Amanah Saham 1Malaysia vs ASM/ASW2020

Amanah Saham 1Malaysia (AS 1Malaysia), which is the largest fund currently will be opened for public subscription from 5th August - 3rd September 2009(30-day offer period). During the offer period, the AS 1Malaysia will not incur any sale charges.

Same as previous Amanah Saham Malaysia and Amanah Saham Wawasan 2020, the minimum initial investment for Amanah Saham 1Malaysia is 100 units while the minimum top up investment is one unit. It will be priced at RM1.00 per unit with a total fund size of 10 billion units.

Everybody knows how Amanah Saham works: Place in RM1,000 or so, and wait till the end of the year to get your “dividend”. That’s it.



The units is subject to an allocation of:
- 50% for Bumiputeras
- 30% for Chinese (So, there will be 3 billions allocated for the Chinese)
- 15% for Indians
- 5% for other races.

Why Amanah Saham 1Malaysia is Launched?
Amanah Saham 1Malaysia is launched to stimulate the local stock market and other investment instruments so that the industry can pick up through new capital investment and provide more employment opportunities.

Where to Invest Amanah Saham 1Malaysia?
Investment in cash are available at:
- CIMB
- Maybank
- RHM
- Post Office (I suggest you to buy at post office because it opens at 8:30am while bank open 9:15am or 9:30am)

Comparison Between Amanah Saham 1Malaysia and ASM/ ASW2020
The maximum investment limit for Amanah Saham 1Malaysia has been set at 50,000 units per accountholder for those aged between 18 and 55 while Amanah Saham Malaysia had been set at 20,000 units per accountholder.

For me, AS 1Malaysia is not as good as other PNB funds. This is because:

My view no. 1: Other PNB trust funds like ASM and ASW2020 give out dividend based on the returns of their investment portfolios, which are 95% equity and 5% others. Their returns have been consistently above 6% over the years. Of course, this does not mean that it cannot go lower than 6%.

For AS 1Malaysia, the returns are to be benchmarked against the returns from the Malaysian Government Securities, which mostly come from bond fund. This is between 3.7% - 4% only. So, I think that AS 1Malaysia may not give out dividends higher than 6%.

My view no. 2: While ASM and ASW2020 have a fixed unit price of RM1, they do not have the transactions charges. That basically means, when you invested RM1000 into ASW2020, you will get 1000 units. But for AS 1Malaysia, there may have transaction charges AFTER the offer period (from 5th Aug 2009 - 3rd September).

My view no. 3: AS 1Malaysia with 10 billion units are too big for the fund to be manageable in a proper manner. Based on my understanding, the fund is almost performing as bad when the fund was close to 2 billion units although many experts think that 2 billion is just nice manageable amount of investment.

My conclusion is, go buy AS 1Malaysia if you have extra cash in the bank. The returns should be higher than the current bank’s interest rates. But it will probably not be as attractive as ASM or ASW2020.