Tags
2013, economy, fundsupermart, investing, investment, malaysia, mutual fund, mutual fund investment, mutual funds investment, outlook
Recently, I attended a seminar organized by Fundsupermart on the 20th July which as usual, focusing around the “Recommended Funds of 2013/14”. In conjunction, there’s this 1% promotional sales charge on the list of these funds. It was a half day session, packed with interesting talks and sharing by industry fund managers from a few major fund houses, informative for investors with various experience levels.
As expected, with the recent announcement by Bernanke on the possibility of the tapering off on the QE3, this has been a hot topic among all the sessions for the whole seminar.
- These “easy money” that were poured into the emerging and Asian market were mostly moved out of the region and kept in the States itself due to the fear of losing such easy money in future with the tapering off on QE3.
- Malaysia is the only region that has given a positive return of 0.2% in the month of July amidst the huge sell down.
- The reason simply because the overall percentage of the foreign funds/hot money in Malaysian market is relatively smaller to other ASEAN countries. Thus, the sell down and exit of these hot money doesn’t impact in such as scale that has impacted other countries such as Thailand and every other ASEAN countries.
- Since the funds have been retracted back to US, we will see the impacts of such actions in coming months when more news regarding QE3 comes out, and “fear” level among the money managers recedes.
- Currency exchange rates shall play a factor of the next inflow/outflow of foreign investments, as in the case of bonds, when the target country’s currency strengthened, the return is relatively higher.
- The KLCI stocks of Malaysia is fairly valued, and thus possibility of the growth gets lower. However, we are all reminded that there’s always another 900+ counters for fund managers to invest.
As for developed markets,
- Housing market is going up and jobless claims has been decreasing, a show of economy is getting better. This can be seen from the major brands where positive returns are being reported.
- The focus one SMEs should not be overlooked, because on a revenue basis, with a the amount of funds (expenses from the public) increasing, the impact of this is always bigger in the smaller enterprises, thus the business growth percentage shall reflect more.
- In EU region, bad news were less, and “austerity” measures were taken off the table, relatively speaking. And thus they should do just fine and shouldn’t be too much surprises as the spending is expected to increase.
- On a side note, funds targeted EU companies shouldn’t be worried, because major income/revenue streams of these major Europe brands are from external, such as Asia. More than 65% of total revenue is generated not within the region. Fundamentals of these big europe brands are doing fine.