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.
There are a few reasons I bought JUCDX-
1) Bill Gross will be managing a very small amount at first which will give him a lot of flexibility to take advantage of smaller inefficiencies in the fixed income markets. Jeff Gundlach has pointed this out.…
The mid-decade rally is scheduled to begin September 30. Historically the next 18 months have been very bullish:
http://jayonthemarkets.com/2014/06/25/september-30th-mark-your-calendar/
I bought some JUCDX today in a Janus IRA. Will be interested to see how Bill Gross does in managing the portfolio going forward. Future inflows into the fund could help the performance.
rjb112- I would agree that for a long term buy and hold investor who doesn't trade, the ETF (VTI) is fine. But for an active trader dealing in six figure amounts or greater, the total return figures for VTI would be greatly reduced because of bid-as…
@MOZART325, I'm not 100% certain that the index fund has the advantage there over the exchange traded fund. The index fund has to "pay" the bid-ask spread on every single purchase it makes. How is that fundamentally different than the bid-ask sp…
On May 15, Tepper was nervous about stocks and said "don't be too friggin long". If you listened to Tepper then you lost out on a lot of stock market gains:
http://www.finalternatives.com/node/27056
I think Tepper feels he is trapped in momentum s…
It is amazing that BEARX still has $450 million in assets. Of course, given its performance that will steadily shrink over time even if there are no outflows.
@MFO Member: Regarding David Tice, a picture is worth a thousands words.
BEARX Performance…
Here is the paragraph containing that link. He believes that Hussman's fund is "the worst mutual fund to own over the last 10 years"
The truth is that finance is filled with people who remain in business despite awful track records. There were 894 …
I think our 10-year bond is affected much more by yields in Europe than by the pace of new home sales. The German 10-year closed at 0.95% today. And the spread of the US 2-year versus the German 2-year (which is negative) is the highest since 2007:
…
Most of the pundits on the radio are still predicting a 10 year at 3% by year-end. I think many readers of bespoke may be contrarians and not typical of the media pundits
Currently German 10 year= 1.06%, US 10 year= 2.39% (Spread= 1.33%)
One year ago: German= 1.69%, US= 2.58% (Spread= 0.89%)
If spread shrinks to 89 basis points, our 10 year would be 1.95%
Check out fundmojo.com. Not perfect, but not bad for a free web site.
I've attached a link for PTTRX.
http://www.fundmojo.com/mutualfund/fund_netasset_report/mutualfund/PTTRX
I'm surprised they listed Triton and Venture which have both been having sub-par years. A few years ago, Triton (JATTX) was one of my largest holdings. I sold it last summer when Brian Schaub and Chad Meade left Janus to work at a hedge fund. Schaub…
This is a good link to monitor the spread of high yield bonds. Currently the spread is 375 basis points, up from 330 basis points just a few months ago. But the Treasury yields have dropped, so the high yield prices have barely dropped in that time …
He has had many winners, but got hurt somewhat this year with COCO. I'm sorry to hear about his death, since his fund had finally gotten past the break even point in profitability.
I agree with most of his dumb investment ideas. But I do think it sometimes pays to own mutual funds directly with the fund company. I have mutual fund accounts with Fidelity, Janus and Vanguard. At Janus, they have special D class funds with a lowe…
One big problem with Motif is that they only use market orders for executions. That may be OK for highly liquid stocks like AAPL or SPY. But for motifs that contain less liquid stocks you can get really poor executions if you have a decent sized por…
Some of the premium in PHK can be explained by stock loan fees. PHK is hard to borrow, and institutional investors and some accredited investors can earn an extra 7% a year by lending their PHK shares to short sellers.
I like Art Cashin, but he is becoming the master of the obvious. I wish he would take a little more career risk and say something useful based on his years of experience.
He says that IF the S&P breaks 1885 there is a good chance it could clos…
The Moose switched to EDV on April 11 and stood pat this week. He missed last weeks rally in SPY. One good thing about the Moose's picks is that they are highly liquid and easy to trade without moving the market.
This article on Seeking Alpha from last year describes some of the moving parts in the senior loan closed-end funds:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1111761-will-senior-loan-cefs-have-another-good-year-in-2013
Many of the floating rate funds own loans with Libor floors that ensure a minimum interest rate of three or four percent. The interest rate payment on many of these loans will not start rising until the Libor rate exceeds three per cent.
A lot of outflows was due to only one investor- Good Harbor along with others who copy them.
http://www.etf.com/sections/news/21434-good-harbor-piles-into-equities-sells-bonds.html
To be honest, I feel a longevity insurance policy does fit my current situation, since it would only require a small portion of my portfolio but I keep finding excuses not to pull the trigger because I am too cheap to part with the money.
A better way to insure against living too long if you are healthy is to use longevity insurance policies. These are deferred annuities that start to pay out when the buyer is 80 or older. Because of this they are cheaper and pay out much higher rate…
Remember that the 8% for a 71 year old is just the annual payout. It is NOT a rate of return since your heirs lose all of your initial investment at death. If you die in less than 10 years, the annualized rate of return is actually negative. I would…
cman-
Schwab recently added some commission-free sector funds. I bought 500 shares of RYH a few weeks ago (around $50K) and the bid-asked spread was consistently around 10 cents or about 0.1%. There was also a considerable amount of tracking error …
The biggest problem with ETFs for an advisor is the bid-asked spread.
Let's say an advisor wants to invest $10 million in an ETF spread across his clients. Unless the ETF is highly liquid (like SPY) the trading cost from the bid-asked spread could …
A lot of these flow changes are not caused by retail investors. Firms like Good Harbor Financial trade billions of dollars every month and they sold equities and bought bonds last week. There are also a whole bunch of momentum-based strategy ETFs no…