Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.
Reply to @hank: "Kill off professionally managed defined benefit plans and expect a car mechanic or otherwise skilled tradesman to manage mega-dollars in a self-directed retirement plan. Yeah!"
Exactamundo, Hank. I was looking at a Google Earth ove…
Reply to @BobC: Our current debt/deficits have very little to do with what you characterize as "cradle-to-grave goodies." This has been discussed, graphed, & pored over in hundreds of articles since even before the recession: two rounds of large…
Reply to @Hiyield007: Oh right, sure, makes sense. I sold a utility etf too early. Utes are still climbing, & the etf I had is ~ zero premium even now.
Reply to @Hiyield007: Hi HY007, could you spell out your take on Pax Global Green a little more? I don't understand the reference to considering it as bonds, and being similar to a natural gas utility fund.
On SFGIX, Andrew F. has already branched out considerably from Asia. He's got 65% in Asia now, versus the index funds VWO at 61% and EEM at 62%. So he's only somewhat overweight Asia (and underweight Latin America & Africa, overweight emerging E…
Reply to @Charles: Not sure what's going on with the chart -- M&P Small has only been around since 2011. Was there another fund with that ticker before 2008?
Reply to @bee: For anyone thinking of getting into Pimco Investment-Grade Corp, be sure to look under the hood first. It's a terrific fund, but it's not the one you might infer from the name.
The only stock funds/etf's I have on watchlists (too many) that were down less than 1% on the Ides of April were EWJ, MSMLX, & WAFMX ... and MACSX just barely missed.
Bespoke uses a 2 standard deviation/50 dma stat to call the market, or sectors, overbought or oversold, 2 sd's being a common statistical measure of outliers in many walks of "life". M* uses its own scheme, which depends on its assumptions about mea…
M. Faber's GTAA is a trend-following etf that's also been underwhelming, clocking in toward the bottom of the mod allocation category (bottom 80-90%) in various time periods since kickoff.
I'm also at a point I won't be doing much shifting around, at least until there's a selloff.
Over the past two weeks, sold all short-term tactical positions aimed at profiting from the turn-of-the-year stock blastoff, and bumped muni holdings back …
Thanks for the notes, Bud; always entertaining, and Josh B does a good summary.
That stock/bond ownership graph is really interesting to me. Reminds of the fairly large number of people out there who own a few individual stocks worth a small % of t…
Just fyi & fwiw, I couldn't get on MFO for the past 24+ hours: it timed out every way I attempted (bookmark, typing in url, using a google link). Using firefox ... just now was able to get on.
As recently as a few months ago, the Vanguard brokerage still required that you call them to set up dca buys into non-V, TF mutual funds (after the initial purchase, of course). Fido lets you do everything online.
I guess Sam Lee (who's a pretty sharp guy if you've read his ETF articles) was putting that together as a rough attempt to (sort of) approximate risk parity ... it really is just an enhanced balanced fund ... just parceling out half the stock from t…
Hi Max,
I still like some of the M* stuff not totally dependent on the accuracy/timeliness of price etc. reporting, but I agree ... man, they really don't what they're doing in the data stream/IT department. But hey, it just took a few minutes to s…
Reply to @slick: My wife and I are going to inherit some individual munis someday, & we'll be on the same learning curve. I didn't put any links in that earlier post, but the Barron's income investing blog & the Abnormal Returns daily linkfe…
Munis got whacked in December over the fear that the fiscal cliff fiasco might result in a limit on tax-free status, and for about the last month, they've drifted south in the usual seasonal pattern of a rough March due to investors' selling munis t…
Reply to @Hiyield007: Hi Mona & Former Junkster,
Very different funds there. OSTIX is MS, but has been all but totally in short junk & converts for several years. It was originally conceived to serve as the total bond allocation in Osterweis…
I wasn't aware of the site; looks fairly interesting from a quick read.
Annoying popups and ads are easily & automatically deep-sixed with the free addon Adblock Plus.
Sold play positions today in stock ETFs VOE, VXF, and VPL; plan to put about 1/3 of that right away into longer-term holding PRFHX (conservative hi-yld muni) & hang onto the rest in cash for at least a bit. First priorities for near-future adds …
Reply to @Investor: That's a great idea to do a call with the GOODX guys if there's a time when that could happen. I've come really close to sending them some $ a couple of times.
Reply to @David_Snowball: The "cash" category treatment has been questioned several times by M* forum posters for Pimco funds (& maybe others too, don't recall); looks like the screener is unfortunately off-target on this data point.
Reply to @Derf: Hi Derf -- I'd guess the "long" and "short" are the currency contracts, no? They don't short, but do hedge foreign currency (which sounds like a good deal at this point, given they've got euro exposure).
Hmmm. I wonder if the source…
Reply to @Investor: I also noticed the wide discrepancy in the cash figure for FMIJX; FMI's December 31 portfolio report, the most recent, confirms it. Thanks for digging out the others.
Tweaks only around this house: reduced a smid-cap index in favor of a mid-value etf, and put some of the cash hanging around from a partial sale of a muni fund into OSTIX, a strategic income/mostly short junk + convertibles fund.
Reply to @Charles: I don't think he'd say he's bullish on anything, especially at these levels of the PE10 overall, but those sectors at least are less than fully valued on a long-term PE basis.
He doesn't make specific predictions or recommendati…
PRBLX, since 2002; low-risk, good return U.S. stock fund, large blend, but with a much smaller than average cap (always lots of mid-caps), and ARTKX, not quite 10 years, basically the same setup in developed ex-U.S. territory.
Looking ahead, I'd li…
Speaking of health care as an investment in general, Robert Shiller is the guest on the current WealthTrack show, where he says that there are four sector PE10's still below the median of the past 20 years: finance, energy, health care, and industri…
Reply to @Art: Not at all, Art; I meant that almost every bond fund I follow (and every one I own) has made $ in 2013 so far, so it just was not that difficult to come up with a positive bond portfolio return. I didn't mean "any bond fund"; I was re…
