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.
Support MFO
Donate through PayPal
Sven
Lynn,
Thank you so much. I am planning on a 3-year ladder since I am a year away from retirement. Lots of spreadsheet work to calculate the income replacement needed. This ladder will create a steady income stream. So thank you for all your help.
I moved back to high quality bond funds this year. Some of which you covered in the SA article. For now, I will stay with agency bonds to the bond ladder. I will pick active managers for corporate bonds.
Sven
We stay with a conservative portfolio having 40% stocks, 50% bonds, and 10% cash. As of last week, we were down ~ 1.6%. We will hang in there. If the market fall further, we will do more Roth conversion.
Canadian WAS the largest US oil importer, not middle east. This administration has done a marvelous job offending Canada. So much wins, again!
Our stake in value finds have 10% in energy sector. Question is can oil stay at $150 without trigger …
Future market for tomorrow looks bad. Hope this would improve by morning. Fir mow, here is a snap shot:
S&P500, Dow, and NASDAZ are down over 2%
Oil future is over $113 a barrel.
Dollar index is up and oversea stocks are down
VIX (fear index)…
Thanks @bee, we will be doing several Roth conversion before 73. The market has been kind to us and we may end up in higher tax bracket in retirement according to our calculation. Healthcare cost is rising fast this year than that of inflation rate…
Please pass the puck bucket.
Likely too busy dealing with the skin cancer on his neck. Some Roundup would take care of it. RFK jr would approves that treatment.
Glad to see Lewis again and his recommendation.
Have to do kore research to better understand how their stock picking process is better than the passive method.
That could be coincidence since the dollar moved up quickly last week, reversing the downward trend since beginning of this year. Not sure if your oversea fund is dollar hedged or not.Nevertheless, the system would calculate the NAV based on the sto…
Absolutely. Thank you @bee. Please see free article below for the same topic. The original Bloomberg article is behind a paywall.
https://msn.com/en-in/news/world/the-iran-war-s-most-precious-commodity-isn-t-oil/ar-AA1XvEQW
stupidly that is monopolized by Larry Ellison of Oracle. His company is about to layoff 10% of their workforce, ~ 10,000, so to pay for his AI adventure. It is just smoke and screen to say because of AI improvement.
It is truly unfortunate th…
Other sources reveal there is little growth across all sectors, except for health care. Manufacturing sector is negative so there is no re-shoring of good paying manufacturing jobs. Hard to find good news pointing to sustained job growth.
That stable genius does not see all these connections and their impacts on the global economy. Think @rforno is spot on that Trump got played by Netanyahoo! (and the Saudis, to a lesser extent) to start this war.
By the way, top Pentagon officia…
We pulled back quite a bit before the Iran war. Having large cash position enables “selective” buying. For now i stay put and be of where we are.
Several observations:
1. The dollar index has been up and down, and many oversea stocks and bonds …
Excerpt From “The Dangerous Munitions Mismatch Between America and Iran”.
“This is not idle speculation: The Department of Defense has warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping is preparing his military to be ready to successfully invade Taiwan by …
Thanks for the update. Like Buffet used to say “when the tide goes out, you get to see what you are wearing.” Blackrock is the largest AUM, and Vanguard is second. Both signed on to private equity late last year. And they want to get access to 401…
@larryB,
Since 2012 (14 year period), BOND out-performed BND. See chart from M* below.
https://morningstar.com/etfs/xnys/bond/chart
You can compare them in 5 yrs, 3 yrs, and 1 yr period.
BOND is active managed and its risk is comparable to BND.…
At least you don’t own leveraged (2X or higher) products. The loss would magnified accordingly. Money flows back to dollar as the safe heaven during stress tome. Even previous metals tanked.
Stocks and bonds mostly recovered from their height o…
this?"
"American intelligence officials say Iran has not tried to rebuild its main nuclear sites
since the U.S. attack in June. Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium are still buried deep under rubble.
The head of the International Atomic Energy A…
Hope this is not a tip of an iceberg. I recalled mortgage companies such as Countrywide and Washington Mutual started to collapse, then came banks who own lots of subprime mortgage packages. One failed sector spread to another before the entire fina…
Think AI will save their asses? Strategic planning takes exhaustive analysis of many scenarios and their possible outcomes before executing one of the plan.
Operation Overload Overlord during WWII took many months of detailed planning and it went …
Reality finally hit. Iran is closing the Strait of Hormuz where major oil and LNG flow through. Going around that region adds 10 days and 30% cost. Math would say higher cost for everything including inflation. The US dollar is the safe heaven dur…
That is one reason China tries to steal its trade secret by hiring former ASML engineers and reverse engineering of their tools. They may be several years behind the west in advanced semiconductor manufacturing.
In my opinion, the huge AUM of PRWCX has reduced its flexibility to navigate the market it once had. The concentration around the Mag 7 stocks made stock picking challenging; the top 10 holdings show that well. Starting last year, the fund trailed…
I have posted previously before it was lost due to the interruption.
We hold several individual stocks in our portfolio; some have gone back several decades. Few tech stocks have grown well while others are evolving with time. They are part of th…
The US market recovered most of the loss by end of the day. The week is still young until something unexpected happened. Beware of noise and disinformation out there.
Will trim energy stocks when oil strikes $100 a barrel. Also notice junk and…
Thank you. Always informative to hear from Jamie Dimon’s perspective on many topics.
Oil price is rising fast with the Iran war spreading in that region. Straits of Hormuz, a key control point of oil and LNG shipment is impacted directly. Will …
It is all about business of convenience. This war is nothing more than a distraction from the Epstein files.
Why are so many pages missing ? The government found another Epstein house in New Mexico.
https://nytimes.com/2026/03/01/us/jeffrey-e…
Thank you @davidsnowball and @chip,
2:50 pm.Pacific standard time. MFO has returned. It is okay to lose one day content, March 1st. Most importantly that we get back online.
Enclosed please find the ALLW commentary dated 4th quarter, 2025. On page 4 it indicated the ETF invested in 10% gold and 23% broad communities.
https://ssga.com/library-content/products/fund-docs/etfs/us/insights-investment-ideas/spdr-allw-quarter…
@crash, you have a great opportunity to visit the N. M. KECK Observatory atop Maunakea in Hawaii. We have visited several observatories in the States and they are fantastic !
Like you said, what is not spoken is more important on the actual safeguards. Evaluation on AI models (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and Grok) has shown Claude to have superior accuracy over the others. Claude is widey used in classified work now. The or…
Trump ordered to remove Claude AI from DOD work. The rest AI companies are submitting whatever Trump wants, a dangerous move to enable ICE to terrorize American citizens.