Hmm.
HCP, SCHN for stocks,,,both up actually.
RSIIX and WBMIX for funds.
Think you are doing better than me YTD.
Well done!

Thanks, Charles. If you're right, I won't complain. PREMX (TRP EM bonds) actually has been doing maybe more than its fair share. YTD +8.53%
PRWCX: +6.24% MAPOX +4.55%
MAPIX +3.59%.
Bonds doing better than equities in my portfolio. Well, DLFNX not so much. Still rather good at +4.37% YTD.
"Break a leg," everyone.

It was a sea of red for me although I am up 5.7% YTD. MAINX was the least down, just a penny.

@dryflower: Many have gone through the questioning expressed in your post. After furrowing my brow for about 5 years, I said good-bye to TAVFX. My deeper fear was that Marty Whitman and crew had gone into Asia without the knowledge base of, say, a Matthews fund family.
I am basically relieved to be done with TAVFX and TAVIX. They were both great for a while. But things change.
Good luck with your decision making.

Dearth of deals leads Oaktree to cut fund size: Seeking Alpha
Jun 11 2014, 15:52 ET | About: Oaktree Capital Group (OAK)
Struggling to find deals for its latest distressed-debt investment fund, Oaktree Capital (OAK -1.3%) has cut its $3B asset-raising target all the way to about $1.8B, reports Bloomberg. The firm also plans to shorten the investment period to 3 years from 5.
Given the lack of traditional distressed opportunities, Oaktree is spending more time on European nonperforming loans, shipping, commercial real estate, and energy, says Ronald Beck, a managing director at the firm. "You have to be very sector specific."
"Financing is readily available and there's little corporate distress," lamented the firm's John Frank a few months back, adding Oaktree is more likely a seller than buyer in the current environment.
Oaktree Capital Group LLC (OAK), the world’s biggest distressed-debt investor, cut the $3 billion goal on its next control investing fund by about 40 percent as it struggles to find deals amid an economic recovery, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
Given the lack of traditional distressed opportunities, Oaktree is spending more time on European nonperforming loans, shipping, commercial real estate and energy, said Ronald Beck, a managing director at the firm, on a panel at the SuperReturn U.S. conference in Boston this week. He pointed to anemic default rates and high-yield bonds trading above par.
http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-11/oaktree-said-to-cut-fund-as-distressed-deals-diminish.html

If someone is going to post 10-15 +/- links in a day without text or reasoning, then fine - but they should be in one thread titled "Links: 6/11/14" (or whatever date.) Post however many links, in that thread, then the thread can continually be bumped to the top for each new link. That way, the board isn't just 85% link threads (and I think it does seem like 80-85% links lately.)

Melrose Credit Union, Massachusetts. 2.25% rate, 2.27% yield. Still pathetically low. But insured, guaranteed. Lock your money up for 5 years and you're losing purchasing power, this way.
...I cannot recommend it, but if you have a minimum of $25,000 and willing to go 10 years out, you can get 3.8% here.
http://www.israelbonds.com/invest/investments-current-rates.aspx

PETDX is leveraged real estate fund using treasuries and mortgage backed securities. Below is a MarketWatch perfomance table.
Anyone have any experience with this fund?
Symbol Fund Name 1 Wk 13 Wk YTD 1 Yr 3 Yr 5 Yr 10 Yr
PETDX PIMCO:RE Rl Rtn;D -0.67% 10.13% 23.55% 8.84% 15.43% 30.40 12.87%
prinx

Hmm. What's the appeal --- supposedly reduced risk? Its 08-09 slump is much worse than, say, PKW, VOO, presumably SCHD, PRBLX, and GABEX. And its $10k gain over the last 3-4-5y is like only a third to a half of theirs! Not even taking taxes on the yield into account. So what's your thinking here?

Thanks for the Bryan questions. I'd been curious about his decision to leave Waddell & Reed (was bloat an issue?), his take on HY valuations (including stuff in the portfolio other than HY bonds) and how he sees himself as distinctive. Had not thought to ask about the research team issue.
The Litman Gregory gathering is crowded, but I can certainly raise the e.r. question and can angle to get to the ARBFX performance slump.
I'll try, as before, to post highlights in the evening. I might, with Chip's help, be able to get stuff out during lulls throughout the day - I often have 15 minutes free there but almost never have 20.
David

Hi, guys.
The nice folks at the Leuthold Group share a copy of Perception for the Professional, their research publication for paying clients, with me each month. About 60 pages of data analyses and reports. Jun Zhu this month wrote "Dividend Paying Strategies -- Which is Best?" and the findings are interesting.
Zhu notes that dividend-oriented strategies have been exceedingly popular, though many now fret that those stocks have been badly bid up. There's also a fear that dividend paying stocks lag when interest rates are rising. That turns out to be true, but not an investable insight: rate rising cycles tend to be triggered with little warning and last an average of nine months.
Even allowing for a lag during the 20% of months in which rates have risen, the strategy works well over time. Zhu writes "In the falling rate and neutral months, dividend paying stocks outperformed non-dividend paying stocks by a large margin. Regardless of interest rate changes, from 1927 to 2013, dividend paying stocks were the winner."
Zhu argues that there are at least four distinct dividend oriented (or dividend-oriented? Drmoran notes that I over-hyphenate. Overhyphenate? Over hyphenate?) strategies that manifest themselves in funds and ETFs. They are:
1. broad focus on dividend-paying stocks, which typically imposes simple size and liquidity requirements, then invests in dividend paying stocks.
2. high dividend-yield, which targets the highest-yielding stocks.
3. dividend growth, which requires consistent increases in payouts over 5-10 years.
4. quality dividends, which adds screens for the quality of the firm's financial strength and management. Those might include debt load, return on equity, earnings stability and dividend coverage ratios.
Leuthold tested those strategies by looking at the performance of dividend oriented ETFs from 1989 - 2014. They admit that few of the ETFs represent pure instances on one strategy of another, but most are strongly aligned with one of them.
They found (1) the dividend strategies as a group substantially outperformed the S&P500 (12.2% annually versus 9.0%) with lower volatility (4.2% S.D. versus 4.3%), (2) that "companies which have raised dividends for 10 consecutive years are actualy the worst performers" and (3) the quality dividend strategy blew away the competition on returns without incurring heightened volatility.
Quality dividend ETFs returned 14% annually with 4.1% S.D. The other three strategies clustered between 10.9% - 12.2% returns with S.D.s of 4.0 - 4.5%.
Charles might be the one to ponder about the mutual fund implications of the research, since fund managers add the overlap of relative value and absolute value orientations. As I think about the funds we've profiled, Guinness Atkinson Inflation Managed Dividend (GAINX) strikes me as a quality dividend / relative value bunch while Beck, Mack and Oliver Partners (BMPEX) would qualify as quality dividend / absolute value.
Leuthold's list of "quality" ETFs includes:
Schwab US Dividend Equity (SCHD)
iShares High Dividend Equity (HDV)
FlexShares Quality Dividend Index (QDF)
First Trust Value Line Dividend (FVD)
WisdomTree US Dividend Growth (DGRW)
FlexShares Quality Dividend Dynamic Index (QDYN, with the note this is a higher beta product)
FlexShares Quality Dividend Defensive Index (QDEF, lower beta).
For what interest it holds,
David

FYI: As we ride off into the sunset, I don't know how many times I have linked this quote from John Bogle,"Why look for a needle in the haystack when you can buy the whole haystack?"
Regards,
Ted
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-best-investment-advice-ever-2014-06-11/print?guid=66F0EAC8-0CE4-48BF-AC80-BA8F582B86C5

More From Guggenheim
Capital flows have come as a result of low yields in Europe, Japan and elsewhere.
In Europe, the risk is that the euro will depreciate. That makes buying U.S. Treasury bonds and other U.S. assets attractive because the local currency could depreciate and interest rates are so significantly higher in the United States than in Europe. On June 6 in Germany, 10-year government bunds traded at 1.35 percent, compared with 10-year U.S. Treasuries at 2.58 percent, so, German investors seeking yield certainly want to look at the United States.
For Japanese investors it is a similar picture — U.S. Treasuries at 2.58 percent look cheap compared with 10-year Japanese government bonds yielding 60 basis points. And legislation in Japan now allows larger allocations overseas by pension funds.
Investment Implications
With no pending crisis expected thanks to central bank liquidity and a bias among Fed policymakers to keep interest rates low, the recent bull market for credit spreads is alive and well, supported by surging capital inflows, which have also helped U.S. stocks hit fresh highs.
http://guggenheimpartners.com/perspectives/media/central-banks-chart-a-course-for-overheating?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Market Perspectives - June 20

M*'s Samuel Lee looked at 31 short-term bond ETFs and compared them with some bank CD rates, concluding that bank CDs are better right now. He notes that Synchrony Bank and Barclays offer 5-year CDs yielding 2.25%. "There is no better deal out there in fixed income," he says.

This, another offering in M*'s small series on the active share metric, looks at the spread of active share for 20 large-cap foreign funds (by assets). Artisan ARTKX tops the list, with an active share of 94.3. FILFX, Strategic Advisers, is in 20th place, with an active share of 65.7. This is a large spread.
Although most funds on the list (15 of 20) with high active share are 4-star or 5-star funds, high active share funds are not necessarily "good" funds to own, Adam Zoll, the article's author, points to TGVAX, with an active share rating of 83.4, yet is a 2-star fund.
Discuss.

Author's thesis: Correlations among different sectors of the market have been falling, which should produce a better environment for stock-pickers.

In May, the average correlation of the 10 S&P 500 large-cap sectors to the index itself was just 70.6%, the second-lowest level since October 2009, according to Mr. Colas’s calculations. That’s down from 79% in the prior month, 85% three months ago and the 95% levels that consistently occurred during the middle of 2011, when Europe’s debt crisis and U.S. political turmoil roiled markets.

FYI:
Regards,
Ted
http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=650510

FYI:
Regards,
Ted
http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=650538

Thanks David. Can you find a way to ask Litman Gregory if they would please lower the expense ratio of Litman Gregory Master Alt Strats Inv MASNX? The expense ratio is 1.91% (ouch). Yes, I know that category tends to have high expense ratios, but they could lower it......and their ER is even "above average" in their category, per M*. I do like their multi-manager concept, and choosing 'Masters'.
For the Arbitrage Fund crew.....don't know how you would ask this....but the fund seems to be 'dead in the water' with respect to performance. Not a happy shareholder. Their 2013 total return: 0.85%. 2012 return: 0.27%. No complaints about 2011. 2010: 1.44%. Not focusing on the category, but on an absolute return basis, can't they do better?

......Back to the original thread: I guess I own enough Jardine Matheson!!!
Top holding in MAFSX, as previously noted. (7.08% of the fund's holdings.) ALSO, just saw it is the top holding in MACSX. (3.57% of the fund's AUM.)

Hi David, thanks for asking. Maybe ask Bryan Krug what his strategy for the near future of ARTFX is, given that the HY spread continues to sink (~3.5) toward the record low shown in FRED data (~2.5). Best, AJ