Managed Funds Why does everyone here rave about the Navra Fund?

You kind of need to understand a lot of the history and the context to "get" the purpose of this fund and why it is discussed so much here (or at least was in the past).

In brief - the fund was specifically designed to be part of a structured portfolio involving real estate for growth and trading shares for income. On its own, you are right - it isn't that tax effective, but when used to help cover the costs of a negatively geared property portfolio, the tax side of things is not really an issue.

The trading system is designed to thrive on volatility, and we've only just returned back to a volatile market after an extended period of historically low volatility (ie the market basically went straight up).

The fund doesn't do technical analysis as such - that implies prediction. It is purely reactionary - reacting to moves in the market (although I guess one may argue that this is what some technical analysts do anyway). There is a lot of fundamental analysis of which stocks to hold (and safely trade).

At over $250 FUM (before the recent downturn), this is pretty reasonably sized for a boutique fund, and NI was reported in the press as one of the fastest growing boutique fund managers in Australia at one point.

It has underperformed many Australian funds during the strong bull market we've seen in recent years - but should (in theory) perform much more competitively in a more volatile market. We'll see.

As for it's popularity here - that is mostly from historical reasons.

Steve Navra was one of the five original founders of this site. Many of his financial planning clients and investors became members of the site - hence we had a disproportionately large representation of people who had invested in this fund. In fact, the original model for the site was paid membership, and we did a deal allowing Steve's clients free access for the first 12 months - so to start with, nearly everyone on the site was one of Steve's clients.

Steve resigned as a director of the site over 12 months ago to focus on his other businesses, and is no longer involved in the site.

Since then, InvestEd has added nearly 4,000 new members (yes, the site is almost 5 times larger than it was 12 months ago !!), most of whom I believe are not investors in Navra - and so the discussion on the site has become much more diverse and interesting in my opinion - which is a good thing for everyone. Naturally there are still a lot of people here who are clients of Steve's, and so the fund gets quite a bit of coverage still.

Back to the fund itself - my father-in-law is a self-funded retiree (semi-retired actually - he still works part time), and he loves the fund for the income it generates (I didn't tell him to invest in it - that was his own decision and he is a conservative and cautious investor). You can't lose income once you have it in your hand (at least after the taxman has taken his bit), and so is a nice way of supplementing other income sources - especially if you take a long term view and can cope with a bit of movement in the value of your capital.

 

By the way - Navra Financial Services is running one of their courses on the 21st of June and still has places available I believe: $179 per person for a full day course (9-5). If you can afford a weekend in Sydney, I recommend you pop over and check it out - you might find it interesting.

Navra Financial Planning Services investment strategies,retirement planning, risk management, wealth creation, superannuation

 

The fund has only just passed the 5 year mark last month, so it should start to gain wider acceptance now that it has a track record.

 

I'm not sure how YG invests - but you can get into CFS wholesale funds for only $100K - and you don't even have to invest that all in one fund (you could have $20K invested across 5 different funds).

The MER for the wholesale funds is quite a bit lower.