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.
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LewisBraham
Hi Hank,
Your satire came across very well. Don't worry about the user name.
Best,
Lewis
Much like in the U.S., in China I suspect it comes down to whether some companies are "too big to fail." One could see the centralized government as a big drawback for investors, but just as often as China has attacked certain companies, it has also…
Isn't it interesting how the Fed can make statements like "The labor market is particularly strong, but it is clearly out of balance, with demand for workers substantially exceeding the supply of available workers." without acknowledging the fact th…
Top 10 holdings showing several derivative positions. Normally, one has to scroll to the end of portfolio list to find derivatives mentioned.
I'm not sure that's accurate, even though Morningstar has it as such.
https://troweprice.com/literature/p…
Look at almost any large bond fund’s annual report today and you will most likely find a virtual stew of derivatives like this one’s. The difference I suspect here is the fund isn’t just using derivatives to bet for certain bonds or types of bonds, …
What I find somewhat unsettling about MAFIX is Appendix A for "Monthly Returns" on page 46 (or page "A-1") of this: https://abbeycapital.com/multi-asset-fund/pdf-viewer/?view=prospectus&hsCtaTracking=6213949d-083c-4dc3-a165-0534cdde2bc2%7C58503…
Rondure New World, i.e, RNWOX has beaten its peers handily in the past three years with less volatility than them as well so I’m not sure what the grotesque attack on the manager’s supposed “virtue signaling” is for. If anyone bought this emerging …
Often when I see the phrase “climate agenda” in a story, I know the author has a fossil fuel or nuclear agenda as is the case here. No one has ever adequately figured out what to do with the highly radioactive form of nuclear waste from plants, whic…
Heraclitus or why I find most but not all technical analysis useless: "No man can step in the same river twice." Unless an investor can explain why a previous price trend occurred and show how similar conditions outside of the price trend itself are…
VTAPX absolutely is a short-term bond fund as far as the models for target date funds are concerned, and that's what I'm talking about and so is the article. In fact, in the Vanguard Target Retirement 2020 Fund for retirees, there are no other short…
We're all maybe kind of giddy with the double up volume and the bounce....but who knows the whammo could be around the corner, no one knows...it is kind of crazy to put your life savings on the line to a great extent....but to the victors belong the…
@davidrmoran It depends on how target date funds mentioned in the piece allocate to short-term bond funds. Vanguard is the largest target date fund manager. It allocates its short-term bond exposure for retirees in its target date funds to VTAPX, i.…
A sign someone is making stuff up to bolster their case: They use familiar cliche stats like “nine times out of ten.” Really, she interviewed sex workers and hit men and they said it was their fathers who got them into the business via nepotism nine…
One thing worth doing with small-caps is looking at their betas. Only a handful have betas less than 1 and if you’re worried about volatility, that matters.
@hank I suspect you're right. I believe the private sector works best with wants and the public sector best with needs. The government has no business manufacturing luxury items and the private sector has no business controlling our water supply. If…
anything govt touches/ rent/ run may turned to doodoos...
I sometimes look at the government buildings constructed downtown during the Great Depression by the WPA and realize they are ten times more solid, prettier and stable than anything the pri…
My understanding is that fees have fallen for individual investors primarily because individual investors are actively selecting low-fee index and other low fee quasi-active factor funds, not because in most cases active managers are voluntarily lo…
Given the fact that money managers have long invested in and celebrated companies that increased their profit margins by replacing human workers with machines, should we feel sorry for the same managers who are now being replaced? Or should we see i…
Interesting funds but very different funds. The risk return metrics even if they’re similar don’t measure how different they are in other ways, with completely different strategies and different kinds of risks the metrics don’t capture.
Consider the JAVA ETF, run by the same manager, Clare Hart, as the VGIIX mutual fund. VGIIX is a five-star fund, even though it has a low active share in part because its expense ratio is a modest 0.69% but also because Hart takes small calculated r…
Because Marks barely mentions costs or management fees, much of what he says here seems wrong to me. The “average investor” in an almost zero cost index fund that captures the entire market beats most money managers after fees. That fee is a hurdle …
@Crash SFGIX has done really well lately, beating 92% of its peers in the last three years. Still, that is a relative game. Emerging markets in general can be a stressful game for investors who can’t stomach volatility. I feel similarly about these …
I don't own either fund, but I admire the manager's honesty and willingness to address mistakes. My issue remains the level of concentration in the two funds, yet I don't think this is something they will address as they don't see it as a mistake, a…
It's worth noting that the linked piece is labeled as "Opinion," so it is not a news piece. Errors MSF pointed out aside, I think there is important information in it: Between 2010 and 2020, the cost of solar power fell 90 percent, and the cost of w…
@MSF I don't doubt your numbers, but I do doubt your focus, given what's at stake environmentally. Part of the problem with finance's fixation on traditional cash flow metrics is it ignores the triple bottom line and the old saying what gets measure…
+1 History will not look kindly upon Manchin for killing the bill so he could buy the second yacht. I think perhaps the fossil fuel industry's climate science denial dodges will eventually end with a major acquisition of a company like First Solar. …
@Crash you guys are correct, but it seems to me that you're simply beating up on a simple maxim: given our system, and given a young-enough starting point, investors will do well, over long periods of time. Don't the "sadistics" bear this out?
All o…
The problem with comparing investing with Archimedes' maxim, i.e., physics, is it assumes that capitalism and GDP growth are natural phenomena like gravity as opposed to human constructs that were created by humans and thus can be destroyed by human…
@TheShadow Thank you for posting this, not blaming you in any way. @davidrmoran Funny. Yet somehow in 2022 it seems possible. You should insist on crypto for all pre-payments.
