Monday, November 23, 2009

More Info : invest your EPF money in stock market direclty.


It was mentioned before that you can use your EPF money to invest directly in the stock market, especially through Jupiter and Amara. The main selling points are;
  1. cheaper than invest to Mutual Fund ( 5.5% ) vs 3% charged by Amara
  2. freedom to invest in any particular stock and not a whole portfolio.
Although Jupiter only charges 0.1% or minimum RM 10 brokerage fee but actually Amara, the licensed EPF withdrawal facilitator, have more charges other than the 3% one time drawn down fee.


The significant ones are
  • Transaction fee : 0.1% or minimum RM 15 per contract
  • Custody fee RM 0.005 per 1,000 shares per month
Add together with Jupiter's fee, your total brokerage fee may effectively be at 0.2% or minimum RM 25. So each MOTS (Minimum Optimized Trading Size) is RM 12,500. With RM 25,000 you can only make 2 transactions.

Assuming you fully load all your investment in the market and average price per share is RM 1. Then 25,000 shares /1,000 x 0.5 cent = RM 0.125 every month. 1 year would be RM 1.50. That would be 0.006% of your initial RM 25,000 investment.

At the end, you may still be paying 4-5% fee in the whole process. In contrast to mutual fund's 5.5%. If saving fee is your main target, perhaps becoming a mutual fund agent yourself could end up saving more. On the other hands, most of the EPF oriented mutual funds are charging less fee.

So if EPF gets a 5% return, you should be able to do more than 10% in order to 'invest yourself'. Else you may just be depleting your ASS - Automatic Saving System.

Also be reminded that if you make a lot of transactions, you may end up paying more than 6% fee.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

if not mistaken EPF's investment into unit trusts are at 3% now, no longer 5.5% compared to cash investments...anyway, I believe if this is allowable by KWSP, I believe many other brokers will soon come out with "packages" to attract our EPF monies soon..

Mt. said...

actual fees deducted depend on the fund purchased, some old funds remains high at 5.5% while some new funds 'design' for EPF withdrawal is low at 1-3%.

Anonymous said...

Is it a usual break of a week without new posts?
Though it is not a fiction and not meant to come up new very often but i thought it could be a friendly note as from some of your readers :)

Mt. said...

thanks for the feedback, been busy preparing for school holidays ... will resume asap ... do also feedback what topics you may be interested in or any specific question to ask ... cheers and have a great holiday seasons!

stock market malaysia said...

I always like and search such topics and everything connected to them. I really appreciate it.