Unit Trust Basic Story Telling..

Unit Trust Introduction

Dealing with people in terms of money accumulation or venturing in unit trust is not an easy task.

The questions that they always asked are ‘Hey, what is unit trust (unit amanah)?’, or ‘is this unit trust (unit amanah) thing is secured investment?’, or ‘Why should I need unit trust (unit amanah)?’

When talking about Unit Trust (unit amanah) or Mutual Funds, people always think about Public Mutual, CIMB Wealth Advisors, RHB Unit Trust and many more.

I personally do not have any clue about unit trust before this and tried to find more information over the net and I found none that can explain in detail about this.

Top 10 unit trust holdings:

Public Mutual | CIMB wealth advisors | CMS trust management | RHB unit trust | ASM | Hwang DBS | MAAKL mutual | OSK-UOB unit trust | PHEIM unit trust | TA investment | HLG unit trust |

Lot of people put the definition of unit trust in a lot of ways.

Taken from our own Malaysia Government portal, http://www.gov.my/MyGov/BI/Directory/Business/BusinessByIndustry/BusinessFinance/FinanceLegislationAndPolicy/FLPUnitTrust/:-

Unit trust funds are investment schemes structured to allow investors with similar investment objectives to participation in the money, debt, equity and derivative markets.

Professional investment managers, who channel their efforts towards achieving investment objectives ranging from regular income to capital growth, will manage funds collected from the schemes.

Unit trusts (unit amanah) are excellent vehicles for individual and corporate financial planning due to their affordability, liquidity and relatively low risk nature.

Let’s simplified it to simpler & chewable terms:

Pooled Money | Collective Investment Scheme | Managed By Professional Fund Manager | Compounding Effect

Pooled money
Money of many investors put together for a sole purpose.

Collective investment scheme
A scheme whereby an entity is set up to pool money from many investors who share the
same investment objectives.

A full-time fund manager then invests the pooled money on behalf
of the investors in securities or other investments in accordance with those objectives.

The basic forms of collective investment schemes are unit trust -based vehicles, share-based
Corporations such as closed-end funds, and pension and provident funds

Professional fund manager
Group or individual of people that professionally manage various of securities (shares, bonds etc.) assets (e.g. real estate), to meet specific investment goals for the benefits of the investors.

In this case, via collective investment schemes, e.g. unit trust

Compounding effect
The concept of adding accumulated interest back to the principle, so that interest is earned on interest from that moment on.

The act of declaring interest to be principle is called compounding.

Let see one EXAMPLE now:

Let say we play a game of golf and made a friendly bet of 10 cent on the first hole, with the best doubling on each hole.

As we’re all concern, we know that in the game of golf, there were only 18 holes.

So how much can we get of the game amount from the 18^th hole?

Hole 1	10 cents	Hole 6	RM3.20
Hole 2	20 cents	Hole 7	RM6.40
Hole 3	40 cents	Hole 8	RM12.80
Hole 4	80 cents	Hole 9	RM25.60
Hole 5	RM1.60

At 9^th hole, the bet is RM25.60. How much could it be on the 18^th hole? RM100? RM500?

Hole 10	RM51.20	Hole 15	RM1,638
Hole 11	RM102.40	Hole 16	RM3,276
Hole 12	RM204.80	Hole 17	RM6,553
Hole 13	RM409.60	Hole 18	RM13,107
Hole 14	RM819.20

See.. At hole 18, the bet amount turning to outrageous numbers of RM13, 107!

When given enough time, the power of compounding can turn very small amounts of money into huge sums.

THE CONCLUSION

To ease my pain of understanding that time, I concluded UNIT TRUST as this:

UNIT TRUST is one of many form of investment that some people might consider for wealth accumulation or form of savings.

I called it collective investment scheme, which pools the savings of investors with similar investment objectives in a special ‘trust’ fund managed by professional fund managers.

All the ‘trust’ is invested in money, debt, equity and derivative markets.

The pooled monies in the unit trust fund will then be invested in a diversified portfolio of securities ranging from regular income to capital growth and other assets in accordance with the unit trust fund’s investment objectives and as other assets and as permitted under the
Securities Commission’s Guidelines On Unit Trust Funds
and underlined under Securities Industry Act 1983