Standard & Poor's (S&P) Taiwan Investment Funds Awards yesterday honored the 19 top performers among 850 funds in the nation's fund industry, who captured a total of 39 awards this year.
The top five companies winning the awards are Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, Shinkong Securities Investment Trust (
Merrill Lynch Investment Man-agers was also honored by the event's co-organizer, the Chinese-language Smart magazine (智富雜誌) as "Fund Group of the Year."
According to Smart publisher Leon Tung (童再興), who is also president of the operating-services center of PC Home Publishing Group's (電腦家庭), most of the 19 winners had a very positive return last year with nine three-year funds garnering a 50 percent return.
Tung said the return of this year's five top 10-year funds doubled. Three of those are linked to the booming local stock market, which he said indicated that the benchmark TAIEX is likely to climb to 8,500 points in the coming year.
"Despite the economic recession, funds remain a very promising long-term investment tool," Tung told a press conference yesterday prior to the award ceremony.
Investors poured money into the nation's stock markets after President Chen Shui-bian (
To help boost the mutual-fund sector, the government last year loosened controls on mutual-fund managers' overeseas investment. Earlier last year regulators raised the percentage of assets insurers can invest overseas and removed the limit on overseas purchases by mutual-fund managers.
Also attending the award ceremony was William Reidy, managing director of S&P's Asia-Pacific Investment Services, who said that the agency estimates the fund's performance will be rewarding this year with the economic recovery underway both in the US and Asia and low interest rates boosting the equity markets.
The agency also forecasts that the US' S&P 500 index is likely to reach 1,230 points by the year's end from Tuesday's close of 1,140.58 points, Reidy said.
He suggested investors arrange their asset allocation by putting 60 percent to 65 percent of assets in equities, 10 percent in bonds -- preferably those associated with equities -- and the remaining 25 percent in cash.
In the US, information-technology industries will continue to see aggressive growth while telecommunication, utility and energy sectors may see a single-digit growth, Reidy said.
In Asia, the China growth story will continue to attract investors, although S&P urges investors to place investment in China via Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, that is, Chinese companies registering offshore to ensure company transparency, he said.
In addition to asset-allocation diversification, Reidy also urges investors to manage fund investments for the medium- to long-term for at least three to five years.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)