PREGUNTAVER

From the Philippines: First Metro Save and Learn Equity Fund has a year to date earnings of 66.31%. It means that if you invested $1M at the start of 2006, your money has grown to $1.6631M on this day.---- WOW!!!!!! Other top performers include Philequity Fund , A TR- Kim Eng Equity Opportunity Fund , GSIS Kinabukasan Fund , Philam , Sunlife , etc. This Mutual Funds made more than 30% each this year. For the complete list, please refer to this link . To all those who made a killing this year, please use those earnings wisely . May I remind you that helping the less fortunate, especially during this time of diversity, is a form of wise spending. To all those who suddenly became interested in investing, may I remind you that "Today's sweetheart may not necessarily be tomorrow's darling" . For a refresher or introductory course on Philippine Mutual Funds, please check Mutual Funds 101. Merry merry christmas!

Despite claims that the Philippine economy is improving, credible allegations saying the opposite abound. An example, is Former Economic Planning Secretary and UP professor Cielito Habito’s pronouncement that more people are actually getting hungry. In today’s newspaper , a government consultant mentioned that the administration is dependent upon secondary data in figuring out the true state of the economy. If that is the case, it is possible that the country’s GNP/GDP shows an increase, simply because more transactions are now being reported by the banks. "Francois Renard, an EU expert in trade statistics gathering, told the BusinessMirror that his observations show the Philippines is having an “undercoverage” of transactions and contributions of the different key service industries. “What you have now is just a rough estimation,” Renard said at the sidelines of the EU-funded training on Manual Statistics of International Trade in Services in Makati ."