DIY Investing vs let the bank manage your money

I've come across an article about investing in UITFs. The article's called Philippine UITFs you can invest in from 1000 and up and posted on www.imoney.ph website.

 Here's the link: http://www.imoney.ph/articles/philippine-uitf/

UITF stand for Unit Investment Trust Fund. It sounds complicated but it just means that the bank will pool money from their participating clients into a fund. That fund will be used to buy stocks chosen by their financial experts.

In my opinion, saving money into a fund is better than not saving at all. My only concern is that the bank and their financial experts need to be paid. They will charge you 1 to 2 percents each year. If your account is making money or not, they'll get their fee anyway. If you're losing money that year, they'll just blame the economy but they'll still get their fee.

Of course, they have this expertise that makes them better than us. But are they really much better than us?

I'm wondering this because they are choosing stocks from the same pool of stocks we choose from. If we buy more or less the same stocks they do, we can get the same performance but with no fee at all.

That's why I want to compare their performance vs mine. Here's the table:

As you see, my performance is not the best, it's only the second to the best! Not bad for someone with little financial expertise. But the other difference is that I don't have any fee to pay each year. I just do it myself. I perform more or less the same as the other funds but I don't have to pay anyone for my performance :)

Even worse, most other fund are performing worst than me but still, they'll make you pay for their "bad" performance. You might really want to think about doing it yourself.

So this is my advice. Start your online trading account and choose 5 to 10 stocks to purchase. These should be well established companies in different industries. These companies must sell something that everyone need. Then buy more of the same stocks every month with the money you have saved. If the stock goes up or down, still buy. That's the secret.

If you do it yourself, you don't have to pay anyone every year and the performance is more or less the same or even better than the banks.