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.
Notion of activism has broadened significantly from the earlier stand on principle to influence the company to the more recent increase my return in capital via financial shell games. The latter is an off shoot of too much cheap money allowing indiv…
I strongly recommend taking a look at the JPM Guide to Markets linked in that article. A very rich source of data. I wish there was a way to download it to keep. At least I cannot find any way.
As to the article itself, just GIGO based on the same …
Gartman - comes out looking like a wise owl in his demeanor (presumably why he is invited so often) and generic altruisms and is always on something different to provide any meaningful or actionable advice, the kind that will do well pontificating b…
There might be a good technical trade opportunity coming up for IBB to get in.
Set up stop (219) limit (225) buy and if that executes a stop sell at around 216 in case it breaks through the 200 SMA with a broad market decline. Upside 8% to 20%+. Do…
Fed directly controls overnight lending rates which affect mostly short term rates. When this failed to affect long term rates needed to kick start the housing market and the econony, the Fed started purchasing the long term bonds to manipulate thos…
I am sure some people have seen this TV screen capture taken of a reporting of news about the search for the missing Malaysian airliner by a Austin TV station.
If even news media can do this and we continue to flounder on what school education ou…
MJFOX is a good fund but they cannot beat Japan Inc. :-)
Japan is looking very broken technically and in a downtrend but with frequent bounce backs. Fundamentally, they did well earlier with a weakening Yen with Abenomics but that is not working an…
@rjb112, I hadn't heard of the Chartist, but for momentum technical traders, it isn't about getting all out or all in one day. In fact, anyone who tries to do that will crash and burn. But rather getting out somewhere around top perhaps gradually an…
Perhaps if you were a short term trader and trade the weekly wigglies. Longer term, it has come back to mid channel from overbought conditions.
However, both terms indicate a bounce back from resistance for SPY around 184 so short term traders migh…
The only country funds in my play money portfolio doing well without getting stopped out from volatility are Italy (EWI) and Australia (EWA). Completely missed the move in Latin America except indirectly via EM fund because of the speed at which the…
I don't follow this site but this switch seems odd as if done mechanically with a relative strength indicator. And likely to be a bad short term switch. Do they ever switch to just cash or to inverse funds?
The small stocks have been beaten up more…
I see these in the same entertainment category as self help books that all preach something that is common sense in general but not very useful in practice other than for entertainment.
Usually happens when people try to find a quantifiable approac…
This ruling doesn't affect what are known as direct rollovers or transfers, where you never get a payment to you to be deposited back within 60 days. It is the latter that is being affected.
Seems like they are cracking down on a loophole that allo…
Feels like beating a dead horse. I still don't have any sense whether you are pointing to a very specific special case where the general doesn't hold or saying something more fundamental.
If the former, then fine. There us always a special case or…
Just saw Michael Lewis on CNN in Fareed Zakaria's GPS (the only show I respect on CNN). Amused to hear him changing his tune from his Demagoguing of front running scalping to the complexity of the technology making it unstable being the problem, not…
@msf, I really don't understand what you are trying to get at because you have mixed up a couple of terms.
To standardize on terminology for the common case, consider bonds that pay interest on a regular basis than all at once at maturity and whose…
@old_skeet, no single bench mark would be appropriate for all. The goal of a benchmark is first to make sure that one isn't destroying their portfolio with meddling and then to see if they are realizing some benefit such as higher volatility adjuste…
0.2-0.3% loss?
With SP500 off 1.3? Tech off 2.6%?
That would indeed take a lot of diversification, as aggregate bonds were only up 0.2-0.3%.
Take any of the published 60/40 lazy portfolio with the typical large/small and value/growth split with a…
This is the kind of article that makes people focus on duration and make bad choices as I mentioned in the other thread. Duration is most relevant in a bond fund that is the purest in the metric that is going up, so for example intermediate treasuri…
rjb112, the long maturity notes in USFIX are mostly floating rate notes with low credit quality. Their effective duration is low because the floating rate note interest rate resets regularly. In other words, equivalent to short term junk. Look at th…
Focusing on managing duration is not the right thing to do for active funds. Managers focus on total return, not duration. Duration is just one factor and doesn't say much about what the total return will be.
On the other hand, just looking at dura…
@old_skeet, didn't mean to start a chest thumping war with alpha males! Short term performance implies very little after all. Concentrated portfolios are just fine for active investors as long as they know what they are doing even if they may get cr…
Today just stunk.
It wasn't as bad as it looks for a fully diversified portfolio, perhaps .2% - .3% loss for a globally diversified moderate allocation portfolio. This is why having such a portfolio is a good thing.
Undiversified alpha males are ge…
Looking at effective duration for an actively managed multi sector bond fund is a deeply flawed fund selection strategy. There is very little correlation between reported duration and returns for such funds. To see this, check the performance of dif…
There is no allocation or fund that will remain the same in 30 years. :-)
Assuming you mean that you have a long time horizon (in which case trying to time value is unnecessary) and assuming current global market composition, 8-10% EM allocation fo…
I have a strong suspicion it has more to do with decreasing reading habits over the years than just a transfer of the habit to electronic media. I see more people reading in Kindle commercials than in real life.
TBT and PST
But seriously,
Note that the Fed can only raise short term interest rates. Long term interest rates will only rise if there is confidence that the economy is strong.
Rates won't go up in a straight line. At the first set of increases, …
David Winters was on CNBC today about this. I have never looked at his funds and don't follow KO to know what they may have done or not.
My first impression is that Winters is a lousy communicator even if he has a valid point, not that fund manager…
The more I read the debates on this, the more it starts to resemble the common knee-jerk reaction to the acronym GMO in foods. Lots of opinions that the concept whatever it means is bad but very little specifics or knowledge on why exactly it is bad…
Not much in this very sideways market which can go either way but have bought into some 2X shorts in technology and small caps in play money portfolio as a hedge. Pondering ultrashort Gold.
The first quarter rebalancing over the last few weeks has …
@BobC, it isn't that simple. HFT disrupted the trading arms of the very large firms with the big political clout whose arbitrage opportunities declined reducing their profits.
If they had their way, they would have shut down HFT with their lobbyin…
But American capitalism is egregiously unethical. Money = more important than people, more important than peoples' LIVES, more important than fixing the malfunctioning car-part (ignition switch, yes?)
Problem is with American management culture a…
@old_skeet, the old concept of market makers isn't feasible any more in the electronic world of multiple exchanges.
If you read my post above, you will note that it is price discovery that is the key. Market makers did that earlier but their busine…
There is a bit of financial demagoguery going on. Hopefully, it results in some transparency and increased knowledge. The problem with HFT is not in "front-running" but what else happens around it. HFT isn't competing with common investors or mutual…
The main reason to DIY when you have non-trivial capital is that you can get better diversification globally than any single allocation fund.
The main reason to not DIY is that you may screw up both your allocation and fund selection if you don't e…
I am yet to read anything from Zack's that made sense to me. Seems like they keep churning recommendations to keep themselves in business.
Brazil is definitely overbought on technicals and will likely pull back in the short term to test resistance …
