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.
The market is all about politics. Taxation, monetary policy, trade policy, the deficit: all matter a lot more than random quarterly results. The problem is predicting the future.
They have been giving notice of this for years. TBH the brokerage site is better. You can trade ETFs, etc, and your settlement funds earns a very competitive interest date, currently 4.75% for VMFXX. There is still an option to fund Vanguard-only mu…
One weird thing about Vanguard is that they sort your transactions by settlement date and not trade date, so I wonder if this is some weird side effect of how they display the data. Do they show timestamps for the reinvestments? Unfortunately I don'…
Neither Wells Fargo nor Bank Of America do any kind of signature guarantee any more.
There is an online service https://esignatureguarantee.com/ that will do them. It's expensive, $149 per stamp. After you set up an account and they verify your ide…
I hate to bump an old topic, but as of 2022 no bank or brokerage does Medallion Guarantees any more (only a few brokers and bankers I talked to even knew what they are.) Believe me, I have spent hours on this, and I live in a huge metro area, This h…
There is nothing in the proxy statement about changing investment objectives or advisors, at least for the Growth Fund.
Every fund's and ETF's assets are held in a trust, and that trust is managed by the advisors, just like a personal trust might b…
"Be aware that 60 day IRA transfers are restricted to one within a 365 day period, not within a calendar year. One could not, e.g. do a transfer 2/2/22 and then another on 1/12/23."
Yes, it's a 365 (or 366) day wait. "One year period" more specific…
Thanks for the chart. You can see that even for a dip below the 200 MA it's only about a 2.5% dip in the NAV, and with the dividend yield above 4% even at today's elevated price, risk seems reasonable. I do have "trial" initial limit order in at sli…
Tiingo.com. Currently the web pages seems to be pretty rudimentary ("beta"). My use of their free data is via an API - using a short python program, you can get various data (like daily closing NAV) from the API.
BTW Many funds provide a "tax lot basis" report that lists your covered vs uncovered shares and their basis. This helps you reconcile your records if you have been lumping all your transactions into one basis bin.
Thanks for the discussion. I think this is the key point: "If one uses average basis, there is no choice in which shares were sold. They are sold oldest first."
The "mutual fund bifurcation" is correct, but it doesn't explicitly say whether it's IR…
Unless they charge some kind of fee, I wouldn't bother to transfer IRA assets from one online brokerage to another. Everybody trades ETFs and common stocks for free now.
IRAs held directly by a mutual fund company are different, you don't have as …
Fund companies do make things difficult with their "Medallion Guarantee" signature requirements; nearly all my fund companies seem to be requiring this. I get them for free from my bank, but nevertheless I have been unable to make some direct transf…
Until now I've been slowly bailing out of DODGX. A little too concentrated in financials and tech, big, and it's not been outperforming index funds. Stopped selling it for now until things settle down. Not a bad fund, but I'm retired and shedding ri…
Years ago I looked at brufx, didn't buy. I liked it because it still had under a $billion assets and had a high level of ownership by the fund managers and owners. Check those attributes, not too many funds with them.
Ignore gold shills.
Rebalancing is not too hard. Don't be afraid of capital gains taxes, they are at historic lows if you have little or no earned income.
I am wary of bond funds. As I shave off my stock index fund gains little by little, I've ac…
Look like a done deal. Got an email this morning:
"Legg Mason, the majority owner of Royce Investment Partners, to be acquired by Franklin Templeton
"Transaction Structured to Ensure Continued Autonomy of Royce Organization
New York, NY February 1…
There’s a huge risk in the room with muni bonds: at any moment Congress or the president could decide to make their interest taxable. There has been talk about this in the past few years. I used to think muni bond income would be a significant part…
Vanguard will let you consolidate "rollover" and "traditional" IRA holdings ad-hoc. (Obviously as long as they are the same fund.) As noted above the only restriction used to be was that "traditional" IRA holdings could not be rolled up into a 401k-…
I've always thought of the Dow as the poor mans blue chip dividend fund. The WSJ editors that run (or used to run) the index probably know just as much as anyone else about which stocks to pick, and don't charge any fees, aside from the 0.17% you pa…
One of the things I've picked up on about Europe, as least as far as Vanguard's European fund (VEURX), is they pay a decent dividend - over 6% in the last 12 mo, and more than 4% in the 2011-12 TTM . So in spite of the performance of that fund being…
"paying squat with squat" - LOL.
I'd amend that with "paying negative squat with squat." Go to your brokerage's bond listing and shop for bonds. It's a vast wasteland. Particularly interesting are all the munis with formerly attractive yields that …
I guess Fuss can't retire for a few more years now! I've held the Bond Fund for a long time and done very well by them in my IRA. The big swings in the NAV of the fund have tracked the overall bond market with lots of added "alpha". Currently bind p…
Also, a decent 5% or so cap gain in RYPNX (Opportunity) last week. They've only had LTCG distributions before at YE 2005-2008 and 2011 and never a substantial dividend.
In a high turnover fund like RYPNX I've always seen this as a sign of the manag…
Just doesn't seem to make sense to me. Stocks and bonds have been tightly coupled and are only getting more so. The art and collectibles markets are dependent on the highly variable incomes of rich people. Even assuming gov'ts and central banks try …
The impact of plugging in the CRSP for VTI (and presumably VTSAX etc) will be minimal since the index has a huge number of constituents. The impact of dumping MSCI from VWO (Emerging Markets) is more substantial; there is much less correlation betwe…
It's a pretty significant change: Comparing Vanguard MSCI Emerging Markets (VWO) to FTSE EMERGING MKTS (ENEI.L):
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=VWO&t=2y&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=ENEI.L
I don't remember what happened in 1Q 2011 but AFAIC…
Looks like SAAC is simplest where the MF co knows the basis. I have a few accounts where the MF co knows nothing about the basis since they were opened in the 90s before they even began tracking basis as a courtesy. I guess those are the ones I'll h…
Thanks msf for those links. The Heartland articles goes into more detail than some of the info I've been getting. And some co's, like Vanguard, aren't letting you specify SAAC anyway.
And only 68 IRS FAQs to read through. It's enough to make you w…
I haven't stopped by in a while ... hey looks like 2008 all over again :-)
Doing more of the same this time this time around: Five or so years from retirement: Still saving like crazy, some tax harvesting of obvious long time losers like DODGX and …
