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I decided to perform a monthly recurring investment worth RM100 into each of the below two funds since 8th April 2020. I’ll share my reason for investing in these funds in the below section too.

Fund Names

1. Public e-Asia Pacific REITs Flexi Fund (PeAPREITF)
2. Public e-Islamic Sustainable Millennium Fund (PeISMF)

Reason

A form of diversification.

Since both funds have different characteristics, I’ll admit I should not be comparing them. It’s like comparing apples to oranges. Having said that, all I want to illustrate in this post is that monthly investment return is totally different than investing lump-sum.

Lump-Sum Investment Return From 8th April 2020

As shown above, PeAPREITF’s return is at 21.71% while PeISMF’s return is slightly higher at 29%. This simply means if an investor was to invest RM100,000 lump-sum each into these funds on the 8th of April 2020, the investor would have made a profit of RM21,710 from PeAPREITF fund and RM29,000 profit from PeISMF fund.

Based on the above, we can easily conclude PeISMF is performing better than PeAPREITF. Now, let’s turn our attention to the funds’ return for monthly recurring investment.

Note: The above return does not take the service charge into consideration.

Monthly Investment Return From 8th April 2020

Here we noticed, as highlighted in the red box, my monthly recurring investment is giving a different return value. Both funds are performing almost identical at around 5% return (not 20%-30% return of lump-sum investment) and PeAPREITF is performing slightly better than PeISMF (the reverse of lump-sum).

Note: This is an unrealized return as of 14 Jan 2021. The return will change from day to day depending on the unit price movement.

Conclusion?

A chart can be a good guide for investing lump-sum but not necessarily for monthly recurring investment. For monthly investment, the return depends very much on the unit price on the purchasing date. Buying units at a cheaper price over a long period ensures a lower average cost per unit (Ringgit cost averaging), which tends to give a higher return as the unit price grows.

In my next post, I will share how will the funds perform if the chart is flip over to simulate a market downturn scenario.

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