In the month of August, the best performing fund category was ahead by a mile. According to the Lipper FundMarket Insight Report, Equity Sector Gold & Precious Metals returned an average of 6.45% in the one month, while the runners up — Equity Sector General Industry Average and Equity Malaysia — returned a distant 1.16% on average.
In a mixed month for funds in Malaysia, Bond Asia Pacific (+0.36% on average) and Bond MYR (+0.58% on average) were in the list of the top performing classifications for August.
Reflecting the uncertainty in markets over economic growth, all fund groups except target maturity and unclassified funds turned in negative performance on average. “Equity funds returned minus 1.63% on average for August and were still negative (-5.7%) for the year to date. The presence of many poorly performing sectors on a macro level such as Equity Europe, which incidentally lost 18.14% over the last eight months, dragged down the returns of the equity asset class within the fund market,” said Lipper (Asean) research analyst Ivan Ng in the report.
For August the two best-performing equity funds were AmPrecious Metals (Equity Sector Gold & Precious Metals, up 8.27%) and CIMB-Principal KLCI-Linked (Equity Malaysia, up 5.10%), in accordance with the top-performing LGCs for August. At the bottom was Equityi Vietnam with a -8.80% loss.
On a year-on-year basis, a local focus beat a global one. Eight of the top ten equity funds were Equity Malaysia funds. “Lipper Equity Global funds generally did not have a good past 12 months, with five of the ten bottom-performing funds on a year-on-year basis coming from this LGC,” said Ng.
Local Bond funds were the top performers in the one-year ending Aug 31, with nine of the ten funds in the top-performing list belonging to the Bond MYR category. The best-performing Islamic bond fund was PB Islamic Bond (Bond MYR, up 10.91%), while the bottom-performing Islamic bond fund was MIDF Amanah Islamic Bond (Bond MYR, down 1.24%).
“Over the last three years the Lipper Leader ratings system managed to identify funds with a good risk-adjusted return; the top-performing bond fund over the last 12 months — AMB Income Trust (Bond MYR, up 13.37%) — led the charts in terms of returns, although its volatility was much higher compared to the other bond funds on the top-ten list,” said Ng.
This article appeared on the Personal Finance page, The Edge Financial Daily, September 23, 2010.
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