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 @catch22: Perhaps a Physician's Do No Harm might apply here. If a Physician sees a neurotic patient they are not going to feed the neurosis further just because the patient requested it. :-)
It might be better to elicit much more context t…
Reply to @tp2006: Remember that these lazy portfolios are constructed for one or two risk profiles not individual circumstances. Just borrowing one may or may not work for you. Is there a reason you seem reluctant to spend the 5 minutes it takes at …
Reply to @catch22:
Which part of this snippet from my first post can I explain to you better?
My recommendation would be to go to wealthfront.com and click on the Invest Now button and go through the questionnaire. You don't have to register and y…
This is what I do with leveraged funds in my play money portfolio but difficult to do for entire portfolio without significant risk unless one is very actively involved or uses relatively low volatility bond sectors like @junkster.
No kidding!
Bad day for alpha male funds today. The kind of days that shows the value of stop limits for volatile funds. Both YCS and SSO got stopped out early today. The purchases last week in EEV and FXP more than make up.
Fun ride. Some good op…
An asset class like EM can go down 20% or much more at any time. No one can guarantee it will not. If you did not understand the potential drawdown of a sector you picked to invest, why did you pick EM funds in the first place?
It would appear that…
Reply to @tp2006: Honestly, I don't see myself spending a whole lot of time actively managing my portfolio. Ideally re-balancing/reallocating 2-3 times a year is what I am looking for. So my thought was to pick a diversified portfolio that I can set…
Reply to @tp2006: That is a portfolio allocation for 2013. This is what happens when you read the latest suggestions. They are usually based on what happened in the last year or two so they all look like geniuses from backtesting. It is OK if you ex…
My recommendation would be to go to wealthfront.com and click on the Invest Now button and go through the questionnaire. You don't have to register and you don't have to give any personal information. Get the portfolio recommendation they provide at…
Reply to @bee: That example makes no sense to me in this context. A multinational exploiting cheap labor in EMs is more like a short position in EM than long. If the EM economy improves, labor costs go up and the multinational margins go down.It is …
Regarding taxation, it is like the US is split into people from Mars and people from Venus. They will never see eye to eye with each other. The only time they happily co-exist is when economy is booming and it doesn't feel like a fixed pie and both …
Reply to @hank: Thinking of a less doomsday scenario where life goes on as usual for people without significant investments. Banks function to circulate cash, people get wages, etc. Just that all trading platforms have ground to a halt, sort of huge…
Agree with @scott, keep a finger on the trigger in this volatile sector. As long as Gold price is above $1200 or so, the miners draw in money and a lot of speculative money at the moment because everyone wants to catch the bottom in this beaten down…
Reply to @Kaspa: Depends. Is the tax proposed by a Democrat or a Republican? :-) But seriously, solving this with taxing is a political solution not a financial one. It just becomes another cost of doing business if too small and if it is too high i…
High yield munis are not for conservative or passive investors. You use it for total returns not just for non-taxable income. With its volatility, you will likely pay capital gains tax on it. For momentum or otherwise active investors, the total ret…
It is interesting to note in this context that pre-hype has began for a new book titled 'Flash Boys' from Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker, Big Short, Money ball, etc to be released in March. While the publisher is tight-lipped about the subjec…
What is much more relevant is what your individual return is in each fund not what the fund may have done ytd unless you steadily held that fund since the beginning and just sold it. There is the issue of what the performance is when you actually se…
He has incinerated the "gamblers" verbally well enough. One group's faithful is another man's heretic. Same thing with investing. People draw arbitrary lines around their comfort zone and claim it to be the most wise with a lot of rationalizations a…
Another article that is based on, "if you do like I do, you are an investor, if you don't you are a gambler". The corresponding terms used in religion are faithful and heretic.
Reply to @hank: Leveraged is the most misunderstood and abused word in investing.
There is nothing leveraged about Gold. It goes up and it goes down and frustrates both buy and hold and performance chasing strategies. It doesn't fit the "keep going…
Excellent read for a summary that appeared earlier.
I do think there are many forms of inefficiency than just information propagation. This is a very simplistic model of market efficiency.
Investor action depends on a number of factors in addition…
Reply to @mcmarasco: By "core", I mean a holding that plays the essential part of your investment strategy. For example, a buy and hold portfolio might have a percentage allocation to an asset class like international developed markets independent o…
The only thing you can learn from rise and fall of gold is not to read bloggers on gold, bears OR bulls. Gold, through history, has a way of making people irrational and this applies to people who write about it.
I have no position in gold or gold …
Shaping up to be what would be called a "group think" fund in the future. :-)
Personally, I don't think anyone should be using this fund for a core portfolio or for that matter any fund that hasn't gone through 2008 and 2009. Unless one actively mo…
The reality, as always, is somewhere between "sky is falling" and "invest as usual".
Tactically, I have gone net short EM this week primarily on technicals. The following thinking is my assessment of this asset class but not what determined my shor…
Nothing in core portfolio. In play money portfolio, got stopped out of short Gold (GLL) and short Treasuries (TBT) last week. Started new positions short China (FXP) and short EM (EEV) this week. Still holding short Yen (YCS), long tech (QLD) and lo…
Reply to @fundalarm: DXJ is a good choice only if you keep an eye on it ready to sell and so have stop limits at all times. It almost behaves like a leveraged fund because of the hedging (albeit without as much of the daily reset problem with pure l…
You guys sound like the League of Grouchy Old Men. :-)
It is not uncommon for the elders of one generation to think the next generation is in big trouble. Partly because of changes that they don't understand or inability to envision solutions outsi…
Check Tue's NAV change against Tue index close in Japan. They may have done fair value pricing on Tue because of the bounce back in US markets on Tue after Japanese markets had closed.
