EPF declared 6.15% dividend for 2012

Few hours ago, the Employees Provident Fund (EPF, a.k.a. KWSP) has just declared the dividend rate for financial year 2012 to be 6.15%, which is 0.15% higher than the 6.00% dividend declared for 2012 (last year).

This is the highest dividend rate declared by EPF over the past 10 years.

If you have already registered as an EPF i-Akaun member to access your EPF account detail with their online service, you can login to your online account now and check the actual amount of dividend in RM added to your EPF account by viewing your 2012 online statement.

With this dividend rate, it seems that those who have withdrawn their EPF Account II savings to reduce their housing loan during 2012 might be regreted to do so, as the effective mortgage rate is generally lower than 6.15% in 2012, due to a lower housing loan financing rate along the year (BLR-2.4% = 6.6%-2.4% = 4.2%).

If you have withdrawn your EPF Account I savings for investment in unit trust or fund, your fund manager has outperformed EPF if your 2012 ROI in the fund is greater than 6.15%. Otherwise, you might want to meet up with your unit trust agent or fund manager to find out what's wrong.

In 2012, EPF has put the highest proportion of its investment portfolio into the equities (share) market, forming 38.77% of the portfolio.

The EPF 2012 investment return is reported as below:



 

Therefore, EPF's return of investment (ROI) for year 2012 is 31,024.94/469,035.43 = 6.6146%. Among them, the EPF's equities ROI for year 2012 is 13,912.54/162,089.56 = 8.5832%. However, in their announcement, EPF says their equities ROI is 10.06% instead.

The KLCI at 30 December 2011 (Friday) closed at 1,530.73 with  volume of 1.329 billion and value traded at 1.528 billion. The KLCI at 31 December 2012 (Monday) closed at 1,688.95 with volume of 0.835 billion and value traded at 1.314 billion.

Therefore, the ROI of KLCI in 2012 is (1,688.95-1,530.73)/1,530.73 = 10.3362%

This means that the ROI of EPF in equities portion is lower than the ROI of KLCI!

Click here to read the official announcement from EPF, and the investment structure of EPF in 2012, etc.

Source of the chart and tables above are from EPF website:

• Chart for historical dividend rate
• Tables for 2012 and 2011 investment proportion and return

Erroneous device driver update is harmful to your computer

Today, I installed an optional Windows 7 update called "NextWindow - Input - NextWindow Voltron Touch Screen" found in the Windows Update listing. This update is related to my Dell SX2210T touch screen LCD monitor.

After the update, I noticed there was unusual CPU activity causing its temperature shot up to over 70 degree Celcius. All the 4 CPU cores were in high usage.

I checked it up with Task Manager and found out the culprit was a process called TouchScreenTools.exe.

As the CPU usage continuously remained high and the CPU temperature also stayed at high level, I decided to undo this problemistic Windows update.

I opened the Device Manager by right clicking on Computer in the Start Menu and select Properties to bring out the Control Panel, and click on Device Manager in the left menu.

In the Device Manager, I managed to find "NextWindow Voltron Touch Screen" inside Human Interface Devices.

Right click on it and select Properties will bring out its Properties window. There is a "Roll Back Driver" button inside the Driver tab.

After clicking the "Roll Back Driver" button, there is a confirmation window, click "Yes" and restart Windows will roll back the driver to its previously installed version.

After the driver roll back, the CPU is now back to normal, with temperature back to below 50 degree Celcius.

In order to prevent future update of this erroneous driver, I went to Windows Update, right click on "NextWindow - Input - NextWindow Voltron Touch Screen" and hide it out.

If you also have a Dell SX2210T touch screen monitor and see this optional Windows update, remember not to select it. You might also want to hide it out from the Windows update listing.

Moon+ Reader Pro for Android is giving 50% discount

Moon+ Reader is a popular e-book reader app for Android which is feature-rich and supports a lot of e-book format including txt, html, epub, pdf, mobi, umd, fb2, chm, cbr, cbz, rar, zip and OPDS.

Recently, a compliant from a Russian online library LitRes to Google had caused Moon+ Reader (both free and Pro version) being removed from Google Play Store, just because Moon+ Reader supports the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) Catalog format that is also used by certain pirate online libraries.

Anyhow, Moon+ Reader appealed to Google and finally relisted on Google Play Store. To celebrate this recovery to Google Play Store, it is now offering a 50% discount to its Pro version (selling price reduced from US$4.99 to US$2.50) from now onwards until end of February 2013.

I have been using Moon+ Reader free for quite some times. To show my support to them, I have made a purchase to Moon+ Reader Pro at this discounted price.

If you are looking for a good e-book reader for your Android smartphone or tablet, I would recommend you to try out Moon+ Reader free. If you like it, you can purchase the ad-free and feature richer Moon+ Reader Pro before this 50% discount offer expire.