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.
including energy storage facilities that use batteries to store power that gets released when the grid needs it. Grid batteries are also heavily exposed to tariffs because, unlike EV batteries, practically none are made in the U.S. They are made in…
Nicely laid out. Unfortunately what I expect here is the same thing that's being done with immigration - a shell game. When one law is shot down, just use another and keep the deportation planes flying (and the import cargo ships away).
Meanwh…
” … probably be satisfied if Congress simply delegated their tariff power to the President.”
Perhaps initially. But there’s a larger issue of whether Congress can constitutionally delegate away to another branch of government an authority they are…
By using options, one can create ("structure") financial instruments having virtually any behavior, at a cost of course. IMHO it's not much different from betting - not meant in a derogatory way. And unlike betting, when investing the deck is sta…
He got irritated when a reporter asked him about the TACO trade.
He got irritated at the reporter. "Six month ago, this country was stone cold dead. We had a dead country. We had a country people didn't think it was going to survive. And you…
Say you owned GSPKX and SPY on Oct 9, 2007. That's one of just a few covered call funds that existed and used covered calls back then.
Between then and March 9, 2009, you would have lost 55.17% with SPY. GSPKX would have provided you around 3% of…
The approach depends on one's objectives. For day-to-day, checking account type usage (or hank's trading), IMHO only a MMF, like GABXX (7 day yield 4.30%) or VUSXX (7 day yield 4.23%), are a good match. I'm assuming a "checking usage" occurs in a …
By "down" to the 22nd percentile I meant that PRWCX typically ranks even higher. In half the years of the past decade it was at the 10th percentile or higher.
As of last market close (May 23), M* reports it at the 23rd percentile YTD. (It dropped…
These are many tempting ideas to read for one who has 95% of his egg in FIGXX earning 4.17%
Normally chasing a few basis points isn't worth the effort, but with 95% in MMFs, you might take a look at VUSXX. Its seven day yield is 4.23%. And last …
Vanguard has been careless in merging some of its OEFs. After ignoring related investor complaints, it had to settle with the SEC on this
What Vanguard was careless about was how it went about reducing the min of its institutional clones of TDFs. …
Many years ago I looked into ways of investing in currencies when Fidelity (among others) offered currency funds.
Invesco CurrencyShares® ETFs (e.g. FXE, FXF) are one way to play currencies. The YTD gains reported above include both changes in pr…
Passive voice in CNBC piece: "are expected". Who is expecting, and why?
The current SEC rules and regulations require funds to seek "exemptive relief" from the SEC. Generally all share classes of a fund must be treated equally. That's not true …
I don't see The Economist article either. I did a search on all Economist pieces since March 1 containing the word "Europe" (there are 267). The vast majority are under 1,000 words. Several are between 1,000 and 2,000 words in length (typically…
Thanks all for sharing your thoughts. My current risk assets are limited to TRIGX,, CGDV and DODLX. All actively managed and not low cost by any standards. It’s not business as usual for me,,,
M* classifies DODLX as a global bond fund (not hedged…
The main concern with doing simple (straight line) extrapolations is that they assume nothing will change. Businesses will ignore increasing uncertainty in the world, both economic and geopolitical. The markets will keep chugging along.
We've …
The SEC filing may be a work in progress. While WCPNX's prospectus explicitly permits investments in unrated securities ("The Fund may invest up to 25% of its total assets in debt securities which are unrated or which are non-investment grade") the…
Thanks for the link. Pieces on the Kitces site are always worth a read. I'm planning to read it in full over the next couple of days.
Meanwhile, I see that the exec summary is already out of date:It also creates a new type of savings account for …
Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Jan 1, 2014.
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000XLooks like an interesting read. Thanks for the link, though I won't be buying it from Amazon.
A decade ago, the wor…
You may be giving Trump too much credit (pun not intended) here. S&P and Fitch had already downgraded the US. Moody's downgrade was just the last of the triumvirate to take note of what had happened over time. Moody's wrote of more than a deca…
They'll likely adapt as they have in the past, by changing their charters and adding notes about taking on greater risk. Some may have a more flexible rule that their paper must be rated AAA by any NRSRO.
Still, what will the CLO AAA funds do? Th…
Gosh, so many reasons. But what was posed was a rhetorical question not really seeking an answer. So I'll offer just one of many reasons.
Many institutions have (or had) a rule that they could only invest in securities rated AAA by at least two o…
You omitted a link to the May 18 post you quoted, here it is:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/deindustrialization-causes-and-consequences
What I'm assuming is that Krugman meant something. You might have stopped with "hard to tell exactly what"…
Side note: I traveled round trip from NYC to Luxembourg for $400 in 1973. I don't how that compares to prices today; but that was a hell of a lot of money at the time. And as you note, market places vary a lot depending on the product or service.
I…
Here's another theory. Lipper data is stale.
I went back and checked old docs. While the May 1, 2025 prospectus (and Schwab and Fidelity) report ERs of 1.61 (gross) and 1.30 (net), the May 1, 2024 prospectus reports ERs of 4.24% (gross) and …
Speaking of data inconsistencies, what's the correct ER for LEOIX?
The prospectus says 1.61% - 0.31% (fee waiver) = 1.30% net
Schwab and Fidelity also report these figures.
M* says the ER is 3.55%. When "adjusted" (for borrowing costs, etc.) this …
In general I'm not fond of using daily figures for statistical calculations - too much noise unless you're a trader.
In this case though, those spikes are not noise but data errors. TestFol didn't handle divs correctly. LEOIX went ex-div on Dec…
You may be getting misled by its extremely short history. Eyeballing its performance graph at M*, it looks like it tracked the entire (20 fund) category pretty closely. That is, the 1.6 std dev is not something special for this fund, but rather i…
As I wrote before, Moody's is late to the party. In that sense, Bessent is correct that Moody's is a lagging indicator. However, Moody's is also correct that there has been an "increase over more than a decade in government debt and interest payme…
A key expression in Moody's press release is "Without adjustments to taxation and spending".
What does "without adjustments" mean? There are two interpretations: under current law and under current policy. If you were to say this sounds like dou…
These are exceptions that prove the rule. The sovereign ceiling rule is a de facto rule, i.e. one generally followed in practice by Fitch, by Moody's and by others. The fact that S&P followed this rule uniformly in the only instance in a singl…
The sovereign ceiling rule (that corporate lenders should not have a higher credit rating than the sovereign debt) is applied by many credit rating agencies. This is a rule of thumb, not an ironclad rule, though agencies tend to apply it strictly e…
There are several different reasons why the asset-weighted fees have dropped. I wonder how much is due to funds reducing fees and how much is due to changes in investor behavior.
Investors have been moving to index funds which cost less to run. I…
(If you ask me, Queens, New York comes a lot closer to being who we are now.)
I hope Krugman's economics are more thorough than his demographics. While Queens is often cited as the most diverse county in the country, that diversity is only, pardon…
Is it normal for the POTUS to instruct a retail company (Walmart) to eat tariffs that he was responsible for?
As to FOTUS demanding companies bend to his tantrums on tariffs, pricing, and production locations
WaPo:
Trump’s view of his role was ref…
You may need to change the M* chart settings. It sometimes defaults to monthly frequency. Make sure that this is set to daily, then try it again.
Also, make sure that you have selected the data type(s) that you want. NAV or price, with or witho…
The IRA is mostly in SPAXX now,
You might consider moving that to FZDXX ($10K min in IRA), though it would only have gotten you six extra basis points YTD. Almost enough to feel stupid about :-)
Summary prospectus
Whether it's an asset allocation fund (TDF with glide path or traditional fixed target allocation fund), or a pure robo advisor, they seem to all pretty much build cookie cutter portfolios and rebalance. So I agree that:
Most buyers of robo-adviso…
