Union Mutual Fund today opened the New Fund Offer for the Arthaya Equity Long Short Fund, its debut product under the Arthaya SIF platform. The NFO will remain open until 18 May 2026, giving investors a two-week window to subscribe to Union AMC's first entry into India's Specialised Investment Fund category.

NFO details at a glance

  • Fund name: Arthaya Equity Long Short Fund

  • Category: Open-ended equity long-short SIF

  • NFO window: 4 May – 18 May 2026

  • Minimum investment: ₹10 lakh per PAN

  • Unit price during NFO: ₹10

  • Exit load: 1% on redemptions within one year

  • Benchmark: NIFTY 200 Total Return Index

The fund's strategy combines long positions in companies with strong earnings visibility with tactical short positions in stocks considered overvalued or structurally weak, implemented through derivatives. According to the AMC's investor presentation, the approach is built around three core aims: reducing downside risk through hedging, generating alpha from both winning and losing positions, and managing volatility more actively than a conventional long-only equity fund.

Union AMC has framed the launch as reflecting a broader shift in how equity investing is evolving in India — away from simple "buy and hold" approaches and toward more adaptive portfolios that respond to market conditions rather than merely tracking them. The presentation accompanying the launch noted that today's markets are increasingly episodic and non-linear, marked by sharp rallies, corrections and sector rotations — conditions where traditional long-only portfolios often struggle to protect capital during drawdowns.

Where Arthaya sits in the market The launch comes at a point when the SIF category has expanded rapidly, with more than a dozen AMCs holding SEBI approval to operate SIF platforms and a growing number of live funds spanning equity, hybrid and debt strategies. Union MF's entry via an equity long-short structure — rather than a hybrid product, which several earlier entrants chose as their debut offering — positions Arthaya to compete most directly with other pure equity long-short SIFs already in the market.

Distributors note that, as an open-ended (rather than interval) scheme, the Arthaya fund offers more frequent liquidity than some of the interval-structured hybrid SIFs launched earlier in the category's life, which could appeal to investors who value flexibility alongside the fund's hedged equity strategy. As with all SIFs, investors are reminded that returns are not guaranteed, and that the product's use of derivatives and short positions introduces a different risk profile from conventional equity mutual funds.