GAMC tops foreign currency-laced bond fund

Mutual funds managed by the Grepalife Asset Management Corp. (GAMC) has landed on top among bond funds invested in foreign currency securities in terms of net sales as of end March 2007.

GAMC general manager Efren Ll. Cruz said that their concern is not so much total sales but net sales (the difference between gross sales and redemptions). A high net sales figure means that a fund is able to retain more of its investors.

Another measure of such high retention is the ratio of net sales to total sales. For the first three months of 2007, GAMC was able to produce the highest net sales to total sales ratio of 74 percent.

Cruz attributes their high investor retention to the proper matching of investors with their funds.

"We don’t rush in selling mutual funds. We make sure first that our potential investors understand that mutual funds must be viewed with a long-term perspective. This is why our clients are not rattled by the daily ups and downs of the capital markets," the fund manager said in a statement.

GAMC, a member of the Yuchengco group of companies, manages the funds’ portfolio with a medium-term duration. This means that their bond funds are not overly exposed to the volatile fluctuations of very long-term bonds and, at the same time, do not suffer from the low yields of very short maturities. Investments are diversified across issuers, currencies and maturities.

The Grepalife Fixed Income Fund (GFIF) was named by the Investment Company Association of the Philippines (ICAP), the mutual fund industry association, as the best performing bond mutual fund primarily invested in foreign currency securities last year.

The GFIF registered returns of 10.07 percent per annum in 2006. On its heels was the Grepalife Dollar Bond Fund (GDBF), which was named the second best performing bond mutual fund primarily invested in foreign currency securities. The GDBF produced a return of 8.98 percent per annum in the sameperiod. — TPT