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.
Hi Old_Skeet and thank you for your insights. Indeed, I see the beautiful simplicity in how your system allows you to evaluate bigger or smaller pieces of the portfolio, which I also attempt to do with the portfolio xray tool.
Your sleeves tend …
@Crash, you are soooo right about M*. I've concluded if you think the way they think then its probably okay, otherwise you have to work a lot harder to find what you're looking for, and you always, always, always have to double check their informat…
@Old_Skeet, I would be grateful to learn more about your sleeve system, most importantly how you define your sleeves. Your results are impressive, congratulations!
I basically have only two missions, the first of which is to be (significantly) ove…
Similar to @jlev, I bought a bunch of GPEOX in anticipation of the closing and will buy more before they close. I was, and still am, hoping the correction will be a bit more substantial over the next couple of weeks so the remainder of my intended …
It sounds like their goals for increased traffic are tourist driven, so if it moves forward, investing in tourism should do well. And if you really want to know who benefits most from the construction, I'd be looking at those who make the decisions…
Given the connection between Wasatch and Grandeur Peak its not surprising that a culture of candor and transparency prevails at both. A long time ago I owned a few Baron funds and found the quarterly commentaries well worth the read. They were ful…
David, first of all thank you and the others for all of the effort you put into this every month. It is much appreciated as are all the opinions and ideas on the discussion boards. I subscribe to M* and a few daily/monthly newsletters and I look f…
Funny, from the original post a year ago WAFMX was one of the funds that was up and yesterday it was breakeven. It was my only non-negative fund, unless you count my position in SPXU, which is a 3x short S&P etf that I bought two months ago whe…
For some reason, and I can't find the information anymore, but I thought I had read they believed their firm-wide capacity was $3 billion. With $2.3B already in their current funds, and I believe 3 more funds to come, they are either going to have …
The law of unintended consequences!! Most organizations in the world both private and public find it difficult to punish those who break the rules without punishing all those who follow the rules or at least the intent of the rules.
I don't think this is about money laundering. The ability to control money laundering doesn't depend on where you are or what your address is, and there have been more effective restrictions in place for many years. The basic rule was about securi…
It seems this might be an outstanding opportunity to help some of those people who are overly obsessive about investing. Since David has made the clear and valuable point that burdening ourselves with more information often leads to lower quality o…
I'm not a big fan of all these fads either, but somehow this just seems like a twist on closed end funds, in which case I don't imagine I'll be involved in this one either.
I subscribed to FundX for a few years before 2008. My experience with the recommendations was generally good, but depending on how you try to follow the newsletter and what your transaction costs are it gets a bit unwieldy. In all the cases I reme…
Maybe I'm going to give an answer that you already know, but M* has a fund compare tool that I believe is unlimited. The time periods compared are not exactly the same (ytd, 1 month, 1 year, 3 year, 5 year) but the returns I found when I did it are…
I think part of the problem is that the average management fee for "actively" managed funds is between 0.5% and 1.0%. With $5.5 trillion in those funds in the U.S. it means fund companies are scalping somewhere between $28 and $55 billion from our …
I was a little surprised to find out, when I just looked it up, that the IMF gets about 17% of their money from the US. I would have thought the number much larger, but the contribution from our taxes is almost 3 times bigger than Japan at #2 and G…
Hasenstab basically IS the Ukrainian bond market and it will very likely be our taxes that pay off the debt. I had an investment in the fund which I've reduced and will most likely eliminate because I think investors could be hurt badly if he needs…
I have problems with M* a lot while at the same time I'm able to access other websites in different tabs of my browser, so I know its not my service provider. Normally my problems only last for a couple minutes, but this has been happening for a mo…
I like the fund and I like their approach to invest in the rising middle class. I wish they had closed the fund sooner and I wrote to them a few weeks ago asking why the had closed WAIGX at a lower asset level with a much bigger investment universe…
This is such an embarrassment for the U.S. and another piece of evidence about how broken our political process is. The more I read about this the more I'm convinced the only thing that's really being debated or discussed is how best to get elected…
Hi Old_Skeet,
That's a very interesting approach. It sounds like rather than a pure 50/50 allocation to the two trending areas, you overweight them. How do you decide the extent to which you overweight the trending categories? And if you're usin…
This is a similar trend following strategy to the FundX newsletter, although the newsletter's process is only based on the actual performance of mutual funds and ETFs rather than the multiple factors mentioned in the article.
I'm always a little …
Thanks AndyJ! Like you, I'm not a fan of index funds and I think the GP crew is very good. Their willingness to close funds at such small sizes seems unlike any other mutual fund company I've ever read about or invested in, and the fact that some …
I've never thought about this at the fund family level but I think its something that deserves specific decision making rather than backing into whatever happens. My key focus is on big picture allocation, and I want to be overweight small cap and …
Thanks Vert! I'm interested in their Fallen Angels fund as well, but I'm not sure my confidence is as high in their skill with turnarounds as it is with more traditional growth stocks. I'm very interested in the Global Micro Cap fund since small f…
@cman, thank you!!! I was feeling somewhat depressed after reading Sam Lee's article (and its funny but I feel that way a lot after I read his articles) and you've cheered me up. I felt even better when I did a little research and found out Lee's …
I have got to think that the founders of GP are justifiably proud of their achievements...and their shareholders are also pretty much happy as a clam too. What a nice achievement for both. Me included.
And, kudos to Mr. Snowball for introducing th…
All three of my top funds are emerging markets:
#1 GPEOX +6.34% but I bought a week into January so I'm up 7.52%
#2 EMBCX +5.93% even EM bonds have helped
#3 WAFMX +4.82%
These 3 are 15% of my mutual fund portfolio and closer to 10% of my total p…
Fundamentals and Japan, in the same sentence? The Nikkei and the yen have tracked each other up and down pretty closely for almost 10 years. Japan suffers from the worst demographics in the developed world and the recent consumption tax increase c…
I think you have to believe the Nikkei's performance is largely due to disappointment that the BOJ didn't move to more aggressively support the economy on Monday. As I posted earlier this week in a separate discussion I still believe in Abenomics a…
I own HQL as well and I'm adding to it as it has suffered as well. I also have other funds that are overweight healthcare, usually biotech, but I don't view them as specific biotech bets.
If you take what the article says literally, that the further people thought Ukraine was from its actual location the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily, means that those who thought Ukraine was in Australia were some of the most like…
Abe got elected at least in part based on a promise to stimulate the economy and due to the consumption tax that was passed by a predecessor he'll have to convince the BOJ to further devalue the currency in order to offset the negative impact of the…
