If you interested in stock market ( because you know it's one of the way to get you rich?), then you probably can understand public mutual fund (unit trusts) pretty well. Unit trust is a method/tool/investment vehicle that helps us to have an opportunity to 'taste' the stock market cheese.
Unit Trust is absolutely important for the following two groups of people:
1) Those people who wish to do investment (particularly in stock market) but with a limited of modal. For example, you only have RM3K in your bank account.
2) Those people who work hard for long time and manage to save a few hundred thousand in bank but started to realize the return is tooooo few ,even fewer than the rate of inflation. These people started to think of a better way to put their money in but with very careful, because they don't want to lose their hard earned money. They admire the people who win in the stock market battlefield but they still not ready to get themselves in.
i don't want to explain the formal definition of unit trust because you can get tons of the information in the internet. i use a less formal explanation. Imagine George Soros is your friend, you know he earns a lot of money from stock market. You want to get some 'advantages' from him, so, you give him 2K and ask him to invest something for you because you know it's 99% will earn money one. Unfortunately, our Mr Soros ask you to fu*k off because the 2K isn't even enough for him to pay for his clubbing bills. Thus, you go and invite the others 19 friends to join your smart easy money scheme! each of your friends handled out their tuition loan of 2K and total you have gathered RM40K !!
Cool~~ you give this RM40K to Mr Soros and he is very happy now. Mr Soros has taken the money and ready to throw in stock markets. But, because this isn't his money, he wanted to play safe, instead of putting all this money into one basket, he find 10 baskets. he invested in 10 good companies.
One months later, 1 of the companies earn 30% of profit and 6 earn 10% each but the less did bad, with lost of 5% each. But overall, the RM40K now is worth RM70K already. Mr Soros had put much hard work on this, so, he will take 10K as his commission. So now, you and your 19 of friends still can enjoy the sharing of 20K of profit! and you get 1K with just 2K of modal. it's 50% of interest! far more higher than bank interest ( FD in Malaysia is 2.5% , Japan is 0.1% ) . As a result, you are very happy with the outcome from your smart and easy money scheme.
So it is pretty much easier to explain now. George Soros is actually act like our Public Mutual where it gather a lot of small ( some are big actually :p) money from all-walks of investors and invest in hundred of listed companies to achieve diversification.
Public Mutual is a subsidiary of Public Bank Malaysia.It is Malaysia’s largest private unit trust company with 73 funds under management. It has over 2,000,000 accountholders and as at 31 December 2009, the total net asset value of the funds managed by the company was RM35.6 billion.
there are many others Unit trust companies in Malaysia (oversea is even more!) but i personally encourage you to invest in public Mutual because Public Mutual is controlling 48% of the total unit trust asset in Malaysia and with a very good return record since early 90's.
see the recognition