Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Investing in Exchange Traded Fund

A colleague in my company agree with my view that USD will inevitably weakens, and since HKD is "pegged" with USD, holding HKD is no better than holding USD. However, his question is how to accumulate savings so he can start investing.

Lesson 1 from Economics: Savings equals Investment. To an economy, how much the population save is how much the economy as a whole can invest. The same hold for an individual: how much one can save is how much one can invest. Keeping deposit in banks is also a kind of investment. It is just not much people looking at it that way. Even if you never buy stocks or fund. You are investing, in pure cash, in the form of bank deposit.

I have one recommendation. Buying "Exchange Traded Fund". Whenever one accumulates a small sum of money, dump it into ETF. Whether it is Tracker Fund of Hong Kong, which tracks the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong, or Spider, which tracks the S&P in the States, ETF is (one of) the most efficient way of investing in equities. In addition, by dumping small amount into ETF regularly, one is also "dollar averaging" one's investment. From my investing experience in stocks/futures/options/forex/arbitrage/hedging since 1998, I find this investment method the most efficient one.

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