Mumbai: The rising nature of the stock market and availability of liquidity in the banking industry has helped the Assets Under Management (AUM) to achieve a new peak of Rs 5.6 lakh crore after climbing 16.7% in October.

This is, for the first time, when AUMs has crossed the Rs 5 lakh crore-mark.

Due to the fear of a sharp correction, capitalists have withdrawn funds from equity schemes when the benchmark indices were achieving new peaks to only reinvest that in liquid as well as liquid plus plans.

The Association of Mutual funds in India (Amfi) said that the asset under management (AUM) of the MF industry stood at Rs 5,56,729.69 crore, which showed an increase of about Rs 79,740.69 crore.

A fund manager said, “Money that were seen getting out from equity linked schemes, were reinvested in debt or money market instruments. Specially banks with surplus funds, parked their money in these schemes.”

SEBI told that equity schemes, during October, saw redemptions of around Rs 1,715.20 crore, and in contrast, debt or money market witnessed an inflow of about Rs 11,993.60 crore.

In actual fact, equities schemes witnessed a net inflow of around Rs 2,749.20 crore from April to October 2007, whereas debt instruments saw net investments of about Rs 59,174.50 crore during the same period.

In terms of AUM, Reliance Mutual Fund (RMF) topped the list with Rs 79,978.83 crore, which is being followed by ICICI Prudential MF and UTI Mutual Fund with assets valued at Rs 56,212.84 crore and Rs 51,752.65 crore correspondingly.

Vikrant Gugnani, Reliance MF president, said, “The market has been good, prompting investors to come back to the market through the MF route, In addition, there has been excess liquidity in the system which led to short term fund flows into liquid schemes.”