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.
You can submit an online request to hold mail. The USPS system will even email you an acknowledgement, and another when it is time to pick up your mail. But somehow or other, the same notices I get automatically don't seem to reach the people re…
@hank - nicely said. One's near-term needs, unless one is just starting out, should be small relative to one's total portfolio (including IRAs, 401ks, etc.). So including all of one's cash in calculating one's asset allocation shouldn't significa…
I've mentioned before the work of Pfau and Kitces suggesting that one should get more aggressive as one progresses through retirement. Here's a reasonably digestible article, followed by a more detailed writeup. (I believe I've linked to the la…
It's not directly comparable with Express Scripts. As a pharmacy, I believe ES deals only with insurance plans; they won't fill a prescription unless it comes through a managed plan. They also serve as your PBM. Insurers treat them as a mail o…
Section 407(a)(2) of ERISA (29 USC § 1107) generally limits traditional (defined benefit) pension plans to acquiring no more than 10% of the stock of an employer. This is noted in the article.
So while there can be some risk to pension plans, they…
It's not just that machines have gotten faster, but also memory dirt cheap.
A common response back then to the question about how Lisp machines would handle memory management is that you could wheel in another rack of memory. Sure enough, sin…
Howdy,
Welcome to the monkey farm. As mentioned by rforno, Bloomberg is much superior to CNBC or Fox's version. Alas and alack, my cable provider stopped carrying it several years back.Same here, so when my contract was up, I switched "cable" pro…
Of course it's legal, at least if you clicked "accept". You have the right not to accept, and they have the right to deny you service. Such is the free marketplace where buyer and seller are presumed to have comparable bargaining power.
The same…
I've found an AT&T (T) make whole note, coupon 6.5%, maturing 3/15/29, with an asking YTW of 4.991%. (Other maturity bonds are also available; longer ones with higher yields and shorter ones with lower yields.) CUSIP 001957AW9.
On the page yo…
The yields of all of the securities mentioned in the column, SPAXX (1.49%), SHY (1.16%), MINT (1.75%), FLOT (1.66%), FLRN (1.77%), and BSV (1.75%) are in the same ballpark as various online banks including Synchrony (1.75%) and Marcus by Goldman Sac…
Most states don't tax "food", though they have differing interpretations of what constitutes food. (Illinois shamefully imposes a sales tax of 1% on food, drugs, and medical equipment.)
It's a matter of how one classifies things, much as how a fun…
Agreed that this ruling does not change the purchaser's liability for the tax. It only changes who collects the tax - the vendor (at time of purchase) or the buyer (at time of income tax/use tax filing).
The official Michigan version of the stat…
Fidelity and Schwab both say the fees they charge are a good value for funds and investors. ...
[Schwab VP of mutual fund and ETF platforms] Ms. Fischer noted that fund companies can choose to go on Schwab's transaction fee platform if they don't …
It's a tax on the purchaser, collected by the vendor. So it's a tax in the state of the purchaser.
It is sort of weird. If you travel to another state to buy an auto, the dealership is required to collect the tax you would have paid in your hom…
Let anyone in who wants to come BUT give them a Green Card and if they get caught without one, they go to jail for 3 years and then get returned to their country of origin. In this way, they pay taxes, social security, and are able to be kept tra…
It looks like all the justices agreed that if the tax question were being decided for the first time, physical presence of a vendor wouldn't matter.
The original case in 1967 established the rule that a state could force a vendor to collect taxes o…
My apologies. You're absolutely right - I don't know what I was thinking. Thanks for catching that.
At least my first part, about E*Trade also adding a few iShares and others was correct. After that, I went off the rails.
I agree that many of…
Quick thoughts:
- Some people subscribe to publications because of the quality of the content. But many subscribe because of their editorial slant (regardless of whether that infiltrates the news section). I suspect that this accounts for the …
IMHO, too little too late. I suppose technically not too little, as E*Trade added 32 Vanguard ETFs (as well as 3 iShares and several from lesser known families), after having dropped a somewhat different 32 Vanguard ETFs last year.
New additions:…
If I read this NYMag article correctly, free viewing via Google is something that paywalled sites have discretion to grant or not. So reading a Barron's article by clicking through on Google is okay.
http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/10/google-searc…
Yikes! A 6 year corporate bond with 9%+ YTM? Great interest, so long as they pay it. Good luck getting your principal back. At 24%+ YTC, I wouldn't count on it getting called soon.
The cbonds page cites Goldwasser (Brussels) as the source for…
Crash is absolutely right. This thread started out talking about the empathy, or lack thereof, of this administration. So here's the latest news about this administration's empathy regarding Israeli actions, and Israel's response:
AP, via NBC N…
As strange as it may seem for a column in MutualFunds.com, this seems to be advice on how to manage a portfolio of individual securities. ("Just because a stock has done well in the past does not mean it will continue to do so forever.")
In the en…
Did not sell much past yr, some Corp bonds just matured and gain capitals back to buy more Corp bonds.
For taxes the boa or schwab just send us 1099misc and its pretty simple to do w turbotax and automatically filled
Will look at the performance…
A decade ago when "Private Client" was Fidelity Gold, there was a clear monetary advantage to having achieving this status - lower commissions. These days, what useful services does one get for $1M; in other words, why did you leave enough to main…
What's jarring? Assuming this is what you meant:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/laura-bush-separating-children-from-their-parents-at-the-border-breaks-my-heart/2018/06/17/f2df517a-7287-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html
not the strong argu…
Haven't gotten their survey. I'm assuming it's something different from the usual "know your client" survey that all brokerage firms circulate in some form or another periodically.
https://retirementplans.vanguard.com/VGApp/pe/PubQuizActivity
I'v…
Every living first lady has condemned border separations:
• Melania Trump
• Laura Bush
• Hillary Clinton
• Michelle Obama
• Rosalynn Carter
"Every living first lady — including Melania Trump — has condemned the policy of separating immigrant famil…
There is such legal irony in invoking the bible to justify enforcing the law.
For many centuries, in parallel with courts of law there have been courts of equity to address inequities in the law. Who ran these courts of equity? Why the Church, o…
Because of government collusion, where the politicians control the utilities, having forced resident ratepayers into significantly and unreasonably high cost green options, and the refusal to bring clean burning natural gas into the state. Breaking …
With the recent tax law changes, you have to be careful, especially if you're living in a high tax state.
Using the same yields as in the article, 2.88% Treasury and 2.52% for a national muni fund, the after tax yields can be close, and may not com…
Almost always, the brokerage/fund company will treat covered and non-covered shares as separate batches of funds - as though they were completely different funds. So we can consider the treatment of non-covered shares alone. Those are the share…
Who needs 20 TVs? Well, one for Fox News, one for Fox Business, one for WNYW (Fox NY), WTTG (Fox DC), WFLX (Fox W. Palm Beach), ...
Regarding the toilet, why settle for plating, when one can have solid gold?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local…
Seems my ears are burning.
ISTM that Fidelity has started using Danoff (and to a lesser extent Tillinghast) to pitch funds, much as it used to use Lynch.
Fidelity used to care (at least to some extent) about overloading Danoff.
Fidelity clo…
Nice find. Though it sounds more like speculation ("probably because of technical difficulties") than hard facts.
If we're going to play the guessing game, I'd go with a variant of their secondary speculation: "the complete lack of notification t…
Not sure what your thinking is.
The paper calculates a negative relationship between a manager's age (or longevity) and fund performance, statistically significant at the 1% level (more significant than the usual 5% threshold), shown in Table 4.…
Here's a FT article discussing a 2016 CFA Financial Analysts Journal paper studying The Effect of Management Design on the Portfolio Concentration and Performance of Mutual Funds. Here, "management design" means the use of one manager or multiple …
