, minus its expenses, are shared by the fund's investors. An attempt is made to understand investor's attitutde towards Savings Avenue, returns on various schemes, factors influencing for the decisions and information sources. A Sample of 300 investors from Prakasam district of Andhra Pradesh state is taken for the study on the basis stratified, convenience and judgmental sampling. The frequency and percentage analyses were carried out to understand the socio-economic characteristics investors and analysis also is based on averages, weighted averages &Chi-square are calculated and the results are interpreted.

The foregoing analysis shows that about 63.33 per cent of the investors are males while the rest of 36.67per cent of the investors are females. The results also reveals that out of 300 respondents 33.30 percent of investors belong to rural area, about 16.67 percent of investors are from semi-urban and the remaining 50.00 percent are from the urban area. It indicates that about 17.00 per cent of the investors belong to the age group of below 25 years followed by 25–35 years (32.00 per cent), 35–45 years (30.33 per cent) and more than 45 years (20.67 percent).

The preference for investment alternatives indicates first preference for mutual funds, second for shares and third for Post Office/Bank Schemes. Majority of the investors depend on electronic media for their decisions, the second influencer is the brokers followed by print media.