UOB Asset Management (UOBAM) started offering its new United Singapore Dynamic Income Fund earlier this week, with a planned inception date of 16 November.
The fund aims to help retail investors manoeuvre volatile markets during a likely extended period of high inflation and interest rates, by providing flexible access to growth and income opportunities in tune with Singapore’s market cycles, according to a spokesperson for the Singapore-based asset manager.
“In this new regime, investors can expect increased market volatility but also new investment opportunities, especially within more defensive asset classes,” Paul Ho, senior director, Asia equities at UOBAM said.
The Singapore-domiciled fund will invest in several asset classes, including equities, real estate, bonds, and money market instruments, increasing or decreasing exposures by responding to views generated by both manager analysis and artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Most of the fund will be invested in Singapore equities, REITS, bonds and money market instruments. It can also make outsized bets on those asset classes, but allocations to non-Singaporean assets are capped at 20%.
“The Singapore market has traditionally displayed resilience and has the potential to outperform in this higher-for-longer era,” said Ho.
The product also tries to provide stable distributions through active asset allocation, using UOBAM’s “AI-Augmentation” capabilities for asset allocation. AI-Augmentation is a proprietary process based on the integration of analyst expertise and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques.
“For the United Singapore Dynamic Income Fund specifically, we have used our proprietary AI-Machine Learning Model to help managers make the correct asset allocation decisions. Our managers then engage in security selection under each of the asset class selected,” said Ho.
The model employs more than 30,000 variables and analyses more than 300 million combinations before making an investment decision.
It learns from the current investment environment and adjusts itself based on the constant feedback of new data. The model then makes investment decisions dynamically rather than based on a static set of variables pre-selected by the portfolio manager.
“This way, we are able to quickly detect the development of new trends in the market which would result in better investment performance over time,” Ho added.
The fund is designated an excluded investment product (EIP) by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, which makes it suitable for retail investors.
They can subscribe during the 23 October to 15 November offering period through FSMOne, Tiger Brokers, WeBull and Phillip Securities (from 1 November) platforms, while corporate customers can subscribe through “UOBAM Invest for Corporates”.
