What do you mean by Mutual fund

Mutual fund: A mutual fund is a professionally managed type of collective investment scheme that pools money from many investors and invests typically in investment securities (stocks, bonds, short-term money market instruments, other mutual funds, other securities, and/or commodities such as precious metals). The mutual fund will have a fund manager that trades (buys and sells) the fund's investments in accordance with the fund's investment objective. It is registered in Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mutual funds raise money by selling shares of the fund to the public, much like any other type of company can sell stock in itself to the public. Mutual funds then take the money they receive from the sale of their shares (along with any money made from previous investments) and use it to purchase various investment vehicles, such as stocks, bonds and money market instruments. In return for the money they give to the fund when purchasing shares, shareholders receive an equity position in the fund and, in effect, in each of its underlying securities.

For most mutual funds, shareholders are free to sell their shares at any time, although the price of a share in a mutual fund will fluctuate daily, depending upon the performance of the securities held by the fund.

Benefits of mutual funds include diversification and professional money management. Mutual funds offer choice, liquidity, and convenience, but charge fees and often require a minimum investment.

This is passive instruments having two forms namely open end mutual fund and close end mutual fund.

Closed End Mutual Fund: The scheme size is fixed so that the asset manager (who manage mutual fund scheme) could not issue new instruments in the form of bonus or right.

Open End Mutual Fund:   The scheme size is not fixed so that the asset manager could extend scheme size by issuing new instruments in the form of bonus or right.

There are many types of mutual funds, including aggressive growth fund, asset allocation fund, balanced fund, blend fund, bond fund, capital appreciation fund, clone fund, closed fund, crossover fund, equity fund, fund of funds, global fund, growth fund, growth and income fund, hedge fund, income fund, index fund, international fund, money market fund, municipal bond fund, prime rate fund, regional fund, sector fund, specialty fund, stock fund, and tax-free bond fund.