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.
Perma bears are as dangerous of overly optimistic managers. Yes, when the bear eventually happens they strike gold but look at Hussman for example. It did make money in 2018 but over 3, 5, 10, 15 year horizons HSGFX has lost money. As smart as they …
@msf You are right. Highly compensated employee is defined by IRS as someone that is making more than $120K and are in the top 20% of the company pay scale.
This of course does not take into account cost of living expenses of the locality. Some whi…
@msf Yes, I was primarily talking about the first half. Sorry for the confusion. I am still in the accumulation phase so my focus was in using these funds for accumulation.
Well, it seems like I am one of those in that 13%. There are a lot of people that earn more than me and yet they hardly have any retirement savings. They are spending like there is no tomorrow.
Hi Ron,
Nice to see you are still around since I recently made my way to the site after 5 years of hiatus.
I am not too fixated on the trade deficit. I put it out there especially since president pretending that putting tariffs will help solve thi…
One thing that the study shows (the one in the link) is that there is some momentum effect in periods less than a year. And it is more likely to be momentum of the asset class/sector so those managers that had a larger allocation to that asset class…
Yes, I agree a lot of random luck is interpreted as success or evidence of skill in the case of managers. On the flip side, skilled managers often do not get credit because they are unlucky or they have been given rains of managing money in an asset…
I own a Suzuki Equator truck. This is a rebadged Nissan Frontier. Most Nissan parts fit identically but front bumper headlights and panel are different styling. The problem is that Suzuki has left the US auto market in 2010 closing all dealerships, …
The question is: what's an appropriate glide path?
I will argue that most decreasing glidepaths do a pretty good job. The end result over time tends to be similar.
I am not sure of the increasing equity allocation in retirement though. I have to …
I used to think that Target Date funds were not pretty good investments. But they have improved and costs have come down significantly. I think most investors will do just fine with a low cost target date fund. People have better things to do with t…
That sounds like variable annuity with wrapped mutual funds inside. They give you insurance but costs and the fine print to exercise that insurance makes it an unattractive vehicle for investing. The terms are written in such as way that the annuity…
The fact that money flowing out of FLPSX makes the fund more manageable. I actually welcome it.
While the fund initially looked at companies whose share price was less than $5, over time they redefined it to $35. I think the real deal was small val…
I used to think Life Strategy funds were not really good choice. Over time they have improved, costs have come down significantly. But now I am thinking that they are actually pretty good investments for most people. There are a lot more to do in li…
It is really unbelievable.
Recently, there was another story of a bitcoin investor dying and not leaving the access password to successors but this is exchange. It should not happen here. You expect that this sort of things does not depend on the …
Almost everyone can run a screen that can beet the market looking backwards. Can anyone you tell me how many of them will beat the market in the next 5 years or even 3 years?
Often money managers that had great records with small amounts of money u…
@davidmoran Inadequate to meet basic needs in retirement and for that reason it needs to be supplemented by personal funds.
But, given most people are way behind in their savings for retirement (or their current income is not actually sufficient to…
In 2017, the COLA was a scant 0.3% — or a meager $4 a month for the average beneficiary.
So in 2017, the average monthy SS benefit is 1333 (working the number backwards $4 / 0.003)
For 2019 the average is $1461 according to this article (not sure i…
@hank I agree that people are doing themselves the biggest damage.
During the era of pensions people did not have to worry about learning about investing, the pensions were invested in professionally (well at least on the paper) and neither people…
This caught my eye at the end of the report:
Fidelity’s entire ETF lineup can be bought commission-free on Fidelity’s online brokerage platform. Earlier this month, the company announced it was nearly doubling the number of funds that can be bought…
I also think employers should be freed from the burden of providing retirement plans.
Employee's retirements savings should go to his/her account hosted somewhere else just like direct deposits to a bank account. It should be as simple as that. Emp…
Well, international markets have not been great in the last few years and those active funds that kept more money in cash did better than the index fund. Index funds area almost always 100% invested.
If you prefer a little less volatile fund take a…
Interesting article. From that you can jump to the article containing the calculator.
https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-states/
Here there is an interesting graph towards the end comparing 2013 vs 2016. Wealth has increase i…
What international or global funds do you have? That way perhaps the recommendations could be better tuned to your portfolio. You do not want too much overlap among funds.
Yes, even if one does not buy his index fund philosophy, he/she is benefiting from overall lower costs. We are indeed lucky in the US. European versions of popular funds (or similar funds) have eye popping costs and fees. Thank you John Bogle!
The damage is already done and like it always does, market might have reacted more violently than necessary. Selling a fund right now because it owns KHC is rearview investing. Instead of selling this could be a buying opportunity going forward.
@Sven you are right and there are some people going around to get rid of that minimal FDA oversight as well. Regulations are there to protect the public but companies have money to buy politicians. As long as we have corporate money in politics, nee…
Yes this is a simple portfolio but Maximum drawdown should give an investor an idea of how much they can stand to lose. A lot of people have much less loss tolerance than they imagine probably because they have no idea what to expect. They are surpr…
I don't think LTI is meaningful. If you only had $100K, that means you only have 2 years of money to live. That is a big big problem. On the other hand if you had $1M portfolio and after loss you will have $700K which means 14 years of money left an…
I kind of agree that large cap companies have a lot of international exposure. Since large cap companies make most of the traditional indices, what is considered US market index has a lot of international exposure. You need to go down the capitaliza…
I remember those days when every investment advisory firm taunting the diversification benefits of the Commodity Investing so a large number of funds were created in that era but most of them really did not deliver on returns.
@Junkster hi! How are your junk bond investments going? I remember you did very well during the recovery.
I think at some point we will hit the wall again. It has been more than 10 years since last crash. I firmly believe it will happen again as t…