If you invest in stock market and can't have peace of mind, what makes you think you can have peace of mind with unit trust?

Unit trust buy stocks too and they must be >95% invested. So if market goes down, expect unit trust to follow. If market goes up expect same stuff. Sounds familiar right?

Now how to have peace of mind investing in stocks?
1. Do not use leverage and margins.
2. No penny stocks.
3. Focus on big strong companies.
4. Go for dividend growth investing
-invest for dividends where money will come in every quarter or half yearly. Regardless of market condition dividends will still come in.
- best thing about dividend growth investing is dividend will increase yearly without any input from you.
5. Do not see. Do not touch. Once a year pump in money into your selected companies. Done.
6. Buy and hold. Get the selling thought out of your head.

I have been doing that. No loss of sleep. Money comes in every few months. No need monitoring. More living life, less worries about investing.

If you can't stand price fluctuation you go no business in stocks or unit trust. Your only options are
1. FD
2. Amanah saham
3. Epf
4. House.

This post has been edited by Ramjade: Feb 15 2020, 06:59 PM

Amanah saham is unit trust. True. But is different. The fixed priced funds are priced at RM1.00 per unit. You buy and sell at RM1.00 per unit regardless of market condition.

Yeah tell that to him/her. He can't stand price fluctuation. With reits and etf price fluctuation is there. Cannot run away.

Most Malaysians are just too lazy to figure out how to open overseas brokerage to buy ETF

That's cash. Don't use cash. Use normal bank account.

ETF is like unit trust. Difference between them is
unit trust there is active trading - fund manager buys and sells stocks/bonds and attempt to beat a benchmark. Usually the index
There is always a management fee. Fee range from 1.2-2%p.a regardless of market condition which is automatically deducted from the price you pay. You won't see or feel it as price of fund you pay already included the management fee.
A unit trust is never real time.
What you price you see today is few days ago price.

ETF is well basically the index. Index are constructed usually based on market capital of the company. The company with the largest market cap gets the biggest pie.
Every quarter or half yearly companies with lower cap will be removed from the index while those with a larger cap will take it's place. That's why theoretically weak companies get replaced over time. ETF price is real time and they are listed on various exchange like a stock. The price changes every second. Their fees is very low about 0.03-0.1%. Low fees is great as overtime those 1.2-2%p.a unit trust fees is huge.

The index is the one unit trust attempts to beat. Are they successful? Yes and no. Good fund manager must beat the benchmark consistently over a long period of time.
Yes there are some funds with such good fund manager. Majority no. That's why you see majority of unit trust give you -ve returns, 2-3% returns only = worse or same as FD.

Over long time 10-30 years, market always go up. Is that true with unit trust yes and no. The good ones will go up. The bad ones will go down.
That's why people said buy ETF. You are getting market performance. You won't beat it but you won't lose to it.
Is it good?
Depends.
Yes is good if
1) you can if get rid of your emotion and buy certain fixed amount every month regardless of price
2) you have holding power, able to hold 10-30 years
3) able to stomach volatility. ETF price is basically market returns. Market fluctuate up and down.

ETF investing only works in US, EU, UK market not asian market.

So how to buy ETF?
1. DIY
- open a broker and buy it off the exchange.
- if you use local brokers, beware of expensive commission, dividend fees, quarterly platform fees.
- know where your ETF are demociled
- I will never suggest to use a local brokerage. I myself use Interactive broker (whitelabels of it -Tradestation global), then again I don't buy ETF
All about ETFs / Foreign Brokers, Exchange traded funds

2. Robo advisors
- basically hiring a company to buy etfs for you on your behalf
- the only good ones in malysia are stashaway or mytheo.
- they have programs which help to smoothen out the drop in market at expense of returns.
- if your portfolio value does not drop much, your returns over time also does not goes up much
- if you want good returns, have to be prepare for market drop.
Stashaway Malaysia
myTHEO

Of course back to your original post, you need to have stomach for the volatility. Ask yourself what happen if market drop 30-40%. What will I do. There is no other way. You want higher returns, have to take higher drop = higher swings in price.

PS I was one like that scared of market loss. I was also a noob in finance. No one taught me anything. I read financial blogs, fianncial forums and books. I never spend money on any course. They are all snakeoil.. After a while I looked back and think is silly of me. I can still be invested without bothering about up and down of price because I buy, hold and never sell. Price drops = opportunity to get stuff for cheap. Who is going to give you damn good discount. Something to think about.

This post has been edited by Ramjade: Feb 22 2020, 04:32 PM

Practically useless.
No liquidity. Buy and sell price too big.
Too expensive for ETF.
No quality.
S&P500 is the benchmark for ETF