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 his 12.71%, which I didn't try to recalculate, is achieved by taking annualized return for 1999-2001, then 2000-2002 all the way to 2011-2013 and averaging the 13 results. Of course it says nothing about the volatility one had to live with …
My most expensive fund, which I know several other people here hold, is WAFMX at 2.25%. Ed's commentary made me think a lot as well, and it seems to me that you either have to believe you're getting something valuable for the expense ratio or you s…
@jlev, I think what you're referring to are the lines representing new 13 or 52 week highs minus new 13 or 52 week lows. That means when the number of new 13 week lows is higher than the number of new 13 week highs, the line on the graph will be in…
He had a great record at Nuveen and I like managers who "earn" their money by having broad mandates that they utilize successfully. I don't have an account at Schwab and I have never bought a fund with a front-end load and hopefully never will. Bu…
And while I'm certainly not in the business of recommending funds I think I figured out that Schwab offers this fund with the load waived, TD Ameritrade and Fidelity don't and its not available at E*Trade. I didn't check any others.
@VintageFreak, here's a link to the M* article that gives a good amount of detail about David Iben. After reading the M* article I went to his website to find out more about the fund and enjoyed the commentary that I linked. I find most fund manag…
I think the doom and gloom is actually supportive of the markets. As long as there are naysayers then the chances the market keeps going up are much higher. From my perspective, I would welcome a mild correction as I would be happy to put some mor…
With hindsight it looks great!! I'm a big fan of POAGX and its my largest single position so I've been very happy with its performance in the last few years. The Primecap folks have a fantastic record with the Vanguard funds they sub-advise for as…
@VintageFreak, based on the reading I did its an intermediate-term model, and LT Treasuries have been on a bullish run now for most of this year. I don't find it surprising that a technical analysis would recommend them now, although based on the f…
Do you know anything about Bill Dirlam? The historical results are impressive but it seems he does exceptionally well during big downturns and generally underperforms during bull markets. I've always been intrigued by technical trading but I've on…
I think Option A looks great and I wouldn't worry about the wrap-around problem; the benefit is much bigger than the cost.
@Maurice, I tend to agree with you as far as the first read. I do and will read every word regardless. It will have an infl…
@ibartman and @rjb112, thanks for all the work, this is a great help.
I'm sure many of these links may be useful for lots of different purposes, so I'll summarize what I used and why.
I'm creating a spreadsheet to evaluate mutual fund performance…
@Ted and @MJG, thank you for your posts. This is great information that I've seen before but never spent more than a short while analyzing (shame on me).
Anyway, having done some work to review the data, I find it most interesting that if you'd …
There are monsters like this all over the world. Always have been and probably always will be. While I would be more than happy to see these cockroaches exterminated, the only way I imagine we'll ever minimize the problems these people cause is by…
Its kind of funny that he writes about all the options advisors are pushing these days when its actually the media who do a lot of direct or indirect pushing to the public. There are many kinds of diversification and they address different kinds of…
It makes me think there's at least one and likely more sales and marketing guys sitting in some back office coming up with names like "Strategic" Income. If the fund dropped the name, fired the sales and marketing guys and reduced the management fe…
@rjb112
Hmmm, I sort of assume one of Excel's built in formulas will work but when I looked quickly at a couple it seemed to me they were built to discount a series of payments to the present. Since its such an easy formula I just did it manually i…
@rjb112
PV*(1+r)^n=FV, so I used .02 for r, 65 for n and I rounded the future value from the article to $4.2 million. When I solved for the present value it came out to $1.159 million which I rounded to $1.2 million just to be generous.
@Kaspa
I'm not criticizing your position at all, regardless of its size. I was trying to suggest that I like how these guys approach things and to reflect that I don't have the discipline to stick with them when they trail everyone else even knowin…
What's interesting is that these Intrepid guys are clearly willing to stand by their principles in a big way and it has worked historically. ICMAX and IWM were close to being equal from the fund's inception until mid 2008. ICMAX lost far less than…
I have to give a lot of credit for the choice to my wife, because having never made an investment in her life she said she wanted to invest in healthcare. I gave her a list of mutual funds and ETFs that she read about and we discussed and this was …
This may be a bit misleading because this list is only US focused large-cap growth funds and it doesn't include any sector specific funds. So I looked at large-cap growth funds through today without any restrictions and here's what I found. There …
It achieves a most amazing result when the author simply dismisses inflation because Charlotte probably will be able to add to her investments through her adult life. That's great for Charlotte, it means she's earning more than it costs her to live…
I tend to look at most things from a big picture longer term perspective. With that in mind the places I would put new money don't change much over time, and those are emerging and frontier markets, small cap stocks generally and I try to be overwe…
OJ,
You describe exactly what has become more difficult for me, which is differentiating between the person who's talking to me and all the other background noises when the person talking to me is further away or when they're not looking at me. B…
I've seen a lot of posts here mentioning PRHSX and indeed its been in my portfolio for a while too. I wish I had made a bigger investment at the beginning because the performance has exceeded my expectations, but I have a handful of other healthcar…
Sometimes its unbelievable how many different pricing schemes there are. We've come so far in reducing the cost of investing and yet its become so much more complicated to actually take full advantage of that progress. Two steps forward, one step …
I'm not much of a technical guy, but interested enough to have questions without a lot of answers. The Bespoke guys are looking at a 50 days moving average and Bollinger bands around that. It seems the most typical moving average for Bollinger ban…
TOLLX has a great record along with low risk, so very appealing on that basis. What I'm wondering is whether you would ever pay the big front-end load for a fund like this or any fund for that matter? I just checked my broker and somehow, to my gr…
Interesting, apparently the Russians have said they will import more from South America and New Zealand to offset the reduction of imports from the US, Europe and others. To the extent they just trade on supplier for another, the overall impact wil…
My handful of US small cap funds spent most of last year leading all my funds. This year they're all at the bottom, and amazingly the best one, in the top 15% of small growth funds, has lost money this year. Ugh! I can't complain based on the lon…
Its very nice to see someone defend active fund managers as I have some basic desire to believe or need to make active decisions and struggle to "beat" the market. I quickly reviewed all the funds I own and as davidmoran pointed out, they are all "…
Funny enough, I couldn't find it on the M* retail site either, but when I googled "mutual fund flows" I found a Marketwatch article about Morningstar's report with the same link in it that David used. I then tried to back into where it is on M*'s s…
He's going to cause food shortages and inflation and he also recently approved an increased sales tax that takes effect at the end of the year, further hurting an economy that's already struggling (although it may help in the immediate future as peo…
Costco has some great wine at very good prices!!! I have bottles of Stag's Leap Cabernet and Catena Malbec on my shelf from there and if you ever see Muga Rioja its not cheap but its the best I've ever had.
I'm not sure its possible to answer the question because it depends on too many unknowns, e.g., risk aversion, investment time horizon, need for income, etc. As far as GPEOX, I've invested more than I normally would have because of the hard close a…
