Season's greetings fellow UTF participants,

It has been a year, in 2016, some participants made money from unit trust fund participation, some lost money. Whatever it may be, let it be, so be it....

I urge all fortunate brothers and sisters to take some time to consider using a little bit of your wealth to perform meritorious deeds of charity. Do not forget those less fortunate and those worthy of receiving alms and gifts and donation.

To put some icing on the cake, Lembaga Hasil Dalam Negeri (LHDN) allows deductiom under subsection 44 paragraph 6 up to seven percent of your aggregate personal income for the year under assessment.

May your deeds turns to fruit and profit to you in future times.

Xuzen.

A timely reminder, my friend. Thanks.

Sometimes we get so caught up with work that we forget about others who are less fortunate.

After your posting last year, I started a monthly auto debit with World Vision to sponsor a child. I am still doing it. I am not a Christian BTW but like you said, charity is a universal concept.

Guys, anyone know the difference between mixed asset and balanced fund? Is it the same thing that different companies use different names for? Or are they two different things?

while waiting for responses, you can try this....
The Most Accurate Way To Gauge Returns: The Compound Annual Growth Rate
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/inves...growth-rate.asp

The miracle of compounding returns
http://www.fool.co.uk/investing-basics/the...mpound-returns/

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=compou...rn+in+investing

btw, the markets as this attached example shows in the end long run,....the markets is always on the up trend.

as per your question on "Are they simply used to compare the performance of different forms of investment?"
try read post# 2495, page# 121
"Note that ROI, IRR, CAGR values are all general metrics that tell you the return of your investment in different ways. (https://forum.lowyat.net/index.php?showtopic=3730638&view=findpost&p=76895955)"
there are some seldom available explanation that are provided by forummer "Idyllrain" on these metrics.......just read back a few pages before page 121

just found this....
Historical performance is one of the main criteria when it comes to fund selection.
The use of past performance in evaluation of funds is based on the assumption of performance persistence. In other words, the underlying assumption is that funds with good performance historically tend to do better going forward.
However, risk disclaimers on fund factsheets explicit state, “Past performance is not necessarily indicative of the future or likely performance of the fund.” So then, to what extent investors should rely on past performance as a basis of investment decisions?
Lipper, a fund research and rating organisation, rates and ranks funds based on their historical performances according four metrics, namely Total Return, Consistent Return, Preservation and Expense on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being the best).
In an interview with Eric Wong, Head of Research at Lipper, a Thomson Reuters Company, in Hong Kong, he shares with us his thoughts on the persistence of fund ratings.

https://www.fundsupermart.com.my/main/resea...l?articleNo=627

It is easier to see the compounding effect in savings and other financial tools that give continuous growth. To be clear, compounding simply means not taking out the interest or growth. Hence, in FD, it simply means leaving the interest together with the principal for another year.

Similarly, in variable priced UT, there is compounding effect too if its growth is not trim. But of course, it is harder to see this effect since equity funds are volatile and can be having a negative growth as well as positive.

CAGR and IRR are just measurements - giving the same thing, which is the effective rate or annualised rate. Similarly in step up FD rates with different interest rates every month, the effective rate is the actual rate of return at the end of the FD tenure.

CAGR usually means the effective rate of a transaction, ie. a single purchase of a UT fund. While IRR usually means the effective rate of a bunch of purchases, bought at different times.

Check out the simple CAGR formula to calculate the effective or annualised rate. As you can see, when the purchase is held more than a year, its effective rate is not simply derived by dividing the ROI% by the number of years.

Similarly, when there is more than one purchases of the same fund or various funds, with each having a different CAGR rate, we cannot simply added up the CAGR rates and then divided it by the number of purchases to get the effective rate or IRR.

The formula to calculate the IRR is a bit more complicated than the simple CAGR formula. But this is easily done by using a Excel speadsheet, and its XIRR function.