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.
Getting back to combined balance requirements ...
I had not realized that unlike other brokerages with tiers of benefits, Merrill does not household accounts. If you and your spouse have IRAs there, they don't add together to qualify for a higher…
I bit the bullet a few years ago and moved into the Plan with the very best coverage, including deductibles: Plan F, though BC/BS of MA called theirs "Bronze."
Thanks for the reminder. Mass. Medigap plans are different from the usual Plans A-N. …
What ever happened to the "good old days" when a presidential candidate speaking with Playboy, let alone having lust in his heart, would be enough to nearly derail a campaign?
Despite initially having a strong lead over his opponent Gerald Ford, Car…
For those not interested in reading through the data, here's a quick summary of a JAMA study:
Fact Check: Have healthcare costs risen faster since the Affordable Care Act was passed?
No. While health care costs have continued to increase since Pre…
they {policies for the same Medigap Plan] all cover same by law
As Mark Twain was incorrectly credited with saying, all generalizations are false, including this one.
Like Medicare Advantage (Part C) plans, Medigap plans are allowed to throw in so…
If he can declassify documents in his mind, why does there have to be a White House posting about tariffs? Even posting in Truth Social is just a courtesy. This isn't chaos. It's from the mind of a very stable genius.
pressured by the FDIC under Obama to debank a legitimate company engaged in a legal business ... You know Daimon claimed that they didn't do that. They are lying and I know they are lying
How do you know that they are lying about their reasons? …
It looks like fees will continue to be waived for "Preferred Plus" or greater in the new program. That's $30K+ in combined balances. Under the current Preferred Rewards program, one needs to be at the Gold level, $20K+
Virtually all credit card…
I have great respect for the reporting of Linda Greenhouse- she covered the Supreme Court for the PBS News Hour for many years.
I think you're conflating Nina Totenberg (a fine reporter for NPR/ABC) and Linda Greenhouse (IMHO the best I've read, per…
No president has invoked Section 122 before, so it’s unclear how a court would rule on its use
I thought I just heard Fearless Leader say that all the statutes he's now using have been used many times before. That was wrong. As quoted above, Sect…
It makes sense to me if we just start this circular reasoning from the other end.
We increase tariffs on imported food so that American growers can charge more and still compete. Now they can hire high priced Austin engineers displaced by AI to p…
Vanguard, though it blocks leveraged funds (e.g. DUSL) and non-house OEF MMFs (its house funds are some of the best on the market), does sell IQMM.
Merrill, though it sells non-house OEF MMFs, blocks ETF MMFs, even government funds like GMMF. Who'…
They are attributing today's market drop to these new tariff
I'm not so sure it's the new tariffs per se as it is the increased uncertainty, as if that were possible. We have Trump telling the EU that despite having negotiated lower rates, he's st…
Since you asked, look at Axos Financial and its dealings. Trump's lender of last resort.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-organization-used-borrow-major-banks-now-look-lending-money-rcna22068
At the time this came out, our then …
This is a $9.8M AUM clone of the $35.7M OEF LZSCX / LZCOX / RLSMX. It is sold through variable annuities and variable life insurance contracts.
The OEF fund remains open. Though with a 2 star rating, mediocre cost and relative risk, and just $…
Off topic, Fidelity Elan's 2% from everything is hard to beat, but to repeat myself, anyone who has Verizon for cellphones / Fios (cable TV, Internet) really must get the Vz card which applies 4% of all food and dining (plus gasoline) purchases to y…
Also from the NYT:
[Justice Kavanaugh] also noted that the administration had used the leverage of tariffs to enter into key trading deals with other nations. Mr. Trump, he wrote, “helped facilitate trade deals worth trillions of dollars — including…
I don't know for sure (no personal experience). Here's what NerdWallet says on the page cited above on what qualifies as travel:
Real estate agents (MCC 6513). Mastercard’s rules define this as “fees charged by merchants engaged in the rental and m…
"rent and HOA fees paid through a property management company"
Property management companies usually code their charges as mcc 6513. That's included in BofA's travel category. The property management companies often outsource their financial mana…
So, the folks who work at these plants and the surrounding communities (friends and families) may be exposed to the harmful effects of mercury poisoning
Not just any communities but military communities. Mr. Trump signed an executive order [Feb 11…
What exactly is he going to do to stop the opening? Post tanks on the MI side?
Invade a northern border state starting with "M"? That's so 2025. Post tanks on the Canadian side. Now that's more like 2026!
it can be possible to tax-loss harvest each position to help manage your tax bill. By contrast, an ETf or mutual fund does not offer the ability to harvest individual positions.
That's the sales pitch. The other side of the coin:
With an ETF it …
IIRC those taxes can be deducted on the Federal tax
If it's available (see below), one generally wants to take it as a dollar-for-dollar tax credit.
Global mutual funds often don't pass through the foreign tax credit because they don't meet the 50…
@msf,
Where would I easily find "tax efficiency ratio" data for Funds? I recall it part of M*, but can't remember which tab. Thanks.
It's on the "price" tab, on the right side, next to other fees. (One might expect to find it under performance or p…
Another allocation fund using munis is TAIFX. A fund of ETFs, including:
CGHM 25% - Capital Group Muni High Income
CGMU 21% - Capital Group Muni Income
CGSM 3.5% - Capital Group Short Duration Muni Income
do you know if the small cap funds, VTMSX or FSMD, are managed similarly?
In a narrow sense, yes. They are both managed to track their respective benchmark indexes. And those indexes cover roughly similar segments of the US market. VTMSX trac…
If you like VTMSX, another fund in the same SC Blend space to consider is FSMD (Fidelity Small/Mid Multifactor). Both funds hold around 600 securities and they have similar tax efficiency ratios - 0.40% and 0.44% respectively. Similar trailing twe…
Thanks, everyone.
As I wrote, my vaccination likely lessened the RSV severity. Some people (especially those with initials RFKjr) seem to feel that risks are binary - if you still get sick a vaccine is useless but still comes with a minuscule risk…
@ msf Glad you are doing OK. I assume you got your RSV from a child? The cough can be really debilitating.
@sma3 Thanks for the kind thoughts. Cough was bad the first couple of days (dry cough at first) but now coughing just to clear passages. W…
In the past year, the Dow has gone from 44368 (Feb 12, 2025) to 49452 - up 11%.
In the same time, the Nikkei has gone from 38963 to 57639 - up 48%.
Yes, the markets are about politics:
* But Japan's market story is primarily about politics.
Japan …
The only OEF share class is Institutional.
Institutional Class Shares are available only to institutional investors and certain broker dealers and financial institutions that have entered into appropriate arrangements with the Fund. These arrangemen…
Unfortunately, as @sma3's letters from last year make clear, this is nothing new. Though initial actions were directed more internationally, the anti-vaccine chickens are coming home to roost.
The Trump administration intends to terminate the Unite…
The mind reels at the ways one can parse this headline. Does an engineer have an affair in test runs by trying out a couple of trysts? If they work out does the engineer put the affair into production? Otherwise does the engineer terminate the …
Schroeders manages 36% of two Vanguard funds: VWILX and VINEX.
https://workplace.vanguard.com/tools/investment/active-portfolio-managers.html#
It cobrands a number of Hartford mutual funds and ETFs (i.e. Hartford Schroders Funds):
https://www.schro…
MFO often doesn't display images unless their URL ends in something like jpg, jpeg, png. Here's a shorter link to yogi's graph (still doesn't display, so you'll have to click on it):
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HAuDpHqWAAAatSw?format=jpg
The grap…
At first glance, the M* list of best balanced funds (link from equalizer's post) appears to give each fund's cheapest not oldest share class. This may be why the list includes several less familiar tickers.
For example:
TRAIX (Dec 2015) rather th…
at least we can get the lies to agree.
Which in itself is something rather impressive, especially as the lies accumulate. As Sir Walter Scott observed:
Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive.
Without reading too carefully (e.g. is the latest monthly figure "raw" while the annual figure "revised"?), two details come to mind:
- The current monthly job figure is for January 2026 while the downwardly revised annual figure was for 2025.
-…
Thanks for the clarification.
According to the fund's annual statement (Oct 2025), the fund held three Egyptian bonds. The largest (in term of value) was the one you gave, with a coupon of 24.458%. The highest coupon bond (much smaller total …
So that's the plan for shoring up Social Security! How could I have been so blind as to have missed this?
From the CDC: The reasons people may seek medical care in another country include:
Unavailable or unapproved procedures: To get a procedure o…
