Gold is flying high, while silver is in the dumps. Oil is surging, yet natural gas is slumping. Food prices are going up, but coal isn’t finding any buyers. Commodities. They offer high risk, but they offer high potential rewards as well – if you can get in to the right one at the right time. But that’s the big question, isn’t it? How do you do it without speculating in, say, commodity futures contracts, and risk having a truckload of pork bellies delivered to your home? Fortunately, there are now many commodity investment fund alternatives that take at least that part of the risk out of the equation.
The market will fluctuate. And so will equity funds right along with it. Now, if you can stomach those gyrations, congratulations! You have a high tolerance for risk. For those of us more prone to butterflies in the stomach at every market blip, we have to cast around for alternatives. That’s where balanced funds come in. Offering a mixture of both equity and fixed-income assets, balanced funds usually have volatility lower than equity funds but still higher than fixed-income funds. While offering no guarantees at all, of course, balanced funds aim to provide some cushion from downswings in the market yet still earn decent returns. Here’s a look at two such funds, the Fidelity Monthly Income Fund and Compass Balanced Portfolio. For their strong performance, they’ve both been awarded the Fundata FundGrade® "A" Grade in April, and the prestigious Fundata A+ Rating for 2011.
Fidelity Monthly Income Fund has been around since 2003 and has earned a compound return since inception of close to 8%. It is consistently one of the top performers in the Canadian Neutral Balanced category and was a Fundata FundGrade A+ winner in 2011.
By the end of the week, markets, whose attention span approximates that of a goldfish, had darted from the real-life disaster flick in the eurozone to the relative sideshow on Wall Street. Yes, “the world’s best-managed company,” JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM), gave lie to that banner by losing a couple of billion bucks in a hedging strategy gone wrong. Oops! What with Greece without a government and JPMorgan without sense, markets failed to recover Monday’s high point, and generally closed out the week with a loss.
Fund company:Fidelity Investments Canada Fund type: Canadian Focused Equity Rating: Paterson: B; Fundata FundGrade® “A” Style: Value Risk level: Medium Load status: Optional RRSP/RRIF suitability: Good TFSA suitability: Good Manager: Daniel Dupont since May 2011 MER: 2.28% (front-end load units) Code: FID 231 – front-end load units; other units available Minimum investment: $500
Q – As an avid investor, I pay particular attention to my investment portfolio. I am looking at purchasing a life insurance policy as an investment. Do you recommend this? – Lyn H., North York
The market will fluctuate. And so will equity funds right along with it. Now, if you can stomach those gyrations, congratulations! You have a high tolerance for risk. For those of us more prone to butterflies in the stomach at every market blip, we have to cast around for alternatives. That’s where balanced funds come in. Offering a mixture of both equity and fixed-income assets, balanced funds usually have volatility lower than equity funds but still higher than fixed-income funds. While offering no guarantees at all, of course, balanced funds aim to provide some cushion from downswings in the market yet still earn decent returns. Here’s a look at two such funds, the 
