When the capital market becomes more developed, the opportunities for investing also become more available and the environment for investing has also become more complicated.  The investors who like to make profit shall need to be more prepared.

If without the conditions of investing like: no time to follow up the market; no time to analyses the latest investment situation; lack of capital or lack of knowledge and skill of how to invest;  we can consider to put aside our capital to let the professional fund managers to manage our funds.

At present, the most popular way is to invest in mutual funds or unit trusts letting the fund managers to invest for us.  By this way, we can enjoy the convenience of using the knowledge and skill of the fund managers to handle our funds professionally.

In order to select our fund managers, we need to have some knowledge of investment

But, there is no free lunch when we talk about investment.  Besides to have some knowledge of investment, we have to spend some time to select or choose the right or best fund managers.

Basically, fund managers are human based.  That is why when we select our mutual funds, the image of the company is very important, including the experience, the strategy and the skill of investment.

At this age of communication and information, surely we can get many sources of reference regarding the fund managers and their backgrounds especially nowadays we can use the internet to search for the information.

Periodically to check the performance of the mutual funds or unit trusts

Investors have to check the performance of their fund managers periodically, including the past 3 – 5 year performance of the funds.  To see whether the funds are making profit in the long term.  At the same time, we can compare the average return of our funds with the return of the overall shares market.

We should realize that at a bull market, all the fund managers will perform better. Therefore, the true performance can only be seen during the bear market.  In other word, the true performance will only be known after the test of difficult time.

Generally, a responsible fund manager will not launch a new fund at the peak of bull market.  Because at a bull run, the sentiment of market is always positive so it is easier to market mutual funds.  But as a share holder or investor, the best time to buy mutual funds is during the period of bear market.  This is because at that time, there are many shares and stocks that are below market value for the fund managers to pick and invest.  Finally, when the market pick up again, our funds will show better performance definitely.