I think the purpose of DCA is to invest in a disciplined manner with emphasis on regular investment within a stipulated time frame ie every week/month with less emphasis on market condition. And also in order for DCA to work properly, liquidity is a must. So for you to say stop all dca because you foresee the market is on a downturn in the medium run defeat the purpose of DCA. Maybe you can reduce the amount for now to do your DCA but not totally stop your investment.

The thing with DCA is that you have to hold it for long term for it to ride through the downturns. So as long as the performance comes back up, the DCA method will give you a better return at the same time avoiding emotional dilemma and stress as to when is the best time to invest if you are not doing DCA.

Look through all the funds that you have now, you have to review them periodically. Take the pain in cutting losses by selling them all off and reinvesting them in another fund if you find that there is no more chance of rebounding. How to evaluate?

1. Look at their fund size. If fund size is decreasing every month, fund manager wont have cash to capitalize on this correction, your rebound will be slow or worse not moving.

2. Look at past performance of this fund during previous corrections or market downturn.

1. if you do this, you are timing the market, which is essentially 100% opposite of DCA. If you can know the market movements, you don't need to do DCA.

2. and 3. not sure how to answer but see below

The main purpose of DCA is to invest a fixed amount at regular intervals, so investor don't have to time the market as this could result in heavy losses or very high profit but this comes with higher risk. So if you've decided to do DCA, you just get ready your funds, and do it with discipline (e.g. RM500 every month for 3 years). I'd say 3 years is minimum.

And next is fund selection. Never go for new funds, because we do not know how they perform, whether the market will like this fund etc. A lot of new funds go dead because lack of funds so in the end if you do DCA in such funds, you'll be stucked. Instead, go for master funds. Every fund house will have 4-5 master funds e.g. balanced, growth, income, small cap etc. Look at their performance and see which suits your risk appetite and investing profile.

If you want to be more aggressive, you can incorporate an additional strategy say every 5% drop in unit price then you invest another block of RM500 in it.

DCA is good if you have the cash that is free from short to medium term obligations, and makes you less stress in investment.

For me to go into PRS is mainly for the incentives from government as well as tax break as it gives you instant gain even though the fund generate slower return. From another point of view, you made a guaranteed gain the moment you go into PRS as compared to other fund which you still have to wait and hope.

Can, it depends on your objective, and like other ppl mentioned, you must have a clearly defined rule for you to DCA (say after it dropped 10% etc), otherwise you are basically just timing the market also, although the method is to DCA.

DCA work best if it is done on a regular basis regardless of market movements, of course what I did is to go in again after the fund dropped 10% and my DCA still running every month.

Any funds that related to the oil price?

Principal Asia Pacific Dynamic Income Fund - MYR

Income distribution declared on 24th Dec still not reflected in current holdings.. anyone experiencing the same?

Anyone ever wonder how FSM managed to get such low sales charge? I mean even the Fund House themselves unable to go to such low in the sales charge

then this is indirectly killing their own sales agent.. hahaha.... whenever those sales agent who approaches me, I always tell them FSM is only charging 1.5% for sales charge, can you match that?

Moving forward I think more and more people will go into platform like FSM instead of going through agents. But I can foresee some people will still need agent:

1. Those not tech savy like the uncle aunties now
2. Those have no financial knowledge to analyse, thus agent is like their saviour, giving them advice on which to invest etc

Income distribution for Principal Greater China declared in early March, anyone received it yet?

Yes received last night. Thanks

set up a DCA system. I personally DCA for every -5% loss on the funds I'm holding, this way I can sort of 'budget' the amount required for each fund even in a market crash where fund prices crashed 25-35%, meaning a DCA of 5 to 7 times only. With such system in place and you look at your cash holdings, then you can determine your DCA amount. Always hold cash for such events. I can never see myself 100% invested into the market without extra cash on hand for such events.

Then once you set this up, next you need to set up profit taking system depending on your investment objective. I personally will sell 50% of the profit made for every 30% gain, so that I have some cash to buy during dips.

I don't do it by %, because the amount will become too big for funds that I have invested for a few years. I just go by a fixed amount that I am comfortable with. Like I said, if a financial crisis were to happen, normally it'll drop 30-40% meaning 7-8 times DCA only. So if you have like RM8k extra funds, you can DCA 1k and so on.

The DCA is just a way to accelerate the recovery on the losses you suffered, isn't meant to turn your investment profitable in a short period of time. Of course if you have sufficient funds you can DCA the full amount of the invested amount.

So this comes to the next part where if your investment have grow big enough and earned for example 30-40% profit, you must take profit for times of market downturn so you can DCA with a bigger amount.

It has worked well because even if you lump sum to a UT and give it time say 7 or 10 years, most likely it will generate profitable return for you.

The whole objective of this is so I don't have to time the market. Just follow a clear strategy and execute it. This strategy won't help to buy at the bottom and sell at the peak but at least it is buying cheaper and selling at your desired profit.

slight correction there, I take profit when it reaches my profit target. I only take out the profit portion of the investment. Up to each person's interpretation in terms of timing, but the main point I commented is that for DCA must have a clear strategy so you won't deplete your funds before the market reaches the bottom in case of a downturn.

I keep my investment records in Excel. Basically I did backtest for some time periods in the past. For funds with frequent distribution, lump sum and hold for 3 years or more will generate similar returns to regular investment (monthly). But for funds that have less frequent or irregular income distribution, lump sum investment will lose to regular investment over the same period of time.

and my strategy is not about timing the market, it's about meeting investment objective. With a system in place, you can handle investment emotions better instead of making investment decision based on your current emotions for example your investment dropped 15% and you are stressed and wanting to average down by doubling your DCA amount etc, then next month it dropped another 10% and you become even more stressful and so on. With a clear strategy in place, you can always standby the amount in balanced fund or money market for such events to happen and DCA without any stress knowing the funds are earmarked exactly for this purpose.

Normally in 30%-50% profit I will trim the profit portion out and keep my capital inside. Depends on the funds also. Lower risk funds I will take out the profit portion at 20% range, higher risk will be 30-50%. For example, I earmarked Principal Asia Pacific Dynamic Income as the fund that I will keep for very long term, so I will not touch too much on the profit gained from this fund. For other funds which I have as well like AffinHwang Quantum and TA Technology as well which I will constantly monitor and take some profits if it reaches a sizeable profit like 30% or even sell all of it as they are not my main fund.

Its alright, good to have healthy discussion.

Actually I see distribution as a way of the fund manager helping investors to take profit as they need to have cash to give out distributions, meaning they probably will liquidate some of their profitable holdings for distribution. Because markets moves up and down from time to time. Without distribution, your entry price into fund A for example is RM1.000/unit. After 2 years it has grown to RM1.2000/unit, and then a market correction happened and it goes back to RM1.000/unit. But with distribution of say 5%p.a., your average entry cost would have been RM0.9025/unit, even though you can say provided the investment strategy remains the same, it probably would not have made a difference as price will go down with the % of income distribution. However I am unable to compare the same fund with and without income distribution.

For your question about tracking in excel where distribution can skew the result. Yes, that one you have to manually make a note or something. For me I will put a note that the loss is caused by income distribution which was distributed on [date], otherwise some unit split like the one from Principal will caused multiple times DCA