First Citizens launches new fund

Published: Friday October 10, 2008

In the midst of the global financial collapse now taking place, one would imagine that the launch of a new mutual fund would be the last thing on an investor’s mind.

But that’s not the thinking of the managers of First Citizens Asset Management Ltd.

The company yesterday added the El Tucuche Fixed Income Fund to its four other mutual funds.

Investment manager, Amol Golikeri, said the open end mutual fund would be like an “anchor in turbulent times” as it focused on quality, will provide an income yield above money market rates and also a steady income flow to investors, by providing quarterly dividends.

The investment strategy, he said, will be in quality bonds of the GOTT and high grade corporate bonds, with medium term debt securities, and be denominated in TT currency. Its initial price will be $10 with a minimum investment of $10,000.

Feature speaker at the launch of the Fund, Jwala Rambaran, managing director of CAP-M Research, an independent research consultancy that specialises in economic and financial strategy across emerging markets, spoke on the topic “Global financial turmoil: Implications for Caribbean economies and the T&T international financial centre.”

“It is likely that the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the ‘official’ arbiter for US business cycle dating, will declare a recession by early 2009,” he said. “The key questions now are: how deep will the US recession be, when will a recovery get underway and how strong will it be?”

Answers to these questions, he said, would depend on the effectiveness of recent government initiatives to stabilise the market.

Rambaran said the recent US Treasury US$700 billion rescue plan was necessary but was not sufficient to fix the crisis, because the markets were just not cooperating.

A successful rescue plan must not only seek to restore market confidence and give financial institutions time to heal their balance sheets, he said, but more importantly it must seek to prevent a recurrence of the most abject regulatory lapses in the history of Western financial markets.


Source: Trinidad Guardian Newspapers
http://www.guardian.co.tt/business2.html