More than 80 percent of mutual fund investors in Taiwan prefer funds with monthly dividends over other fund types, in line with their peers in Hong Kong and Singapore, but not those in the US, Standard Chartered Bank Taiwan Ltd (渣打台灣銀行) said on Wednesday last week.
Local investors like to receive fund returns regularly even though funds yield less than other investments, Standard Chartered Taiwan’s head of wealth management Cindy Fu (傅敏儀) said.
Most fund investors just deposit the dividends into their bank accounts and receive returns that are no higher than regular savings, Fu said, adding that they should invest the earnings into other funds, “so money can make money.”
While funds are generally viewed as low-risk investment options, many investors still sit on the fence, the bank said, citing its recent survey.
Of the survey’s respondents, 49.5 percent said they were worried about potential losses, choosing the right investment and having no time to do research.
In Taiwan, online fund investors care mostly about transaction fees and risk disclosures, while those investing in funds offline depend more on professional advice from financial experts and are cautious about Internet transactions and information security, the survey found.
Investors in Taiwan held NT$2.49 trillion (US$81 billion) in onshore funds in September, down from NT$2.52 trillion a month earlier, while their holdings in offshore funds remained flat at NT$3.48 trillion, data compiled by the Securities Investment Trust and Consulting Association (證券投信投顧公會) showed.
PESSIMISM
US-China trade tensions, a surge in US Department of the Treasury yields, the slowdown in economic growth in the third quarter and the US midterm elections tomorrow, have made investors pessimistic about stock market prospects in the months ahead, JPMorgan Asset Management Taiwan Ltd (摩根資產管理) said.
As of Oct. 26, that has caused a massive sell-off across Asia’s equity markets by foreign institutional investors, with the markets in Taiwan, China and South Korea hit the hardest, JPMorgan said in a report on Monday last week.
The Shanghai Composite Index has fallen to its lowest level since 2014 and is down 19 percent this year.
Over the period, South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI index on Friday declined by about 15 percent since the beginning of this year, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index fell 11.5 percent and the TAIEX dropped nearly 7 percent.
JPMorgan said declines in share prices would likely be short-lived, as corporations in Taiwan, China, India, the Philippines and Thailand are expected to make more profits this year than last year, due to their solid fundamentals.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained