Like most people I have been very depressed looking at the various markets over the last 6 months because all they did was go down and further down. Most investors by now have lost something like 20% – 30% of their previous portfolio – so yes it has been very depressing, UNTIL NOW.

I do weekly research on funds and am always looking for something – anything – yes that little green shoot they talk about. Well I have found some. Two weeks ago when I did my analysis I had a small number of funds that had performed greater than zero (which of late was an achievement) for that week – and that started things off. Last week my analysis of the previous 2 weeks showed a bit of levelling off but the big breakthrough came today – the 19th of July – when the same analysis for the last 2 weeks showed a good number of funds doing greater than zero. Next week when I do this work I will expand the analysis to cover 3 weeks until I can get to the situation where I can look at the previous 3 months.

What we do at MAP every calendar quarter is to analyse long term performance i.e. over 5 years and this gives us the basis of a number of funds that we could use for our clients. First though we need to ensure that those funds that have a good long term performance are actually doing it short term as well – otherwise that’s no use. Following on from identifying the long term performance, we then look at short term as well and that means that we actually pick a fund to use it is good long term i.e. consistent – and also doing it short term as well. For us that’s the best of both worlds and has served us well in the past

The thing about this kind of research is that it is not rocket science and is just plain sense, but you need to keep doing the research time and time again – which is what we do at MAP. We never invest a clients money by merely picking a Managed fund – NO, we do our research on what to use and why.

This is why our fund choices actually deliver for our clients because they are choices based on FACTS.

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