Mutual funds¶

A mutual fund is unlike everything else in this library. It is not bought and sold in a continuous market; you subscribe to it and redeem it at the day's net asset value, the price the fund house publishes once a day. UBI has no quote for one and stores no candles, so a mutual fund is not something to analyse or trade on price. What does work is holding it, and that is what MutualFund is for. The one way to measure a scheme is through its stored constituents.

The table below describes the one class in tradingmachine.assets.mutual_funds.

Kind	Class	UBI segment	Named by	Instruments in UBI
class	`MutualFund`	`mutual_funds`	`exchange`, `symbol`	279, on the `nse` only

There is one class because UBI has no futures or options on a mutual fund and carries the segment on a single exchange. It is kept apart from Funds and trusts, because an exchange traded fund and an investment trust do trade like shares, and putting a mutual fund beside them would suggest it does too.

A scheme is named by its exchange code¶

A mutual fund scheme's symbol is the exchange's short code for it, such as ABSLFTTIDG, not the scheme's published name. The code usually begins with the fund house's prefix, so the practical way to find one is to search by that prefix, as the example below does.

from tradingmachine.assets import mutual_funds

matches = mutual_funds.MutualFund.search(exchange="nse", term="ABSL")
fund = mutual_funds.MutualFund(exchange="nse", symbol="ABSLFTTIDG")

On 2026-09-20 that search returned 18 rows, beginning ABSLFTTIDG, ABSLFTTIDN, ABSLFTTIRG, ABSLFTTIRN and ABSLFTTJDG.

What works and what does not¶

Only one broker, Stoxkart, carries the segment, and no broker that serves quotes does. The diagram below shows which members of a MutualFund return something and which raise or come back empty.

flowchart LR
    F["MutualFund<br/>ABSLFTTIDG"] --> Q["quote, last_price, ohlc<br/>order-book values"]
    Q --> E["ServiceUnavailableError"]
    F --> P["prices() and every<br/>analysis method"]
    P --> N["None"]
    F --> H["holdings, holdings_value<br/>holdings_pnl"]
    H --> R["the account's row<br/>or None when not held"]
    F --> O["add_to_holdings<br/>reduce_holdings<br/>liquidate_holdings"]
    O --> C["a cnc order<br/>give a limit price"]

The module was checked against UBI on 2026-09-20. The block below is the check's own summary of the instrument, as recorded then.

MutualFund(exchange='nse', segment='nse_mutual_funds', symbol='ABSLFTTIDG')
  segment    nse_mutual_funds   shape security   lot 1   tick 0.01
  brokers    ['stoxkart']
  last_price ServiceUnavailableError
  candles    None
  holdings   None

Holding a mutual fund¶

mutual_funds is one of UBI's cash segments, so a scheme is reported in the account's holdings exactly as a share is, and MutualFund carries the same six holdings members as Equity. Holdings documents them. The old tradingmachine project gave mutual funds the three reading members only, and this library gives them the three order methods as well, so that no holdable class is an exception you have to remember.

The three order methods send ordinary cnc orders, which is the product UBI accepts for this segment. Three things follow from that.

Give a price. With no quote, there is nothing for a market order to be priced against, so a limit price is the only sensible form. The methods still send a market order if you pass no price, because the library does not second-guess what UBI will accept, but the docstrings ask for a price.
The limit order is sent at once. Since 2026-09-27 UBI's order engine holds a plain limit order until a live quote shows the other side reaching its price. Nothing quotes a mutual fund, so a held order would wait all day and never be sent. The holdings methods therefore pass hold=False, which sends the order to a broker at once, as Order engine explains. Call buy_at_limit_price or sell_at_limit_price yourself only with hold=False too.
Whether it becomes a subscription is up to the broker. No live order has been sent through these methods, so it is not known how the broker treats a cnc order for a mutual fund.

These are real orders

add_to_holdings, reduce_holdings and liquidate_holdings send real orders to a real broker, with real money. The example below would buy ten units at a limit price of 25.00 if you ran it.

fund = mutual_funds.MutualFund(exchange="nse", symbol="ABSLFTTIDG")
fund.add_to_holdings(quantity=10, price=25.0)

As with every holdable class, reduce_holdings and liquidate_holdings sell only units that are not pledged as collateral, and raise HoldingError when the scheme is not held or every unit is pledged. No scheme was held when the module was checked, so the live check proved only the not-held case, and the order methods were exercised against a recorder rather than a broker.

Measuring a scheme through its constituents¶

A scheme's own analysis and performance measures all return None, because UBI has no price history for it. What a scheme holds can still be measured. The constituents property returns a MutualFundConstituents asset basket of the scheme's portfolio, read from this project's MongoDB and UBI every time it is read, or None when no basket has been stored for the scheme. UBI stores no fund holdings, so a basket exists only when one was saved with this scheme as its linked instrument. The basket has candles built from its members, so every analysis and performance method works on it.

A scheme's constituents and its holdings are different things. constituents is what the fund itself owns, and holdings is how many units of the fund this account owns. The example below compares a scheme's portfolio with NIFTY over a year. It was not run for this page, and it returns None unless a basket has been stored for the scheme.

from tradingmachine.assets import equities

nifty = equities.EquityIndex(exchange="nse", symbol="NIFTY")
portfolio = fund.constituents
if portfolio is not None:
    print(portfolio.performance_summary(benchmark=nifty, days=365))

Errors¶

The table below lists what this class raises.

Exception	When
`TypeError`	The `exchange` or `symbol` argument is missing. Python raises it before any request.
`MutualFundError`	UBI has no scheme with that exchange and code, including a share asked for as a scheme.
`ServiceUnavailableError`	A quote or an order-book value is read.
`HoldingError`	`reduce_holdings` or `liquidate_holdings` is called when nothing free is held, or `reduce_holdings` asks for more than is free.