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.
Reply to @Old_Joe: Yuh, that has been part of my hesitancy. Getting a dedicated server is a bit costly, solves some but not all of the challenges we face, and adds a few of its own. Still, we'll keep at it. David
Reply to @AndyJ: Thanks for catching the goof on my report of the ticket symbol. Somewhat "exits" didn't work in my brain, so I transposed a couple letters. David
Morningstar is tracking larger international funds by their "active share," a measure of the degree to which their portfolios diverge from their benchmark's. In general, a greater active share reflects either (1) greater managerial independence or …
Reply to @Ted: True enough, though most of the difference is accounted for by a single day - the last paragraph above. If you made your investment on January 3rd, the difference between the two would be more modest (SEEDX 15.2%, VFINX 17.3%). For …
"As I mentioned earlier, by definition every stock must be held by someone. So when Mom and Pop buy stocks, they must buy them from someone else, and when they sell them, they must sell them to someone else. Let’s call those other parties “X.” The m…
Reply to @Charles: At base, they can count. One retail investor is worth $10,000 in AUM and one financial planner is worth $1,000,000 (or $10M or $30M). Are they trying to game the advisors by making them think they're getting the real inside poop…
Hi, Bitzer!
If by "defensive" you mean "weakly correlated to the stock market," you might benefit by thinking about how equity-oriented funds minimize their correlation.
Some choose to short individual stocks, which allows them to maintain an effe…
Reply to @equalizer: Over the past couple years, about a half dozen people have asked me to confirm that their orders ("I ordered a biography of Catherine de' Medici and wanted to know ...") were credited to MFO. While I cannot see individual order…
Reply to @Charles: Works for me. When I attempted the back conversion on my own I get enough compatibility warnings that I gave up the idea. I'm glad you were able to make it work.
David
Reply to @Investor: Hi, big guy!
Sorry about the delayed response. Just returned yesterday and faced a surprisingly large pile of stuff of the "why didn't you do this before vacation?" variety. Since Chip and Charles have weighed-in on copy edits…
Reply to @VintageFreak: Perhaps because the folks who buy it today will be holding it, mostly, under the new leadership? As a result, Morningstar might want to be signaling "don't move in so quickly"?
Just a guess.
David
Stephen has been reading this thread and says "thanks," by the way. He's fairly sure that FINRA regs preclude his saying it directly, in a post here. After our conference call with him, some folks reached out to ask about Vanguard availability. He…
Reply to @VintageFreak: Stephen was funny on the subject in our conference call. He's just adamant that he won't become a NTF ("an NTF"?) fund because that would require jacking up the expense ratio for everybody (40 bps would be needed to match th…
Reply to @Charles: Read an interesting proposal once, that the top research universities (Harvard, Yale, Stanford...) form a consortium to buy and run The New York Times. The argument, at base, was that great universities need great newspapers (he…
Reply to @Charles: I mostly think of funds falling into three baskets.
1. Funds that give me a sinking feeling. Ones where you look at think, "dear God, what are they up to?" There are a lot of those. The geography of the fund universe is such t…
Reply to @JoeNoEskimo: The speculation from folks in the field, though not Robeco per se, was that the fund will likely close by year's end. They'll likely have the new fund, with vaguely extortionate fees, live by then.
David
"It's time to stop worrying and start acting," say the author (who also seems to suggest that a sustained rate increase "isn't expected to happen until sometime next year or beyond").
His suggestions are common: short-term bonds, maybe high yield…
Three current / impending changes:
Bill Frels at Mairs & Power Growth (oddly, no word about Balanced)
Preston Athey at T. Rowe Price Small Cap Value
Jesper Madsen at Matthews Asia Dividend
Morningstar is reasonably sanguine about each. They m…
Reply to @kevindow: Morningstar is wrong but they expected to have the number right by Monday. Given that the correction was imminent, I was disinclined by harp on the error.
The error is occasioned by a policy decision on their part: they report …
Hi, Daves.
There are others far better qualified on this topic than I am, so I'll be brief:
1. Get an idea of what your retirement income will look like. The official Social Security benefits estimator is http://www.socialsecurity.gov/estimator/.…
I screened for U.S. stock funds whose average market cap was under a billion. There are 84. I sorted them by Sharpe ratio, generally considered the best one-stop stat for risk-adjusted performance. The top three are:
Pinnacle Value (PVFIX): as…
FPA Crescent (FPACX), my largest holding, was up and has been quietly splendid this year. Likewise FPA International Value (FPIVX), about which we've written a fair amount.
Curiously, FPA Perennial (FPRAX) and Source Capital (SOR), it's closed-end…
Can you say TNSTAAFL? ("tin-staffle")
None of that free content you read on commercial websites is free. Every tap on every keyboard has to be paid for by somebody. The fact that you don't pay for it up front in a subscription fee doesn't change…
You might want to read the prospectus for RiverPark Strategic Income, which is not yet available for sale. It was featured in last month's "coming attractions." David Sherman is quite risk conscious and hates losing money. In conversation, he's i…
It might be worth considering a global small cap fund as a way of broadening your (or your manager's) opportunity set. In August we'll profile Grandeur Peak's new Global Reach fund which fits in that niche, as does the relatively new Royce Global D…
Hi, Catch.
Google Analytics tracks numbers of unique visitors (hah!), visits, pageviews, length of stay and so on. The aggregate numbers (10,500 - 11,500, depending on season) come from there.
Folks can, optionally, sign up to be reminded of our …
If somewhat wants to try posting a link, that would be great. Because I subscribe, my attempted links often lead other folks to crash straight into a paywall.
Reply to @MaxBialystock: Exactly the same concerns were expressed when Mr. Frels took over Mairs and Power Growth from Mr. Mairs in 2004. Oh sure, he'd been the co-manager for five years but he wasn't The Big Guy. Seems to have worked out okay and…
Most of the 2008 relative failure occurred in the first three weeks of the fund's existence. Here's Mr. Smead's discussion of that period:
Our first year of managing the Smead Value Fund could not have been more difficult. The fund began trading on…
Reply to @GregFromBoston: The Winkelvoss Bitcoin ETF! It's coming! The "investing risks" section alone runs to 18 pages and notes that Bitcoins might, maybe, just a little be illegal or that hackers conceivably could make the entire enterprise dis…
The reference comes from a book by George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (1991). Lakoff's a fairly major voice in the realms of language and meaning, but his writing gives me a headache. As a result…
Reply to @AndyJ: Hi, Andy!
Junior recognized Abnormal Returns as a "best of the web" site among human-curated financial news aggregators back in May, 2012. He's recently submitted a bunch of updates for the "best of" series, and we'll be working …
