New Delhi, March 3 -- Investors in direct mutual funds lean toward certain equity-fund categories, while regular-plan investors favour others. Direct plans are those that are bought directly from asset management companies, while regular plans flow through banks' distribution arms, national distributors or individual distributors - or a mix of these.

Mint analysed India's top 15 fund houses in terms of assets under management (AUM) to see which of their equity funds had higher share of regular plans and which had higher share of direct plans.

Data revealed that many funds launched in the past four to five years lean heavily on regular plans for their AUM, especially thematic and sectoral funds, as these account for most of the new launc...