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.
As of now, there are no more D shares, so you must own A shares - if you had owned D shares, they're now A shares.
Prior to conversion, a very limited number of brokerages offered A shares load-waived, NTF. Vanguard is the only one I'm aware of, …
Many load families, like many noload families, enter into bilateral agreements with individual brokerages to sell a class of funds NTF. For example, LCEAX is available NTF at Fidelity but is sold with a load at TD Ameritrade.. Likewise, the same…
"switchover has taken place (a few days ago) and was seamless ... for us sleepyheads"
"Not quite seamless at E-Trade, where Monday ... The D shares were showing a zero value, but the A shares showed up this morning. "
There you have it. Seamless…
I was imagining something that would take a 100% agnostic view of market direction ( other than an assumption that prices will be higher a decade or more from now.) The intent would be to move a lump sum into the market with as little emotional upse…
I'm a dolt when it comes to opera, though I've acceded to seeing a performance every now and then for the past several years. So I'm not clear on what you're getting at - it must be something more than a preference for arias over recitative. To …
" ... In fact, not a single mutual fund has beaten the market since 2009. "
There's your first clue that the writer is statistically challenged. Is the question about outperformance since 2009 (i.e. 2010 to the present), or since March 2009? The…
You're absolutely correct.
The plain English of the Tax Cut and Job Acts says that starting with tax year 2018, Roth conversions cannot be recharacterized. Unfortunately, the experts advised people to unnecessarily rush their tax year 2017 re…
Ted does not have a mole inside Morningstar. Here's the Financial Advisors article I think he intended to link to:
https://www.fa-mag.com/news/morningstar-ratings-to-expand-six-fold--to-10k-funds-37760.html?print
I get the feeling that M* is fli…
It's really hard to get an SEC yield down to zero. In a sense, a fund's SEC yield is an average of its individual bonds' yield to worst (maturity or call). It's very rare that someone would buy a bond that pays out less than it costs (better to s…
@bee - if you've got income to allow adding money to your own Roth, and you don't need the RMD, then using the RMD to fund the Roth seems like a great idea.
@Graust - strange as it may seem, FKINX is not load waived at Fidelity (though FISCX is).
…
Not sure how SEP-IRAs entered this thread, but many institutions provide them for free, since they're little more than traditional IRAs. I opened a free one at Fidelity about a decade ago. As I vaguely recall, I opened it for a partial year wher…
No, the account at Fidelity where I keep this low balance MMF is a Roth IRA. (SEPs and Keoghs have a $500 maintenance min, while traditional and Roth IRAs supposedly require you to keep $10K in the fund.)
Though that account is subject to RMDs…
Has anyone invested in high minimum funds and do these funds require one to maintain that high minimum?
Jaywalking...@msf?Different funds have different policies.
I've got institutional class shares of one fund in an IRA. The share class us…
Cetusnews seems to have vanished, so my comments are limited to what bee described.
1. Roth income limits. Here are some concerns about Kitces backdoor solution, a couple pragmatic and one a matter of principle.
I don't know how many 401(k) p…
The last cited article notes that pensions have evolved historically from a gratuity to a promise of deferred compensation. Pretty much everything else springs from that - something for something. You go to work for an employer, and in exchange …
Thanks.
I've been fairly sparse with personal details in part because I feel that writing should stand on its own. An idea doesn't become credible because a Nobel Laureate writes it (e.g. Shockley). Likewise, good work in any field should be ap…
There are substantial differences between Social Security and pension plans. For one, while SS may walk like a duck and quack like a duck, it doesn't eat (get funded) like a duck - it's pay-go as opposed to pension plans which are supposed to be p…
This is an example of what are called "Retail Notes". They're frequently offered by large, recognizable, primarily financial institutions.
Fidelity calls its program for selling these Corporate Notes℠. It has a good description of these bonds:
h…
I know, I know. But I've already tried counting the number of PA voters who can dance on the head of a pin, and the number of people left in the state department (3?). To paraphrase the Ferengi, there's no profit in it. :-)
ISTM that this writer and ETF.com are muddling together various concepts. The writer talks about ESG, but uses a supposed SRI ("socially responsible") database, which in turn throws everything in.
As I understand it, ESG takes a holistic approach…
Here's the the entire text of the Florida bill; it's 22 lines long, including spacing between paragraphs:
http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2018/1013/BillText/er/PDF
So they're actually moving part of the state up two timezones (part is in the C…
Yes they exist This is just another name for equity indexed annuities. You've seen my post in the "pension reform" thread
https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/comment/99053/#Comment_99053
From Dummies:
Since 2006, EIAs [equity …
What Lewis is describing is how to roll your own equity-linked note, also known as a principal protected note, and probably a lot of other names.
Here's a good paper on ELNs. Don't let the fact that it was written by Lehman Bros. make you think t…
"To me, an annuity matches an asset (in this case $100K) to a liability (a required expense)"
Exactly. Annuities are best suited to satisfying expenses that you can't avoid. Annuities ensure you'll have at least that minimum. Once that's take…
I've tried to describe the fund conceptually in terms of major building blocks. To come up with an explanation of its performance entails starting with a much more detailed model and then using trial and error to find a proxy bond fund that might …
Sorry I seem to have missed that bloodbath :-)
Even if one knows exactly what these funds are doing, it really is hard to call this sort of fund one thing or another. So one makes a best guess and explains it. And when they don't make it clear q…
M*'s analysis of MWATX (the last one they did was in 2009) said that the bond portion added to its pain, as it was forced to sell deep into its bond portfolio including illiquid holdings. Above, LLJB expressed a concern about something similar hap…
While I agree that New Insights is the inferior fund, FINSX carries a lower ER than FCNTX and can be purchased with a $2500 min, no advisor and no load, through Vanguard and TDAmeritrade.
With all the people here who are skeptical of M*'s classifications, I think you just lobbed everyone a softball :-)
More seriously, it might depend on how the bond portfolio is being used. Also, DoubleLine and PIMCO tend to be especially opaque, …
I don't want to get too far into the weeds with annuities here, though I'm happy to take this to a separate thread.
The reason I mentioned annuities was to offer a different insight into pensions. Pensions and annuities, aside from details such a…
@LewisBraham - we are often in violent agreement and discussing the finer shadings. Let me offer you a variation on your theme: Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Indeed basic necessities drive all else.
A bird in a gilded cage is still caged, regardless of whether the bird prefers those sometimes friendly confines (with apologies to Chicagoans.) Even when it is the objectively better alternative, one must still acknowledge the existence of the ca…
@TSP_Transfer posted in January 2014 that MFMPX was available load-waived at Schwab and TDA, so load waivers on Morgan Stanley funds go back at least that far.
https://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/comment/34581/#Comment_34581
The paragraph is lifted from "How Long Must New Hires Work to Get Pension Benefits", Governing Magazine, May 8, 2014. That article builds upon the study, How Long Must State and Local Employees Work to Accumulate Pension Benefits?, Urban Institute,…
Schwab started offering JP Morgan at least as early as 2012; Fidelity was a bit later, though I don't recall if it was by months or years. Don't follow TDA closely enough to have a clue there.
American Funds was a well publicized and recent addit…
CAPE cannot be traded at ML and maybe not at some other brokers, not sure, which irks me. Looking at comments on other boards, it seems that Merrill Edge generally blocks online trades of any ETN. Nevertheless, you can trade ETNs there, or so says…
I would think that investing in DSEEX would give similar diversification to a vanilla hybrid fund that had a roughly 50/50 stock/bond mix. The difference is one of magnitude of performance (i.e. getting hammered harder).
In DSEEX, you get full…
Yes. For instance, while the S&P 500 was busy dropping 10% between Jan 26 and Feb 8, CAPE dropped 9.07% (from 125.85 to 114.44), AGG (pick your own proxy for DSEEX's bonds) fell 1.06% (using Yahoo's adjusted closing prices of 107.98 and 106.84)…
@LLJB has done a great job in describing DSEEX, both here and in earlier threads such as this one.
I agree that the use of swaps doesn't significantly affect the risk in and of itself. I believe that the swaps used by the fund involve only net pe…
"The IRR function in excel that msf mentioned is a helpful function but I've also read that it can give you answers that aren't completely reliable because of its iterative nature."
Well, sort of. Pragmatically speaking, for this specific set of c…
