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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
these stocks were also growing more expensive relative to how much profit they produce, an important measure of valuation.
Valuation is getting ahead of these stock. VMVFX is a global fund with ~50% oversea and currency hedging.
Don Yacktman is no longer of part of management.
His son, Steve, and co-manager, Jason Subotky have been running Yacktman funds for last several years. Both Yacktman and Yacktman Focus funds are concentrated that focus on few sectors.
I agree with VintageFreak. Take the 2007-2008 housing crisis for example with subprime lending, the guilty parties merely paid the fine and admitted no wrongdoing. In the end, Washington Mutual and Countrywide were taken over by other banks. Man…
In my own plan I disregard the bond fund advice and substitute that portion with my SS account
@Mark, do you use the current figure from IRS for your calculation? Just curious. In my previous posting, I still use sizable bond allocation.
Lost confident on Mark Hockey since 2000 and never look back. Large stake in banks took much longer to fully recover. His international fund did well when he can move around with much small asset base. Think he reached his maximum capacity long a…
@kevindow, Right now in this low interest rate environment, the only thing that is predictable is the management fee/expense ratio. I like VCIT and VCLT, and OSTIX. The rest I let Wellington and PRCWX's to make the bond allocation.
@jlev and VF, thanks for sharing. DSENX has done well since inception and I try to better understand why and how it works, especially with CAPE. Maybe I am thinking too much.
Concur that $300/month for combo package is a bit too much.
We eliminated the landline and replaced it with a cell phone plan (2 lines with 1Gb data plan - $80 Verizon). Don't have to pay for long distance calls. Cable TV and Internet package f…
Thanks for the warning, but that is perfectly legal to invest (at a much lower price) before IPO. Also notice that Fidelity owns a sizable stake of Alibaba with $610 M unrealized gain.
At least it is on the positive territory (for 50 years!). Some German and Japanese bonds have negative yields. This is the direct consequence of low/no yield world we live in, and it forces the income investors to take on more risk that they norma…
To the larger issue, who needs SNL to get a laugh? Watch or read the news. When a $900M loss in a single year can be spun (by Rudy and others) as a mark of "financial genius" who needs SNL?
This reminds me a quote from Mark Twain...
"It's not retur…
So glad I didn't drink the Kool-aid. After reviewing the top 10 holdings (that would constitute about 80% of the entire fund), lots of beaten down stocks like Sears for good reasons. Not my type of manager I want to hire to loss my money.
it shouldn't be surprising that returns suffer. Investing luminaries such as Charlie Ellis, Jack Bogle and Burton Malkiel have argued for ages that simpler and cheaper is better -- and maybe less subject to the second-guessing of outsiders who think…
Remember when tobacco products were advertised everywhere in billboards, TV, magazines, and the coolness of Marlboro man. It took decades before their advertisement was banned.
There is too much lobby's money to keep the ads going for prescripti…
@msf, I will see if Vanguard can answer your question better. My discussion with them have been quite informative on the ins and outs on 529 plans. The information they provided were all verified later to be spot-on. Among other brokerages I work…
He seems to be declining since 9/11. Last time he ran as a presential candidate in the primary, he lost lots of that energy he had as a mayor of NYC. This year at the convention he is clearly not the same person.
@hank, I admire your optimism and respect your view.
While I am not on the bearish camp, there is not a whole lot of room for significant growth in stock prices from here given the earning growth has been flat for several quarters. Going forward…
The book is a classic. I still have the 7th edition of that book and it was a reading assignment for my business class. In addition, Vanguard has a number of good articles under News & Perspective.
@JoJo26, I hope you noticed that during 2007-2008 crisis vast majority of active managed funds did not offered any downside protection. Only a handful did not lost as much by holding large % of cash. Many did even worse than their respective index…
If the figure above is representative of US general population, we are in trouble unless the they have a healthy social security and generous pension. Over the past 20 years define pension plans have largely been replaced by define contribution pla…
I really like to see the endowment funds from all the major universities and how they compare to target-date funds, say 2000 till 2016.
Even among the target-date funds, some are better than the others just like 529 college saving plan.
Stable value funds are generally available in 401(K) in large companies. It provides a slightly higher yield than money market with a fixed NAV of $1. I used it in the past to park my cash position and the one available has low ER.
For retail inv…
Thank you. Good reading.
Investors need to realize how real estate sector in particularly REITs is quite sensitive to interest rate. At present VNQ yields about 4% vs 2% with BND, and that attract many income oriented investors. At higher inte…
Vanguard balanced index fund is returning 6.3% as of Sept 16th - about the same as S&P500 index. Unless rates go up rapidly and more several times a year which I doubt, I think the 60/40 will do ok...
Like MSF I used a terminal networked to the university main frame computer. That was before word processing, excel spreadsheet, and Powerpoint software, let alone internet. How things have changed... So I do appreciate the all the new tools and ho…
