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.
This is very reminiscent of the rumble at the beginning of 2008 when it felt just like a long due correction as it does now and people were making similar plans for dips and projections for recovery. If it is indeed a 20% or thereabouts kind of a pr…
Problem is increase in median income statistic does not necessarily imply increase in total income mathematically. Consider a new sequence of 1 1 4 5 5 with the same median as the first sequence above but less in total than both first and even secon…
If there is a possibility of returning to a nearby non-airport facility from where you can take a cab, you will avoid those ridiculous airport fees which is essentially a way for states and municipalities to tax out of staters over the locals who vo…
Not sure I would jump to that inference (or the opposite) for two reasons.
The movements in the money flow dominated markets have very little to do with the current state of the economy but rather on what a money manager thinks of what his fellow m…
@hank, as surprising as it might seem to some, just being a monopoly or getting there is NOT illegal. What is illegal is using that position to effectively hurt the consumer. So, paying someone to shutdown to create a monopoly is not illegal, neithe…
@mjg, you have to also account for the odds of more than one person picking the same number for the expected return which can decrease expected payout per dollar. That is a little difficult to estimate because those odds depend on how many people ar…
And this
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bearish-jp-morgan-says-sell-stocks-on-any-bounce-2016-01-11
I am amused at why all the banks are suddenly crying so in unison when they almost never do except in retrospect. To save the poor investor?
My…
@heezsafe, thanks for the link. It made interesting reading. Biotechs have been flat from that point not counting today's bounce.
It is like when you read a news report that seems credible and plausible. If you were a participant in the news or had…
It would have been better if he had pointed to who had advised it so it didn't seem like such a strawman to shoot down.
There is a lot of area between getting all out and staying all in like lightening up a little, especially risky or hot money sec…
Energy sector is more than a falling knife. It seems to be in a price reset and so can wallow for a long time in price discovery. I believe something fundamental has changed in the trading instruments that resulted overstated demand or understated s…
In late 2014 she was saying that we are in a late bull market that has ways to go.
What would it take for this "pinup girl" of the white-collar baby boomer men to prognosticate that investors may lose money for any coming year?
She is like the ba…
There are a lot of things wrong in the hedge fund world but ...
Couldn't you write a similar article on the active mutual fund industry based on the failure of the Third Avenue Junk bond fund citing how the average active mutual fund (over the enti…
I also want to add that behemoth funds like Orbimed in addition to traditional VC funds are partly responsible for the depressed valuations in big bio-tech for reasons I mentioned in an earlier post. This is how bio-tech startups are now able to las…
Has anyone pondered the obvious question before taking such media articles for granted?
Why would you consider the manager of a sector fund as extra-ordinary in having beaten the S&P 500 when the sector itself has been beating the S&P 500? …
Not much to talk about in this falling market is there? So off-topic it is...
@msf appears to be right on the first point that the person who shot the picture has the copyright even if he killed you to get your camera.
Copyright laws are just nuts…
If only the median and weighted wages (not including return on capital) were published and followed as a guage of economy whose growth was the goal, we would all be in a better shape. Not going to happen in this paradoxical capitalistic system. Retu…
@BobC, good advice for most. Unless I have misunderstood you, your first and last sentences do appear contradictory though. If not, let me know when we are at or past bottom, so I can put my remaining cash to work. :)
By the time you know a bottom …
PETA's heart is in the right place but often their brain absconds. UK did the right thing by awarding copyrights to the photographer because he had a hand in setting up the camera and the intent. The monkey simply did what monkeys do - monkey around…
@MikeM, great answer. Only wish to add that even when you play in a range (like I do 60% +/- 20%), you are taking on non-trivial risk of underperformance if not loss unless you get lucky. Or you pick a range so small that it makes very little differ…
@old-skeet, enjoy your daily updates on markets and your cash position.
No one knows where the market will head so can only go by intuition. Have been training myself to think like programmed trading to understand it. :)
Said before that markets w…
Politicians are just voodoo dolls we like to stick pins into when we don't like something. They are dolls of us, a nation of self-interested hypocrites (as a collective which is different from each individual intent that falls in a spectrum). We are…
Here is a table of the so-called "lazy portfolios" (these should be familiar to most in this forum I suspect) that is kept updated. The 1-yr performance gives a rough idea of the order of returns for 2015.
http://www.marketwatch.com/lazyportfolio
…
@scott, thanks for the comments from an investing sentiment perspective in Apple. My post was more on the market behavior of Apple as a corporation whatever the investor sentiments may be at the moment. For the former, you and I won't likely care mu…
@charles, just expressing shock at the level of drawdown. Yes, it may be comparable to some of the single funds but this is a diversified/balanced portfolio right? So you wouldn't judge a portfolio return with any single fund especially a sector or …
@vkt,
If you don't have access to PRWCX, I would consider replacing both funds with VMNVX.
Kevin
Thanks, I was looking for smaller, nimbler funds for what I expect will be challenging markets in the next year or two. GLDLX and TIVFX popped up in …
Thanks @Old_Joe, this board seems pretty relaxed about what is ok given the wide range of posts amidst the very informative ones. Am sure I will discover/push the limits given time.
Does @Ted get paid to keep this board humming? Seems like a lot of…
It wasn't as bad as I had expected given futures and China news.
Several oversold buys triggered in my portfolio in Pharma, Medical Devices, Home builders, Blue Chip growth, Big name Tech, China and Asia funds.
Seemed like programmed trades that u…
Seems like 2014, just 3 weeks earlier.
As I had mentioned in an earlier post, market looked like it wanted an excuse to go down and China provided it. Thought it might happen later in the month though. Will probably bounce back tomorrow the way it …
Down 9%? That is serious damage!
One thing that seems to have tripped investors in 2015 were the so-called allocation or balanced funds. Some of them looked relatively good based on prior bull year returns simply because they used higher effective …
Hussman seems like a perfect example of the downside of "playing not to lose rather than playing to win" to use a sports metaphor. Unlike sports coaches and managers that lose their jobs quickly doing so, mutual fund managers keep making money for t…
It is always interesting to see how sentiments build on themselves in either direction by allowing to see only what further reinforces the sentiment. Not to discount it, that is what current markets are built on as much as we like to pretend that it…
If anyone can DEFINE what a sensible (or senseless) market is in a sensible way, I would love to hear it. Predictable? Amenable to simple explanations? Always goes up? Follows some simple metrics or thumb rules? Behaves as I expect it to? Then only …
Looks like mostly tax related trades this week. A bump up next week likely as typical.
To me, it looks like a market waiting for an excuse to pull back but not finding it. Am fully invested at close to 80% in equities so nothing more to invest but…
Being in the middle of Silicon Valley and involved in the startup ecosystem, I am very jaded wrt to such talk. Especially exposed to VCs talking like that all the time. Take the latest buzz word technologies and hype them far from current reality an…
