Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Is Unit Trust Investment Right For You? (Part 2)

Since fund manager will invest the pool of fund on behalf of fund holders, even though initial investment requirement may not as high as direct share or bond investment, cost like initial service charge and annual management fee do affect investment returns. On average, the initial cost for local equity unit trust is ranging from 5%-7% and annual management fee is normally at 1.5% per annum.

Net Asset Value (NAV) is the actual asset value of the fund. It is calculated on daily basis and is an important figure for investor to understand how is the fund performed.

A number of professional bodies do have compilation of funds’ return table for investors’ general knowledge. One point of cautious is that the return shown in those tables are basically NAV to NAV basis. In other word, those percentage return shown in those tables are before consideration of initial service charge and, therefore, deduction of service charge from those return percentage is essential to reflect the actual picture.

Hence, unit trust investors shall first thoroughly read through the prospectus of the fund to ensure that the fund objective is the same as yours. For example, a conservative investor shall opt for bond fund or money market fund rather than aggressive growth fund. Secondly, unit trust investor shall study the performance history of the fund. As a rule of thumb, select the fund which is consistently ranked in the first and second quartile of total funds. Thirdly, as initial and annual management charges will seriously affect your unit trust investment return, choose only the fund with lowest cost.

In Part 3, I will share with you on how to effectively invest in Unit Trust if you decided to.

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