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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

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  • Even at -20% loss, the 60/40 stocks/bonds allocation is still a lot better than 30+ % loss of S&P500. The massive QE seem to stabilize the bond market and the liquidity. One data point on commercial (corporate) bonds was released today. Fri…
  • We also have McConnell to thank for his part to enable Trump to carry on. Only Senate can be flip to turn the tide.
  • @Anna, thank you for sharing your expertise on Excel. I know enough from the analysis perspective but not so much from tracking. Do you manually input the NAV from TSP website weekly?
  • @Mark, if you folks manage to get Quicken to do it's job, great. My need evolved away from Qiicken can provided. At work I have "clone" version of institutional funds, they cannot be track readily. So Excel became the tool I use for multiple purpos…
  • I should also give Morningstar the credit to whom Charles has draw his data from.
    in Escape Plan Comment by Sven March 2020
  • @Anna is right. Dr. Fauci is a federal employee who has advise several presidents dated back to Ronald Reagan days. He is over 70 years old has truly earned his federal pension. We, as the citizens of this country are in debt to his great service…
  • @charles, Still have few more years to go before retirement. I have learned and survived through several market crisis. The key is to stay invest so you can regain the loss in the future days. In the last two weeks, the market declined at a rate e…
    in Escape Plan Comment by Sven March 2020
  • Yes, total bond market index funds are in many retirement accounts.
  • Similar to 2008 crisis, the Fed is buying bonds and lots of them. JNK also went up today while SPY went down. Think Fed is buying junk bonds too?
  • How has the correlation between price and NAV been working out in the current market volatility? In typical trading days when there are ample buyers and sellers, bond prices are traded with narrow spread in relation to their trading volume. The bon…
  • @davidmoran, my condolence to your loss. Since I never fully understood DSENX and its "secret sauce" strategy, I maintain a small position which I rebalanced half of it late last year to bonds. Other than the monthly dividend, the fund has high c…
  • Totally agree. What @davidmoran described resembles the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia. Can't located the footage showed on CNN that go something like this: an earthquake occurred out in the Pacific Ocean and people were running into the exposed beach …
  • @msf, thank you for explaining the MMFs. Currently I am using VMMXX (prime) as our longer term cash position.
  • For those who just lost their job due to COVID-19, the $1,200 check does not seem to go far consider many people live from paycheck to paycheck. How are they going to pay their rent/mortgage, healthcare insurance, car payment and etc? The unemploy…
  • @Old_Joe, For the same reason you stated above, I use spreadsheet instead. A bit more work but it all work. Also I can do detail analysis on Excel on our portfolio through the up and down cycles, year to year and statistic analysis. @Mark, Ex…
  • @msf, Really appreciate your detail posting on MMF. Aside from liquidity, there's the risk of breaking a buck. "[G]overnment and retail money market funds are allowed to try to keep their NAV at a stable $1.00 per share. These funds do this by usi…
  • @Old_Joe, unfortunately it is for Fidelity customers only. I am sure this is available with Schwab and other large brokerages. Need to dig a bit inside their website under tools to uncover all sort of stuff you can use. I encourage you to search i…
  • Not just utility are expensive by historical PE; the entire S&P 500 was traded high before the COVID-19 strike. Perhaps now the valuation is more reasonable. Solar power has come a long way as the cost has come down considerably. Last tim…
  • @bee, Same here, except I use Fidelity instead for better consistency on daily NAV than those from Yahoo. With Excel spreadsheet, there is no limit for tracking and analyzing the input data.
  • Thank you. Read about Amazon's working environment in the past. Now it confirms the same old practice persists even through this contagious condition. Few thing we buy from Amazon today are carefully handled with latex gloves and items inside are …
  • @davfor, is it the same as dead cat bounce in the last two days? @Mark, think I will get some adult diapers ? As long as the COVID-19 cases continue to rise, especially New York, the Fed money will do little to calm the market. The unemployment …
  • There are few bright spots. My low risk bond funds, VIPSX, VBILX, VSBSX, and VBTLX held up well. Other higher risk credit sector funds are all down. GLD and IAU did okay but volatile.
  • muni bond funds and high yield munis also lost big recently (and in 2008). Muni funds had huge increases today — 3-5% — which is unheard of for munis. Personally I think most of the recent bond fund drops were due to liquidity issues from traders se…
  • His reasoning is mis-guided. In this consumer-based economy, people without jobs simply cannot afford to spend and propping up the business is not all that helpful. There has to be string attach to bailout the corporations so that the $ does not g…
  • You may want to checked again on TRP website. YTD as of 3/20/2020 is -17.2% ! Floating rate bonds are BBB and below rated bonds, i.e. junk bonds. Junk bonds move in the same direction as equities, thus has no downside protection.
  • @msf, thank you for the reminder. I have not forgot.
  • This exemplifies the total incompetence of this adminstration. They chose to ignore the existing scientific and medical experts and their advices. Worst of all, they systematically destroyed them by eliminating the key positions and defunded the a…
  • Hopefully this put some context on the eventual recovery. Certainly this will not be a V-shape recovery.
  • This article about Crimson Contagion exercise send chill up your spin about how incompetent this administration is. The end results of this exercise is strikingly similar to COVID-19. Yet the administration failed to recognize the grave consequence…
  • Thank you. The briefing provides more details on recent bond market behavior.
  • In severe selloff period, mutual funds within the same asset class tend to be move in lock-step to each each. Both of these funds are value-oriented. You may want to consider growth-oriented global funds which I think they have declined 30% or more…
  • @newgirl, selling now near the bottom is the classic mistake of locking-in your loss. Both funds are well managed and it is not realistic to expect them to somehow outperform in this severe selloff. This will pass and the market will recover fully…
  • That is for sure. Besides, they are the older demographic and many do not have healthcare coverage either. By destroying the Pandemic Task Force team in the WH, US reacted slow by several critical weeks in order to control the spread COVID-19. …
  • @Old_Skeet, do you mean VIX instead of VIC ? Market is up in hoping the $2 trillion QE package will pass this week.
  • Experience tell me in order to fully recover the loss that would be time, recovery time that is. During 2008 drawdown, S&P500 index took over 4 years to full recovery the loss from peak to trough. Depending on your asset allocation, it may be …
  • The trust may be "blind" but it likely has a phone number. Is it deaf? DOJ can ask for her phone record unless she use a dropbox like in Mission Impossible.
  • @MikeW, As a subscriber to MFO Premium many of your questions can be found through the database collected and analyzed by our very own @Charles. The tools provide powerful insights to analyze mutual fund's performance and risk in terms of Ulcer I…
  • Lehman wasn't a defense contractor. When Boeing is bailed out, I hope they apply Mark Cuban's rule. No more stock buy-backs ever, for the rest of time. If the rule lasted half as long as Glass-Steagal it would be a good outcome. Agee. There has t…
  • a black swan. I think it is more like black swine....given how bonds performing lately. Their correlation has turned increasingly positive to equity. Is this similar to the 2008? Back in 2008, I held a small position of Loomis Sayles Bond, LSBR…
  • No for sure! After 2% annual inflation, investors earn nothing on the 50 years treasury. Larry Kudlow is copy what the European is doing with their 100 years bond and knowing the investors will never live long enough to hold them to maturity.