Executive Summary The world economy has suffered severe financial crisis following a number of economic meltdowns that occurred in early 1990s, the beginning of 2000, as well as late 2000s. Specifically, the 2008 financial crisis was stern and affected economies of various nations in the world intensively. As result, diverse individual and institutional investors have avoided expanding their portfolios anticipating for bad economic moments that would result to losses in their investments. However, the few investors who continue investing in new assets, as well as expanding their initial investments have remained cautious to evade losses resulting from economic downturns. Nevertheless, with the existence of mutual funds, it is expected that investors would be able to invest in a portfolio that would assure them high returns with respect to maintenance of a moderate level of risk. Given that emerging markets such as Singapore, South Korea and Malaysia are doing well in the market, one would realize that it would be easy to diversify risks from a variety of market securities available (Elton, Gruber & Brown 2006, p. 80). Introduction Selection of market securities that would be included in certain investment portfolio requires scanning of various instruments in diverse financial markets. The markets from which the market instruments are picked are both capital market and money market. The capital market is involved in the sell and purchase of long-term market securities while money market is concerned with the trading of short-term securities. Selection of best financial instruments is tiresome, as it requires adequate time to asses performance since one has to scan the performance of various industries, as well as individual firms. In addition, one has to compare the performance of debt markets in various countries in order to choose the best performing bonds, which should be in line with the taste and requirements of customers. All this activities are streamlined towards increasing the level of returns while minimizing the level of risks (Reilly &Brown 2007, p. 12). In this view, we should use a concept put forward by Markowitz who emphasized on determining the level of risks and returns for various market securities before investing in any single market instrument. His concept was based on the expected return and variance where variance measures the level of risk an index is exposed to. We should use this concept in constructing an investment portfolio consisting of six equities and six bonds for an open-ended fund to be offered to the esteemed institutional investors. The investment portfolio will further be evaluated based on its benchmark. The report will begin by presenting an Investment Policy Statement. The report will select 12 best performing securities based on evaluation taste from 30 securities. Construction and performance appraisal of financial instruments will follow later. The paper will finalize at the end with a conclusion, which will mostly focus on summarizing the whole paper and suggest other techniques that would be employed to reduce the amount of risks and improve the level of returns for various investors. Investment Policy Statement Our investment strategy has always and will always begin with identification o