coolgirl, as you are with hangseng, you can switch to something else from ML for 0.5% fee, if you want to. but without having looked at the fund chart most blue chips gained yesterday as chances for a US interest rate decreased. it's still very volatile to make the right decision. the BOC IPO had a nice development, but most people i know just got a very tiny allocation. if your latest project is really happening, then you can maybe give me a higher allocation
i think this hasn't been mentioned yet: one possibility to reduce the risk, are monthly investment fund plans where you automatically buy every month fund parts for a fixed amount of HKD. if the market is going up, then you buy less and if they are falling, then you buy more with the same monthly amount of money. by this you can get a good average purchase price for your investment funds and the right entry time to pick the bottom is not that important any more (you can even buy one day before a crash and automatically buy more fund parts the next month when the prices are low etc.). risks are still involved if the fund is not peforming well for a longer period of time and you may need to be able to sit out 3-5 years depending on how risky the chosen investment fund is.
bobbybo's suggestion is very interesting, especially as the future of the USD/HKD is not very bright and it could happen easily that the purchasing power decreases a lot with your money fixed with traditional saving schemes. some speculate that if one day china is shifting it's huge foreign reserves from USD into EUR and gold, that the dollar would tumble and the HKD with it. the risk is very low, but not zero and that makes pulling out the money any time so interesting. but what's the minimum amount to be invested? is it the 1M to open such an off shore account or less as well?
another thing: i once saw bonds of the HKG MTR corporation, which are offering coupons of 5% annually, paid semi-annually. i can't exactly remember how much the minimum investment amount was, but i think they started with around HKD 50K-100K already. that's much better than 1M for fixed interest to get max. 4%, but has got of course higher risks as well. in simple terms it could happen in theory that the MTR corp. could go bankrupt, but that's not very likely. there are other risks as well like selling before maturity, but with fixed interest you would have to commit to a certain time period as well. can maybe anyone of you tell me more about these bonds? i did not get into details yet, but it might be interesting for diversification.