Equity funds start looking for profit

2011 starts in full speed for funds present on the Bucharest Stock Exchange. Their rise comes after two years - 2007 and 2008 - in which the Bucharest Stock Exchange became almost synonymous with loss, and investors only wanted a safe place to keep their money, in a bank deposit or a monetary fund.

With an inflation threatening to bite deep into yields, will investors rediscover the bittersweet taste of risk? In the first two months of this year, however, investors in equity funds yielded an average return of 5% of the invested amount, with the maximum yield climbing to 8.5%, which a bank deposit would have fetched them perhaps in a year, writes BUSINESS Magazin weekly.

The top performer of the beginning of the year was BCR Expert equity fund, managed by Erste Asset Management, with an 8.5% yield. Not all equity funds were winners of this beginning of the year, though: Omninvest lost 8.7% in the first two months, Omnitrust lost 5.36% of its value, while the Raiffeisen Prosper fund unit lost 4.6%.

Although the yields of certain equity funds are strongly competing with interest rates, none of them has managed to perform better than the equity market, i.e. the main stock exchange index BET.