Karen Galarpe

THANKS to a perplexed Senator Juan Ponce Enrile wondering where his cellphone load went (it was traced to unauthorized downloaded ring tones), cellphone charges have come under scrutiny. Prepaid cellphone users have in the past complained about being charged for promo texts and other unwanted stuff but no action was taken.

So now the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) is tripling the shelf life of prepaid cellphone load. Effective July 19, prepaid load will have the following shelf life:

P10 to P50 load: 15 days

more than P50 to P100: 30 days

more than P100 to P250: 60 days

more than P250 to P300: 75 days

Text spam or unsolicited promo texts will also be banned, and this will take effect on July 23. Hip hip hooray! (Read news story here.)

We’ve been too serious lately. Let’s play a little game. For the contrarians out there who like to buy when there’s blood on the streets, what are your favorite investments and businesses in this time of market shrillness and panic?

You don’t have to limit your choices to stocks or bonds. Some people don’t like them because they are too complicated and these people get by pretty well. An agri-industrial company was being interviewed on Bloomberg this morning, which seemed pretty much immune to the Wall Street fiasco, clocking in a 170+ percent growth rate year on year. Hmm.

Start voting and we’ll track what happens to the prices of those investments every month from now. May the best contrarian win!

We have been so pleasantly surprised about the interest in the Take Charge Of Your Money seminar. Three days after I blogged about it, we were almost fully booked!

We hope to bring the seminar to those in the provinces in the future, but cannot make any commitments at this time. Those who cannot come due to time and distance constraints, watch out for the podcasts and videocasts of portions of the event right here on INQUIRER.net.

See you all later!

Mutual funds are sold as the investment for the masses, allowing ordinary Filipinos with as little as P5,000 to get their feet wet in an instantly diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds, or both.

It was a little bit of a surprise to find out that the average mutual fund investor as of June 30, 2008 has a placement of roughly P483,820 in mutual funds — not your average Filipino, obviously. That’s an impressive little factoid.

Based on official figures from the Investment Company Association of the Philippines (ICAP), this figure is lower than the average investment size of P580,843 in December 2007, which is again lower than P622,079 in June 30, 2007.
[Read the rest of this entry »]