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.
Another one jumping on the minimum volatility bandwagon, the investing fad of the day? Soon all under-performers will be renaming their funds as minimum volatility, low beta, etc. :-)
Reply to @mikes425: Hate to say this but I think the solution for Mike is to find a better FA than become a DIYer. Given all of his comments so far, I think he is a good candidate to blowing up his portfolio on his own reacting to the way wind is bl…
If you are just looking for a broad exposure to industrials, any of XLI, IYJ, VIS, EXI or FCLIX/FCYIX ( same funds) will work. They all track the broad indices with insignificant differentiation.
If you want to stretch your neck out with an investm…
Reply to @bee: I see what you mean.
Isn't what you are pointing to in this case simply taking some profits from one fund where the other asset was could have been cash? This is what happens in my play money portfolio with leveraged funds. That woul…
Reply to @Old_Joe: While the logical extension of what is happening might seem dire as you believe, it will not typically reach that extreme because they tend to correct even if violently.
For decades, there has been a battle between the RoI for hu…
Reply to @Old_Joe: What you did is called stress testing that is gaining interest in the RIA community because of new vendor tools as an alternative or complement to Monte Carlo Simulations. The latter was an improvement over previous method of assu…
Reply to @bee: What you are suggesting is up to 365x fast play of buy and hold of asset classes with low correlation where you rebalance whenever they diverge rather than once a year. Not sure the math works even if there was no trading fee.
It is …
Kind of silly to keep track of day to day swings but if one were over-exposed in an unbalanced portfolio, today should come as a relief psychologically.
Yesterday was a good day to test if a portfolio was well balanced and guage real beta exposure.…
These two are not comparable. MFO is an excellet fund selection resource where you can get exposure to a lot of different funds with often useful reviews and commentary. But there is very little meaningful information on portfolio construction other…
@bee, hope you are locking in profits on USAGX from your trade rules. It is likely to remain volatile. I got stopped out of GLL as Gold continues to go up. Will have to catch the next cycle if Gold starts to drop again but I don't think anyone knows…
Reply to @bee: Thanks bee, I need something that will calculate the top funds for each interval rather than do this manually for a fund I already know. Not sure how to do that at M* if possible.
They don't anything special other than break it up into multiple topics creating silos.
A forum to look at is bogleheads.org which contains a hybrid of the solutions proposed here.
One, it contains two "tabs" that will filter for unanswered posts…
That makes sense because it has some minimum swings so that the cycle is meaningful.
Working on an.idea, is there a easy (non manual) way to output top performing funds between any two dates?
I am interested in finding out the top 20-30 large cap …
I think looking for a metric beyond the 3 year rolling performance has merit. But I am not sure market cycles defined as peak to peak or trough to trough is it and seems as problematic.
First, it is not well defined. There are many peaks and troug…
Good article from the optimist crowd.
They forgot one critical area to watch: consumer demand. While all economic indicators are on a positive trajectory relative to the recession, they don't seem to be in a sustainable trajectory yet. For example…
Reply to @hank: I am very aware of ATD. It hasn't ceased operations but has spun off from WSJ as an independent entity with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.
The reference to Onion is to say that this article would be valid as a parody, not otherwise…
This discussion is good because a hastily designed solution can be worse than the problem.
But it seems like too many engineers, not enough product managers. :-)
Let us step back from the solutions and look at problems being solved.
Unfortunately…
Reply to @JohnChisum: That was the point I was trying to make. Performance chasing with these kinds of headlines never end well. Even people who use TA would never pile on with such a runup because the risk/reward is not compelling.
Also unless one…
This shouldn't be about Ted. Without Ted's continuous feeding, I think the forum would look dead most of the time.
At the same time, there is a usability problem and people are directing this at Ted as if it is his problem. This is not right. It i…
There are many possible solutions and none of them are perfect. My advice again would be not try to reinvent the wheel because this very need has already been solved after much trial and error in other places.
The suggestion to have a link category…
Do you think people who have missed this rally should pile on now because you think there is still upside or people should take profits if they are already in it?
@ted has provided the definition. From a practical perspective, the difference between the IIV value and the ETF value provides a sense of how far off the tracking might in the ETF price because of investor speculation or thin trading. This is parti…
Very OT, but unless this article was written for The Onion as sarcasm, it is a fine example of the hubris that surrounds the Silicon Valley and how some people here view themselves and their technologies in a distortion field. This article reeks of …
Diversification and "too many funds" are independent things and you can have one without the other. Agree with not too many funds.
But how much to diversify is tied to portfolio strategy. The more one is active in the portfolio management, the les…
Wow, I can just see smoke streaming out of every pore of Ted as he sees this portfolio. :-)
Mike, you need to roughly figure out your financial needs for retirement and how much it needs to appreciate or not from what you have now and where you ne…
Any such measure is inherently problematic and subject to gaming by managers. If the past wasn't well weighted, then it can be gamed with window dressing quarters or at the minimum be too volatile to be useful.
Think of the stars as similar to movi…
After looking at it closely, the problem seems to be in funds that had a reinvestment date of 12/31/2013. Distributions are either unaccounted for or reclassified between short term and long term capital gains multiple times with varying NAVs used f…
Remember a time when one would think about whether one wanted to be in a tax-free MM fund or taxable! Seems like another world altogether when MM funds generated interest worth worrying about.
Now, it is just a parking place for currently uninveste…
Reply to @MikeM: You can hold munis in tax-advantaged accounts depending on the portfolio strategy. For an active tactical allocation it makes perfect sense to exploit the total returns and momentum just like any other asset class while things are g…
In this context, I think it would be wise to rethink the bond allocation percent recommendations. Like many religious or cultural traditions, they may exist long after the original premise is no longer the norm.
The bond allocation thumb rules came…
Reply to @kanmani: VWAHX or PRFHX both prudently managed funds in a volatile sector are worth looking at. Only for tactical allocation in a portfolio with a plan, not for kitchen sink portfolios.
