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.
Seem we picket (protest) the social / constitutional contracts of our "publicly" run country rather than our "publicly" owned companies...public safety & health, political representation, Individual freedom, entitlement programs, etc. fall at th…
VIX climbed 10% today, but still close to its 52 week low.
VIX Index
The MOVE Index climbed 5%, but is making new 52 week highs:
The Merrill Lynch Option Volatility Estimate (MOVE) Index is a yield curve weighted index of the normalized implied v…
Family Feuds...
America’s Covid Swab Supply Depends on Two Cousins Who Hate Each Other:
Admiral Brett Giroir, then an assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, had been put in charge of testing, and he had plenty…
Political Pressure on CEO Pay and Taxation:
Sanders invited Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to testify at the Budget Committee hearing, but he declined to appear. Bezos’s salary was $81,840 in 2019, as it has been for many years. But the company calculates hi…
The Boy Who Cried Bubble
Based on his words, Grantham is predicting that U.S. stocks will be below where they were in the summer of 2020 at “some future date”. When Grantham penned this prediction (January 5, 2021), the Dow was at 30,200. The lowe…
Cullen Roche on the need for both Stocks and Bonds:
...we all have specific time horizons on certain liabilities – your rent, your mortgage, your credit card bill, etc. And the key to good financial planning is matching those liabilities with certai…
@davidmoran @Baseball_Fan
I try to remind myself skilled fund managers help manage upside/downside potential. A fund like COTZX attempts to gauge these two dynamics and adjusts its holdings according to maximizing the up and minimizing the down. VW…
The duration for long-term bonds (VBLAX), a measure of how sensitive prices are to interest rates, is 15. An oversimplified way to think about this is a 1% rise in rates would lead to a further 15% decline from here. Yikes.
Vanguard’s total bond fu…
Bitcoin as a hedge against monetary inflation...
Billionaire investor Mike Novogratz says bitcoin will be like a report card that measures how the government is handling citizens' finances
Novogratz indicated that bitcoin is an inflationary hedge an…
After years of accumulating a retirement nest egg using exclusively low cost, well diversified Target Date Funds, determine your income needs and allocate a portion of your portfolio to meet those income needs. Your Target Dated Fund (now very conse…
I thought the Kaiser Health article was very meaty. I experienced first hand how medicare works (cared for family member for 5 years) and I would have no problem with Medicare as a "national health care for all" platform.
We'd pay for premiums thr…
Opinion Pieces:
Impact of Key Provisions of the House COVID-19 Relief Proposal on Marketplace Premiums
impact-of-key-provisions-of-the-house-covid-19-relief-proposal-on-marketplace-premiums
WSJ Article:
supersizing-obamacare-subsidies
I sold a home this year for over asking (price inflation). I plan on doing the same for a collectible car I own (we will see what it sells for).
I suppose equities will continue to inflate as well, but when interests rates rise and demand dries up…
I wanted to re-post some of the article's comments and additional links
Rule Based Investing & Retirement Spending:
Freeze Rule: In any year when the portfolio has shrunk due to market losses, we freeze the withdrawal amount, not taking any i…
Thanks @ davidmorn
I am also intrigued by Pfau's & Kitces studies that suggest:
In a world where the conventional wisdom is that retirees should reduce their equity exposure throughout retirement as their time horizon shortens, this research su…
The Rubrik's Cube of Vaccine Manufacturing:
Globally, vaccines are manufactured across drug firms’ existing networks and often need to pass through several countries - and even between continents - before they are ready to inject into arms. Within t…
The original Chinese government story, that the pandemic spread from a seafood market in Wuhan, was the first and therefore most widely accepted theory. But cracks in that theory slowly emerged throughout the late winter and spring of 2020. The firs…
Andy Lane has managed the construction of enormous facilities for extracting and transporting natural gas, in places like Trinidad and Indonesia.
Now he is working in his native England, taking on a complex and expensive venture that essentially ai…
Related Article:
Don’t put all your eggs in the yield curve control basket just yet
Many believe that the recent rise in US treasury yields has crept up on the Fed policy radar and that the natural next step for the Fed is to hint at and eventually …
A need for Low Dead Volume Syringes (which would provide a 6th dose out of every vial).
Pfizer spent months working to extract sixth dose from vials as vaccine production shortfalls loomed
The company’s lobbying efforts succeeded. On Jan. 6 the FDA…
New side effect... PFE will get very rich.
Bloomberg article on Pfizer's roll out of their vaccine in Israel and globally.
Pfizer has supplied 95 million doses globally. It’s executing on one of the most ambitious scale-ups in pharmaceutical histor…
Understanding a Fed tool called "Operation Twist"
Mark Cabana, head of U.S. rates strategy at BofA Securities, wrote recently in favor of bringing back Operation Twist, saying "the Fed is simultaneously losing control of both the U.S. front end and …
Great article @Mark
Unpacking the carbon emission problem into components from mining (materials) to manufacturing (vehicle components) to energy Production / Conversion, distribution, storage, grid back-up, maintenance, recycling...lots of places …
Buffet's Warning on Owning Bonds:
Can you believe that the income recently available from a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond – the yield was 0.93% at yearend – had fallen 94% from the 15.8% yield available in September 1981? In certain large and importan…
Treasuries yields, Inflation and the Equity Market:
trillion-treasuries-mystery-is-bedeviling-global-markets
The Merrill Lynch Option Volatility Estimate (MOVE) Index:
Many of us are familiar with the VIX Index, commonly referred to as the “Fear…
The road to carbon neutral may require carbon to be driven forward...
At a time when most major companies are working on plans to cut their carbon emissions, one of the darlings of green investing is working to increase its emissions footprint.
Y…
There’s that...YTD their 3 year old fund is in the top 4%...hoping others find value in what appears to be a well written article along with a few other finds.
GreeNews:
Oil Trade Group Is Poised to Endorse Carbon Pricing
oil-trade-group-considers-endorsing-carbon-pricing
Mining magnets: Arctic island finds green power can be a curse
arctic-island-finds-green-power-can-be-a-curse
These-bond-funds-and-bond-etfs-are-now-among-your-best-choices
the most widely owned bond fund category, intermediate term funds, often called "core" funds, have generally averaged more than 6% annualized over the last two years. Not bad, especially…
