Mutual Funds, Dec. 17 -- Investing discipline requires being invested for a long time. When an investor stays invested for a long time, they stand to reap the fruits of compounding. In other words, being invested for a long period allows them to earn disproportionately higher returns in the later years than in the first few years.

This happens because the returns in the first few years are added to the corpus, thus incrementally raising the scope of earning higher returns.

To illustrate this point, we randomly handpick one mutual fund (JM Flexicap Mutual Fund), which has delivered a healthy return (of 14.25%) since its launch in 2008. For the uninitiated, a flexi-cap mutual fund is free to invest in the securities across market capitali...