It's almost the end of 1st Quarter 2021 and I did a review of my investments in Public Mutual PRS (Private Retirement Scheme) funds and boy was I pleased that even the worst fund scratched a 6% return.
While my worst fund was PRS Strategic Equity (PRS-SEQF) with a 6% return, the fund was the best performing among all the PRS funds according to Public Mutual analytics charts. My low returns on this fund was partly because I did switching to PRS conservative (PRS-CVF) last year when the unit price of PRS-SEQF dipped a lot. On hindsight I should have kept it just there.
PRS Growth fund (PRS-GRF) gave an whopping 45% return. Do note that these returns are over time, not based on year. Unit trust funds in general have to produce returns at least above 5% per annum to be worth it as a chunk of the investments are eaten off by sales and management fees. In addition, EPF is giving above 5% returns so if the fund is underperforming below 5% per annum, it's better to just dump money into EPF.
Do note that this is not advice for you to take retirement money and put into Public Mutual PRS. All investments carry risks ☺️. I managed to get such returns because I did value averaging by investment more when the market turned bad. Value averaging requires a bit more active management than the traditional dollar cost averaging where you pump in more money during bad times and pump in less money during good times. Value averaging sometimes look like a double down Martingale strategy used in gambling, you might end up catching a falling knife. However, based on the fund performance charts from Public Mutual, if you hold it out and not sell/rebalance you will still get quite good returns and way better than FD (fixed deposits).
Basically markets tend to have upward bias long term and also thanks to inflation, it also helps boost stock prices and thus unit trust funds should also increase in tandem.
Here's a summary of Public Mutual PRS fund performance shown in a recently webinar. The 5 year returns are quite good if depositors held on to the funds long term.
