Ann: Monthly FUM and Fund Performance, page-2

Is anyone else following this company? I note its historically cyclical nature, the fact that it is currently valued at no more than its own cash, and the fact that management at least claim to have a plan (and a reasonable cash buffer to effect it before collapse). Given the stupendous loss of one sixth of its customers in a single month announced this week, I'm wondering if the time to catch the falling knife might be approaching...

On the other hand, it has been hemorrhaging customers pretty steadily for five years. Any turnaround proposal needs to be taken with a solid measure of salt.

However, having had a closer look today to try and better understand the customer outflow (more or less non-stop since 2014 - it's bad), I can't get a clear picture from the reports.

Particularly, what does the Net Asset Value disclosed in the monthly FUM & Fund Performance reports actually mean? Presumably this is a measure of the value of all the assets held by the fund, right? The thing is, this number has gone down pretty steadily for 5 years, while the fund manager claims meaningful growth.

The obvious explanation, that funds are being withdrawn from the fund lowering net assets, does not seem to be correct either. $41.6M was withdrawn this month with no change in the NAV. And these reports do specify the Funds Under Management separately, which, as you'd expect, went down by the $41.6M figure. Moreover, historically, the NAV figure has been half the FUM figure.

What I want to do is evaluate the gains and losses of the fund each month over a long period, but it seems I can't do this just by comparing the NAV from one month to the next. My intention was to compare this to benchmarks to see how closely the performance of the fund correlates with fund inflows/outflows.

Any thoughts anyone?