AMB - Value Trust Fund is My Choice

My experience with mutual funds at the beginning of my investing adventure was not good at all. I remember losing so much on the funds that I purchased through a foreign bank. Among them were Amglobal Properties, Pacific GDP Momentum,CIMB Climate Change, Hwang DBS Select fund and the hopeless structured funds. Come to think of it, the bankers who sold these funds to customers really had no clue as to the funds' historical performance and the economic and financial circumstances in which they operate. They only know how to sell and get commission on top of it.

Before you jump up to defend the bankers by saying that every investment has risks and that I need to read the prospectuses before I invest, let me just tell you that many of us small investors just do not have the time to go through those thick books and what more many do not even understand the quality of risks and the terminologies used to describe them. All we want is to invest our money and get more out of them than mere low-interest saving (of course with no loss of sleep especially when your standard 60K saving is guaranteed by PIDM).

Nice to look, nicer to have

Yes, I do a lot of readings on investing and now have become a lot wiser. And so when my banker at a local bank introduced to me AMB value trust and with an explanation and description of the fund's sterling performance whose dividend rate was 10% last year, I was encouraged and decided to purchase it when there was a discount of 3.5% of the sales charge in May this year. I bought quite a substantial number of units at 0.5585.  And today I noted that the price had gone up to 0.5926 on 24 July 2012. My calculation shows that I have made a gain of about 3% in just two months. Well of course if you were lucky on the stock market, you could make a lot more than this but I am rather satisfied with the income generation as I have set a five-year period for this "low risk" investment.

Moreover, AMB Value Trust has been declared as the Best Equity Malaysia Fund in 2012 in the five-year category. Finding a gem among the multitude of funds available is not easy but I must say my confidence in mutual fund has been restored though I will definitely not going to put my money in just any fund now.

The dividend declaration for this fund is at the end of next month (August) and will be reinvested automatically. I hope it will continue to perform despite the global financial uncertainties due to the eurozone debt woes which never seems to end.