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.
I think whatever happens if you spend enough time looking at the numbers and have enough people ( ie institutions) you can do a better job than a passive index.
Some states have never sheltered at home and their rates of infection are public knowle…
I have a background in clinical epidemiology and research design and have followed all this carefully.
Better data is published from the compassionate use study in the NEJM
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007016
It seems the folks…
No body knows but it will likely be variable accross the country but that may not help the stock market. Chipote in say Texas may be up and running long before NYC, but to buy CMG now you either have to be willing to absorb more pain as there is an…
Excellent post , sir. I think we forget, under the constant barrage of tweets from a much much less competent and humane successor, how many remarkable men this country has elected to the Oval Office. A visit to Hyde Park last summer brought it …
I looked at this last year and read all of Hunt's commentaries. Even before corona he believed that huge federal deficits will not cause inflation because the government will suck all of the credit out of the system the economy will not expand. C…
The problem is that when markets are so volatile , stocks and etfs frequently gap down or open well below yesterday's close ( and your stop order) so you get sold out at a much lower price than you expected
Mr Cinnamond was quite generous with his time even since he started this fund and sent out a very informative newsletter. I have emailed him several times and indeed he tells me it is far too expensive to get on the Schwab platform currently.
I wo…
Not worth as much as it used to be but still better than WSJ.
Gist of article is resturants are toast and suspending dividend, although MacDonalds and Domino's are down only single digits this year and haven't cut dividend. Probably because drive …
@Tarheel Sorry you get kicked out of M* I haven't had that problem on a regular basis.
Another advantage to having a real portfolio on M* is that you can track it on your phone with the App.
The portfolio tracker is the only reason I have kept …
no one really knows until the managers provide some clarity but I doubt it will go up as quickly as it went down even if the virus passes in a few months. Maybe as refinancings dry up fewer of their bonds will be turned over, but some of these folk…
This is a problem I have struggled with as I am unwilling to give my passwords to Personal Capital or Yodele because of security concerns, or link my Vanguard accounts to Schwab or vice versa.
I dont find Schwab portfolio analysis tools very helpf…
I am not an expert on central european thought or medical history although I have read a lot more of the latter than most. I do know Hayek.
I think it is a big stretch to link Vienna to Fox.
I also think that the Republicans will try to blame Obam…
That is exactly the problem. They use estimates until there are buys or in this case sales that establish a real price. So when the estimates are obviously higher or much higher than the prices they see quoted the last thing a manger wants to do i…
For what it is worth I think the issue with IOFIX is they were forced to sell thinly traded bonds at any price to meet redemptions after they exhausted their line of credit ( I seem to remember $200 million??)
Since these bonds probably sell "by a…
I think it is very very hard to know what IOFIX bonds are really worth. These prices that make up the NAV are at wide discounts. Even AGG was trading at a huge discount.
When they can get a price it is frequently just one "put out there" by the sp…
nope after Boeing spent what 50 or 100 billion on buybacks in the last ten years. But the taxpayer will bail them out again
Let us at least pray the US gets an equity stake or warrants like Warren could get
I assume the risk that municipal governments will fail is considered pretty unlikely now, as their tax revenues will take moths to decline. How many of them have revenue bonds for example on airports ? Hard to tell but maybe I should have kept those…
If we have no social distancing or other preventative measures then at leaset 80% of everyone in the US will indeed contact the virus.
The 5 million people will not all be grannies. Mortality rate in Kirkland nursing home is 30% 2.5 million fol…
I dont think you can use the test data until tests are widely available. The numbers then will skyrocket. Using the flu as an example it is estimated there are 100 cases for every diagnosed case but most of these people are not sick enough to go to …
For anyone who missed this I think this is the best single web analysis of the pandemic
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca
The first Tuesday after the first Monday in November is federal law since 1842 and consequently cannot be changed without an act of Congress. The democrats will not go along.
Although McConnell has a call out to older Republican federal judges to r…
One of the most aggressive "allocators" I have run across is American Association of Individual Investors "Level three" portfolio. James Cloonan spends an entire book trying to prove that there has never been a period longer than five years where t…
I assume the mortgage bonds in IOFIX are less sensitive to the emotions in BB or B rated energy or airline bond markets making IOFIX less variable recently. Liquidity is a real risk in IOFIX although the mangers recognize that and have lines of cred…
@FD100
Thanks for the update. I assume that you pretty much ignore the month or older published portfolios and focus on the NAV performance as a reflection of what the fund is actually buying and selling?
Since the prices of a lot of these bon…
Do the problems in the credit markets ( what took them so long to wake up?) today concern anybody with positions in DHEIX JMSIx PTAX or JMUTX ?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-06/credit-market-has-worst-day-in-a-decade-as-virus-fuel…
From the CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/show-me-the-science-hand-sanitizer.html#twentyone
Reference 21 has a large scientific discussion of all of the issues. Many are irritating but true allergy to just alcohol is rare.
The biggest proble…
best site for current cases etc
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/
This site also has hundreds of other "meters" like number of cigarettes smoked worldwide today!
Bloomberg news reports that Chinese airlines are starting …
The entire WHO report is worth reading and not to technical. It has a lot of data on incubation periods etc.
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf
The WHO believes the Chinese ext…
very concise article about WHO study of China and it's lockdowns. They sent 10000 epidemiologists/ case trackers to Wuhan in a few days
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/china-s-aggressive-measures-have-slowed-coronavirus-they-may-not-work-o…
As a primary care internist with 30 years of medical practice I have to agree with all of the above, with some caveats about ZINC. This quote comes from one of the best professional online medical textbooks ( anosmia is lack of smell)
"Zinc — A…
I agree but ZEOIX has a shorter duration ( 0.57 vs 1.4) so will handle rising rates much better
BTW how do you easily access the older and much better fund pages at M* ? your link works but I cant get it to load any other fund's profile
In case you missed it
More cases in washington state one dating from specimen January 19th It has been circulating for weeks
None with any travel history or contact. Possibly one in RI
Faucci who is a hero for banging the drum about AIDS and h…
Unfortunately Trump's chickens may all come home to roost. Cutting the NIH and CDC budgets, calling scientific analysis "fake news", saying the press is the enemy of the American people, claiming that the "deep state" experts should all be fired.
E…
Most recent JAMA article 20% Chinese cases severe or critical
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762130
Covid 19 is largely unknown and as the world has no immunity could infect almost everyone. The infection rate is estimated a…
But why would they start a province wide quarantine of 11 million people if there was not the danger that hundreds of thousands would die? 80000 people died of the flu in the US in 2018 and we didnt blink.
Where there is smoke there is fire
The one idea I can't get out of my head is the following:
If COVID 19 is so benign and causes far fewer deaths than the flu, why is China quarantining 300 million people?
The only reason they would do that, is that they had data that the mortali…
