Yes, the remittance fees would be a burden to you. I suggest you accumulate your money and then invest it one time perhaps once or twice a year rather than sending money and getting charged exorbitant fees for remittance. By the way you could open your own stock market trading account at either BPI trade or Citiseconline. That is if you want to manage your portfolio personally. (Doing this is more rewarding) However I would like to stress out that if you do this you must learn all you can about value investing and learn to read the financial of a company. Read all you can about Warren Buffett’s methods. If you have not time to learn all of these, then I suggest you park your money in an index fund. By the way this is a good time to invest in the market. The prices may not be dirt cheap but a lot of wonderful companies especially blue chip stocks can be bought at a fair prices.

Any way I will write more about index funds, mutual funds and how it compares to running your own portfolio in the near future.

I’ve already started investing on stocks, although I haven’t tried buying on my own, I just use the EIP. I’m still playing on the UI of citisec. Hopefully after a few more days/weeks of reading I’d be confident enough to trade on my own.

I was looking into investing on mutual funds ( e.g. , and I find the exchange of currency a good way to leverage my capital. Although it added some cost on it like remittance fee. So if I would send money to my fund every month it would cost me additional of a few dollars. So I thought of doing it quarterly but much bigger deposit. Would that make any difference aside from saving a few bucks for avoiding the monthly remittance fee? I mean would it affect the value of my fund by doing quarterly instead of monthly depositing? What are the usual consequences? Thank you very much.

Regards,
Rhani

Another Peter Lynch great is “One up on wall street.” Also try reading “Rule number one” by Phil Town and any warren Buffett books.

Citisec is a great online broker. Lots of information is offered to investors. They also do a lot of market education for free. (Free stock market investing seminars)

I have not tried EIP but based on the information I have read its about “cost averaging.” I am not really a fan of the cost averaging. If you must do “cost averaging” I believe it is best to do it through an “index fund.” As Warren Buffett says ““ . . . By periodically investing in an index fund, the know-nothing investor can actually outperform most investment professionals. . .” Anyway, more on this in a future post

i’ve already sent my application on citiseconline, hopefully i get approve =) i’ll try their EIP. could you give some inputs on that? is it worth it? i’m planning to keep on funding thru EIP first while still acquiring enough knowledge for me to trade on my own aside from the EIP. is that a good move? thanks.

As time goes by I will later on introduce the “Intelligent Investor’s tools” in analyzing a company. This is a series of long post devoted to analyzing a company. Its not hard to do, and most of it is not even my ideas. Its been used by value investors throughout the years, I am just putting them together and making the more understandable to ordinary investors. Do drop by this blog from time to time to learn more. Thanks !