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 noted in my original citation (which I've got to read more carefully), one can invest in stable value funds via 529 plans, e.g. Colorado's CollegeInvest Stable Value Plus option. The CollegeInvest option is effectively a MetLife GIC, which curr…
My first computer was an IBM 701 as part of a class in programming at UC Berkeley around 1958, 59. Cal was still a great place to learn this stuff decades later - land of BSD unix. The CS dept. let me sit in on an OS class and gave me an account…
See stablevalue.org, especially: why I can't find a stable value option for my IRA:
http://stablevalue.org/knowledge/faqs/question/why-cant-i-find-a-stable-value-investment-option-for-my-ira
Fund sponsors tried a decade or two ago to offer retail s…
a modem that made future advances to 300 baud seem like a miracle ... Thanks for the reminder. A portable terminal that I'd used (at 300 baud) did have a switch for slower settings. Now that you mention it, I do remember it had a 110 speed. …
I never believed in those newfangled contraptions. Too much trouble to administer. I stuck with terminals. Very intelligent terminals, mind you, like X terminals, but terminals none the less. Finally gave in somewhere around the turn of the…
I can't find a link on Yahoo to these pages, but the info is still there. Here's the performance data for the Fidelity Fund going back to 1930. Just substitute the 5 letter ticker for the fund of your choice in the URL, and awaay you go.
https:…
I'm not quite clear on what you're asking, but sure, break a TBTF bank into two jumbo banks and you'll have the same work being done between them (with similar economies of scale), but now there will be two CEOs. Sounds like job creation to me. :-)
The tools available to us now are incredible compared to when I first started in the eighties. Those days it was phone calls and written checks with days and weeks to accomplish a move. Now it's instant. Certainly one can do more nowadays than in da…
I'm not sure there are any great managers in terms of voting records, but I'll take a look.
FWIW, here's SSgA's 2015 proxy voting record (all 9945 pages):
https://www.ssga.com/investment-topics/environmental-social-governance/2016/2015-Vote-Summa…
Anyone remember WF's five minute max promotion? It was so absurd for them to offer $5 if it took you more than five minutes to get to a teller in line. For the heck of it, I went to an urban branch in a not affluent section of the city. After 1…
I am not faulting Vanguard for holding WFC. I am faulting Vanguard for its unwavering support of WFC management; yea verily for ratifying huge compensation packages. Heckuva job, Brownie, um, Stumpf.
Vanguard's explanation for its near perfect …
Why would anyone reinvest dividends? To reduce the need to rebalance (the subject of this thread). You've acknowledged the importance of bond fund dividends in this respect.
Equity funds typically make one distribution a year. I think I'm able …
One can vote with one's feet, or one can vote. How many people are going to drop their index funds?
After Berkshire Hathaway, the largest holder of WFC is Vanguard. The same Vanguard that (along with Blackrock, the 5th largest holder) has a 9…
mfs, I believe your 1st comment above to be true, but with a caveat, A very important trade off if in or near retirement for long term stability is picking a risk tolerance that meets your withdrawal needs. Taking a big loss would be detrimental to …
ISTM there are two issues here: strategy and execution.
Regarding execution, I've found that by accepting modest deviations from target allocations and managing allocations via targeted purchases (accumulation phase) or targeted selling (distributi…
From the article: "Consider five ETFs that strive to beat the AGG" (i.e. to beat the total US investment grade bond market).
BND and Vanguard in general try to match market return, not beat it. No gimmicks, no going outside the defined market. …
You may have missed this in the slides - I figured that it was the reason for all the doom and gloom:
"Technology ... is destroying the middle class (i.e. accountants; lawyers; traders; logistics; clerks; pilots; economists; editors; investment adv…
Same in San Francisco, where politics and medallions were so contentious that a city ballot initiative on some arcane aspect of taxi regulation was expected each election - sometimes competing propositions.
Excerpt here: "He’d waited for years to b…
While MJG was posting his response, I'd drafted this. At least I didn't seem to get anything wrong:
Often one models stock returns as periodic time series using autoregression - that is, treating annual returns as a pattern that approximately rep…
Hi Bob, thanks for the comments. I completely agree with you that after several fat cows one should expect several lean ones. But mean regression is something entirely different.
What you (and I, and most everyone else) are assuming is that the…
Nice award-winning movie by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. NYTimes review here.
Unfortunately, your optimism that the struggle "has been mostly won for most Americans", doesn't appear supported by the movie or by history. In the Times r…
M* Ultrashort Bond Fund Returns:
http://news.morningstar.com/fund-category-returns/ultrashort-bond/$FOCA$UB.aspx
IMHO they're getting closer, but still not worth the risk as a cash substitute. The heuristic I'm using is to take the SEC yield, subt…
Perhaps a distinction without a difference, but "clone" is being used here (and in the article) in a somewhat unconventional way.
Typically, a clone fund is a fund with substantially the same portfolio as the original. For example, a "clone" o…
Maybe its just me, but I found this very muddled. Starting with credentials.
Epoch Times (now there's a publication I rarely reference) calls Shvets "the global strategist of the investment bank Macquarie Group." BI says merely that he's "a" gl…
Robert Cochran's column, in its use of mean reversion and inflation/real return, has left me befuddled.
"Reversion to the mean" simply expresses the tendency of next year's returns to be closer to the long term mean than the current year's returns …
That's the first time I've seen it suggested that funds are more nimble if they are larger and are stuck with lots of cash that they have to invest regardless of what they can find.
If a fund owns good stocks, it shouldn't want to sell them (M&…
Some Roth distributions are federally taxable (e.g. earnings if your Roths are less than five years old). "Any portion of your Roth IRA distribution that is included in your federal adjusted gross income (AGI), is subject to Michigan tax."
http://w…
A quick search shows virtually every doc saying that Michigan IRAs are considered pensions for tax purposes, and are subject to withholding.
Older folk (those who were born earlier than 1953 or have spouses that old) may be able to avoid some or …
My family's never lost money in a MMF either, though my father was an early adopter of Reserve Fund when it was the only game in town.
At the same time, I remain cognizant of the risks (small but nonzero), which is why I expect compensation for the…
Who are "they" who are claiming prime is risk prone?
The article says that "You can be safe in a prime fund and a little safer in a government fund". Nothing about retail prime funds being especially prone to risk.
If "risk prone" means "not t…
Wow, Hancock Horizon Funds - never heard of them, I'm impressed!
I do think that the heyday of the regional funds was the late 90s or so (the era from which my links came). "Regional stock funds are becoming more popular in the mutual fund indust…
This exchange about what constitutes the midwest is sort of humorous, given that funds invest based on economics, not political lines. The midwest is whatever the fund says it is, no more, no less.
M&P doesn't even say it focuses on the mid…
Because of, or in spite of, localization?
From M, via SFGate: The main argument for regional funds is that managers gain an edge by being close to the companies they own.
But from CS Monitor (1998): Many years ago, regional investing might have…
IMHO it's all about culture and attitudes, not state lines. How do people act, vote, shop? By these metrics, I tend to view cities like Buffalo and Pittsburgh as midwestern cities. And then there's how people talk:
Pop vs. Soda (vs. Coke): http…
Here we go again. Either bad English, or bad reporting. Either way, not good for a columnist:
"Institutional and municipal money-market funds will move from the stable $1 share price to a floating net asset value. Retail funds sold to individual…
Portfolio Analyzer looks like a reasonable tool, but it doesn't seem to get much closer to what VF was asking for than does the Yahoo download.
In both cases, what you've got is a bunch of lines that need to be pruned for the date ranges desired,…
Yahoo finance. Here's the daily data for VFINX from 2/15/97 to 6/15/16 (20 years):
http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/VFINX/history?period1=855982800&period2=1465963200&interval=1d&filter=history&frequency=1d
Just hit the download lin…
What you're describing isn't a Roth conversion at all. It's a distribution (counting toward your RMD) and a separate contribution to a Roth. There's no connection whatsoever. Unlike a conversion, here you don't have to show that the Roth money…
