invest in a mutual fund

I haven’t written in here for some time, since I was simply waiting for things to start looking better. Well, at the bleakest my investment was worth only about 60% of its original value. As of today it’s back at 90%. Good, good.

what to do with my two funds in this time of financial crisis. I’ve pretty much decided now to keep them. I don’t need the money invested there any time soon and I hope the market will pick up again eventually, even if things do look bleak at the moment.

To offset the current losses I will also take some of my safe investments to another bank that offers the same safe deal, but with a much higher interest rate.

This is a goal, on which I’m currently undecided. I had started this pretty much as an experiment. To see if fund managers of highly rated funds do their job well, go with the market and are smart enough to do the right things to keep the fund rising in value.

While the funds had risen well at first, there were several hard crashes, from which they had to rise again slowly. So, while I’m not losing money, this is also not going as well as I hoped.

Hmm. This is the first time I’m really wondering if this is the best way to go at things. The funds had been going great until that big bump this August. They had been recovering, but always dropping again for one reason or another. And now, again, they were almost where they had been and now again we had another bump. So they dropped to (compared to the price I originally paid):

Fund #1: +21.9%
Fund #2: +11.3%

I’m not losing of course, together this is still 16.7% more than I had bought. Compared to the conventional money market account I had before I would only have 3.6% more at this point !

Still, it doesn’t seem like this is really growing anymore. I wonder if I should sell and invest the earned money into something that is doing better currently. But that would go against the “experiment” I’m doing here, since I thought that was the fund manager’s job. Hmm.

So here’s a little summary and update.

My funds had gained value until the end of July, at which point they were worth 24.6% more than I had paid for. Then the stock troubles happened and they fell to 11.22%. Since then they’ve been slowly, but steadly rising again and as of today it looks like this :

Fund #1: +25.2%
Fund #2: +18.2%

So at this point in time I now own 21.2% more than I had bought.

Looks like my patience is already being rewarded. I had expected the funds to take some time to show better numbers again. But already, when a week ago the numbers had dropped to what they were last December, now they are already up to what they were in April. Looking good.

The stock troubles in the past few weeks have of course also affected my funds. But I decided to wait, since I think the fund managers will find ways to bounce back. After all, this is an experiment for me, and I will sell, before I lose anything.

Anyway, it’s far from being that bad yet, it’s just dropped back to about the numbers from December at this time.

When I checked my funds again today, I saw that while one fund had lost a little, the other had gained a rather big amount. So again I think it was a good idea to invest into two separate ones. Here’s what it looks like now, as always, compared to the price I originally paid:

Fund #1: +28.5%
Fund #2: +20.5%

So at this point in time I own 24.6% more than I had bought.

When I checked my funds again today, I was pleasantly surprised to see they’ve grown by a nice amount once again. Here’s what it looks like now, as always, compared to the price I originally paid:

Fund #1: +22.9%
Fund #2: +22.3%

So at this point in time I own 22.7% more than I had bought.

It’s been about a month since I last checked and when I did just now, I found out my funds have in fact not only recovered from the little crash a couple of weeks back, but have gained past the previous high point. Very nice.

Here are the numbers, as always, compared to the price I originally paid:

Fund #1: +16.5%
Fund #2: +20.1%

So at this point in time I own 18.4% more than I had bought.