investment

Invest basically means purchase of productive assets such as factories, equipment, commercial
rental property and things like that, which produce value and give a return on investment .

in real terms equity mutual funds are NOT investments, because you are actually not buying anything, you are merely holding a ( security/paper asset, you'll learn this later) unit which entitles you to that part of profit or loss of a fund, whose fund manger , according to you, is much better at speculating in stock market than you.