Sunday, December 14, 2008

ASNB Fixed-Priced Unit Trust Funds a Hit With Investors

My comment can be read below after the article.

The Star Online > Business
Monday December 15, 2008

ASNB Fixed-Priced Unit Trust Funds a Hit With Investors

By LAALITHA HUNT

AMANAH Saham Nasional Bhd’s (ASNB) fixed-priced unit trust funds launched in the past few years have proven to be big winners due to their commendable returns.

These equity-based funds, namely Amanah Saham Wawasan 2020 (ASW 2020) and Amanah Saham Malaysia (ASM), have achieved compounded annual growth rates of 10.78% and 6.3% respectively since the time of its launch.

ASW 2020 and ASM have been providing an annual average distribution income of 7.74 sen and 7.12 sen respectively.

To paint a clearer picture, say if an investor had placed RM100,000 in ASW 2020 10 years ago, his investment value would amount to RM251,360 today.

Similarly, by placing the same amount in the ASM fund 10 years ago, the investor would have RM173,340 today in his investment account.


ASM was launched on April 20, 2000, with an initial fund size of two billion units which were fully subscribed in 21 days.

ASM undertook its first increase in fund size two months later in June 2000 with one billion units fully subscribed in four months.

In April 2006, one billion units of the ASM open for subscription were fully subscribed in 45 minutes.

The most recent offer of ASM’s additional units was in July 2007 which saw all the 500 million units, capped at 50,000 units per investor, fully taken up in 30 minutes.

Earlier in March 2007, a total of 800 million units, also capped at 50,000 units per investor, were fully sold out in one day.

ASW 2020 also drew strong response for its subscription quota for non-bumiputra investors since its launch in August 1996.

Besides the notable payouts, both these funds have fixed prices at RM1 per unit unlike other unit trust funds, which is an attractive feature for risk-averse investors.

According to an analyst, ASNB’s strength lies in the fact that it manages a big fund and has the luxury of time.

“These two factors are crucial to beat the market at any time,” the analyst added.

To date, the fund size for ASW 2020 and ASM stands at 10.42 billion units and 7.2 billion units respectively.

This includes the additional one billion units each offered to the public last month for both these funds. In comparison to these fixed-priced unit trust funds, ASNB’s variable priced balanced fund, Amanah Saham Nasional 3 (ASN 3), did not perform as well.

ASN 3, which has a fund size of 112.91 million units, only registered a compounded annual growth rate of 3.7%.


My Comment:

I prefer ASB which gave good and consistent distributions almost every year. It's compounded interest for 15 years based average 7% is 11.92% and at the same time also invest into Amanah Saham Nasional (ASN) and 15 years based on average 5.88% is 9.5% - I worked this on estimation and history and tracked record for the past 3 years and extrapolated to 15%. (I shall later, updated with correct average and compounded interest after I extract its data from ASB and ASN historical records.)

Friends advocate me to join other houses as well, I know - to reduce risks, I am therefore better to have a few good funds and diverse my money.

But, I am the believer of consistency and focussing on certain fund to avoid over-lapping investment into same category of fund as well as to avoid over-diversified and losing my focus on its horizon.

Those common mistakes I've seen is that, investors do not project  vivid horizon and target of a particular fund. They always missed this:

1. Horizon : How long they want to invest and preserving its capital.

2. Cum distribution : At the end of their projected horizon, how much do they expect distribution that they can take out (using capital preserving model).

3. Total unit holdings : Which reflected in (1) and (2). So, they know how much they need to invest, regardless any method they want to use during invesment period.

4. Over-diversified : Where investors hold to too many funds that they lost focus for (1) and (3).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Actually,good post. thx