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Agreed. I was just plugging in a few funds and came up with some curious ratings. HSCSX, for example, was rated as a "poor" fund. That's news to me. The charts to support their reasoning are very vague and unscientific, IMHO.
I bought VWINX and sold ARTGX. The latter has a rather high ER and has become less tax efficient over time. I am going to put the proceeds in FMIJX and VMVFX. As far as VWINX goes, that's a no brainer in my book for a conservative allocation fund.
Lipper puts VBINX in the Growth Allocation category. There are 113 such funds in its database ending January 2016, at least 10 years old, oldest share class only, open and closed.
VBINX stacks up pretty well. Here is list from top, sorted by 10 yea…
@willmatt72 I agree that tax considerations are important for funds held in taxable accounts. But I also feel that the "magic number" tax cost (or after-tax return), while offering some insight, is not a particularly refined figure. The best it …
VBINX (a simple 60/40 fund) is ranked #16 out of all 1194 Allocation (Balanced) funds based on Fidelity's Mutual Fund research site over the last 10 years. Therefore 98.6% of all the CFA's, MBA's, ChFA and PhD's portfolio managers cannot outperform…
Justice Scalia was appointed by President Reagan in his last year when Robert Bork failed to be confirmed by the House. There is no reason why President Obama cannot appoint a new justice this year, barring confirmation issue that may arise.
Actual…
With 15 years to go until retirement, I'm buying ! I've been buying slowly throughout the last few months, so we'll see how that works out. I've caught a few falling knives, but hopefully, it won't matter in a few years. I hope. The theory goes - yo…
But no worries, when it comes roaring back 40% (at some point TBD) and gets you back to breakeven, Arnott will crow about how, see? Dogmatic adherence to a strategy come hell or high water is a good idea and see -- I was right. No thanks.
I bail…
Poop. That's a SIXTY SIX PERCENT reduction on the damn dividend. That's not a mere reduction. That is Management spending lots of time LYING to shareholders, until today. I'll stay in long enough to collect that dividend, and take the small loss, an…
I've been looking at these short term muni funds as an option for near-cash holdings. BASFX is an interesting option. The managers are the same crew that runs MITFX, a very good intermediate muni fund.
Will....I am re-evaluating my bucket 1 allocations, and BSBIX would be an ideal fund for that purpose. But you are correct in that VWINX is very different and offers greater opportunity.
At the end of this month, I am swapping out of BERIX and into…
I sold my entire holding of BSBIX. It's a good fund but doesn't really warrant holding with yields so low for short-term bonds. I may DCA into VWINX or something with a little more risk/reward.
It's been an educational 2016 for me, thus far. I've learned that it's time to trim back on a few of my funds, such as PIMIX and ARTGX. I recently purchased FGMNX as ballast for my equity funds. I will slowly increase my position in that fund and tr…
I agree that the numbers relative to the category (multisector bond) are impressive. But the numbers compared to the bond aggregate category are way down because of the exposure to EM bonds, high yield and the short positions as noted above. Current…
willmat72: I think that FD1000 at M* hits the nail on the head here pretty well -- at least in the responses so far. Too many headwinds hitting this holding with 19% in EM, long U.S. dollar bias, and some high yield based on the fund's comments last…
Will,
Stillers at M* does not mean to discourage you, I guess. He was pointing you to the 300+ posts thread on PIMIX in the past, where there was a heated, but largely good discussion. You can read that thread. I think FD1000 started it.
- Mrc
I'm…
To each his/her own. My expectations for this fund were much higher. For this fund to lose nearly 5% in one year is totally unacceptable to me. There are better options with a lower ER.
"RiverPark Strategic Income Fund seeks high current income and capital appreciation consistent with the preservation of capital..."
I bailed on this fund about six months ago when it was clear that the managers would not be able to satisfy the capi…
Hi Catch,
About 75% of my portfolio is in taxable accounts because I inherited a rather good sum of money. I do max out my Roth IRA and contribute to a 401K as well. But they will have a less substantial effect on my overall portfolio than my taxab…
I customarily wait for year-end pay-outs and then, after the New Year, re-jigger. I like to feed profit from aggressive funds into more conservative funds. (Trim MSCFX for example, and put the proceeds in MAPOX. But not this year. No profit in MSCFX…
I'm holding off on buying anything else at this point. I was looking at some muni CEFs but I could be late to the party with them. I own a few muni bond OEFs already. I'm feeling a bit jittery with the first week performance of the market, so I shou…
To willmatt's original question, which seems like a good discussion topic, here's ~ 2.03 inflation-adjusted cents' worth from this house.
For now, sticking with moderately significant changes made in mid-2015, which consisted of (1) reducing equity…
To willmatt's original question, which seems like a good discussion topic, here's ~ 2.03 inflation-adjusted cents' worth from this house.
For now, sticking with moderately significant changes made in mid-2015, which consisted of (1) reducing equity…
I agree that it was a nice gesture, and could have been left at that.
My mention of M* was to point out that one has to be careful with processed data from different sources - if sources process raw data differently, the resulting numbers can't …
I didn't post this story to start a thread about the shortcomings or greatness of *M. Let's just say that I would never pay their membership fees for their services, or lack thereof. I just thought it was a nice gesture by a PM to call back an indiv…
Best case - those are similar, but not identical, averages to what M* would have computed. Worst case, they still understates risk.
The best case is that these ratings represent the rating firms' averages of the bonds in the portfolio (based on t…
