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.
Reply to @VintageFreak:
I'm doing this. I'd rather pay a $75 fee (and am delighted to pay "just" $50) to get into an institutional share class that will save me 0.25%/year, year after year. On a $10K investment, that now pays off in two years i…
It looks like most funds are at $49.95. I did a little spot checking - so far I can find only Vanguard that is getting stuck with the $75 TF. Families like Selected Shares are charged only $49.95.
(Selected Shares class D shares are quite chea…
You're missing the idea of consistent (vs. "best") performance.
DODFX was in the bottom half of its category only in 2011 and 2008 out of the last ten years. That's pretty consistent top half performance. In constrast, OAKIX was bested by t…
Reply to @Charles:
The key word is "additional". The Funds' Advisor isn't charging any additional fees - the marketing costs are already baked in to the management fees.
Back when American Century was still 20th Century, they charged a flat 1% f…
Reply to @David_Snowball:
IMHO they're using the wrong terminology, and to me that's at least a yellow flag. The only way (or at least the only common way I know of) for YTW to differ from YTM is if the bond is callable. (One can have sinking f…
Reply to @AndyJ:
While these fund families are newly waived at Fidelity, several of them (such as Eaton Vance) have been load waived at other brokerages (Schwab for sure, and likely TD Ameritrade) for quite some time. It's good to see Fidelity ca…
"Fidelity Global Balanced Fund (FGBLX) manager Ruben Calderon has taken a leave of absence for an unspecified person."
Any guesses on who she is? :-)
Whitebox " Investor and Advisor shares carry a 12b-1 fee. Some brokerages, like Fidelity and Schw…
John Bogle has noted that while Vanguard's funds originally each charged fees equal to its expenses, this has changed. As I understand him, the Vanguard Group now charges fees that in the aggregate equal their costs. This allows Vanguard some fle…
Reply to @TheShadow:
Cute. Did the "parent" RIC, Two Roads Shared Trust, having given up on the road less traveled, become One Road Lone Trust? Perhaps that has made all the difference. :-)
Reply to @Sven: The Vanguard PR answered that question - no submanagers, the fund will be managed by Vanguard’s Equity Investment Group. Since it's not an index fund, that means it's a quant fund.
One can confirm this by reading the prospectus Sh…
The closest funds you may fund to what you're looking for are not clean energy funds, but clean company funds (funds that invest in companies that are "green"). A couple that do hold TSLA are Alger Green (SPEGX) and Shelton Green Alpha (NEXTX).
A…
Replies to various posts ...
OJ: EMTALA and ACA have some interesting interactions. Found this law article (still browsing through it) from 2011 discussing conflicts between EMTALA and ACA. Look at pp. 257-259 (pdf pp. 3-5; sounds like a lot, but…
There are a few reasons why families move series funds from one RIC to another. A couple that come to mind are changing the state in which the RIC is organized (different laws), and to loosen up the restrictions on the fund.
From a quick look at …
When I too have $90M in my portfolio, I'll be sure to let people know how many advisers I'm working with.
Really, is this relevant to people here? I figure if you have that much money, you're paying someone else to read this website.
The "old" FMI Common Stock Fund was a series of the registered investment company FMI Common Stock Fund, Inc.
The "new" FMI Common Stock Fund is part of a completely different registered investment company. It is a new series of the RIC FMI Funds…
Reply to @Charles:
A fund's expense ratio already includes 12b-1 fees. If M* were to take note of the 12b-1 fees explicitly, it would be double-counting those fees.
Note that M*'s performance results don't really explicitly consider any fees …
Interesting that GS seems to be cutting off research even from their own. Half a decade ago, they enabled Schwab to offer some of their research (via Goldman Sachs PrimeAccess(sm)) to the hoi polloi. No longer.
Regarding NY Mag - some of us cam…
It's a "kitchen sink" complaint. Whatever they could think of got thrown in. Hence, the failure to select "best of breed" got tossed in with the "too expensive", and the "too many funds" (seriously) claims.
Reply to @TSP_Transfer: It's a reprint from BusinessInsider, a New York City site.
The Chron, formerly hosted on SFGate (and now behind a pay wall), is also publishing a wire story (AP) and not its own perspective:
http://www.sfchronicle.com/news/…
While the plaintiffs might have a case, the complaint is not impressive.
As the only example of a "major fund family" competitor that outsources its 401K fund selection process, it gives TD Ameritrade. I don't know about you, but when I think of…
Brian was the manager (not analyst AFAIK) for Health Sciences from 1998 to 2000. The fund's five year record didn't make it into the the top two deciles (top quintile); the fund's one year record isn't in the top three deciles (barely made top 1/3…
I would have said brothers at Fido and TRP, but the latter was busy managing funds (not serving as analyst) 1998-2000. And the fund he managed during those years isn't even in the top quarter of its sector for the past year - warm, but not exactly…
Reply to @AndyJ:
WBMRX is the advisor class fund - same or lower ER than the retail shares, just NL. Also available NTF at Schwab, Vanguard, TDAmeritrade, etc. Note that that ER is either 1.93% (prospectus), 1.94% (Annual Report, Jan 2013), or …
A fund "family" is a distinct entity from the family's funds. Fund families typically own administration, distribution, and management companies. These are not funds, i.e. registered investment companies (and they don't even have to be corporatio…
Worth highlighting:
- Total recovery for investors was over 99c on the dollar.
- Bruce Bent had already been found innocent of all charges.
- Reserve Management Company, on the other hand, had already been found guilty of violating securities la…
Here's the M* chart. You'll have to move the slider at the bottom of the chart all the way to the left to get the identical graph.
Too easy. There are only four mid cap growth funds with 15 year performance in excess of 14%/year (which one can …
Fidelity hasn't posted the 9/6/13 distribution on the fund page, but looking at the historical data, FLPSX distributes most if not all its cap gains (as opposed to ordinary/qualified dividends) in September. Likely little in cap gains left for a …
Indexing - true indexing, i.e. buy the whole market (however "market" is defined), almost by definition beats the average dollar invested, because the costs are generally lower. The average indexed dollar beats the average managed dollar. That's …
Reply to @Old_Joe:
See my post below. RPHYX is also paying the manager extra money - in the case of this fund, approximately 0.03% of AUM. That is, without the reimbursement of waived fees, the ER of the fund would currently be around 1.22%. N…
Directly addressing Mark's question - what this says is that min wage, even after tax credits, is so low that people still need welfare. There's something wrong with this picture.
Since you pulled an article from Forbes, let me offer another colu…
The thesis of the paper is that welfare is a disincentive to work at low paying (min wage) jobs.
Isn't there an argument go that, well, most of the people on min wage are teenagers or people just starting out (who will move off min wage soon)? If…
Reply to @BobC:
You raised lots of questions/issues. I hope I can keep some of them straight:
- There seems to be an implicit assumption that the hypothetical investor being addressed doesn't have enough money/earnings to max out all the options…
If I'm reading the semi-annual statement correctly (this is a back of the envelope calculation), the current expenses would be about 1.18% but for the fee waiver.
That's the way lots of fee waivers work. The management company agrees to a cap on…
One often sees posters asking: (open end) fund X has done poorly; do you consider it a buy now? IMHO, this question is generally misplaced - open end funds are not stocks of companies that may get beaten down because of a bad quarter or due to deal…
Reply to @jerry:
Use the M* ETF screener (free): http://screen.morningstar.com/etfselector/etf_screener_version1.aspx
Click on "Add Criteria" (on the right hand side of the black band labeled ETF screener). The last criterion in the list is Lev…
"Can't find SAI on website. So can't verify manager investment."
That's why we have M*. See the filings tab.
http://quicktake.morningstar.com/FundNet/SecFiling.aspx?Symbol=DWUGX&Country=USA
From the SAI (for a variety of Dynamic family (Dund…
I'm coming late to the party (this thread), and it's been a very interesting read. Let me offer a few(?) tangential observations on pensions, IRAs, SS:
RMDs - people tend to think that these are drawdowns. They are only tax events, not investmen…
Reply to @VintageFreak: There may be a much less insidious explanation. I believe that in its articles, M* uses the same ticker that would pop out of its premium screener when asking for "distinct portfolio only". That is (as stated in the link…
I likely come down midway between OJ and MJG. I think that some black swan events are built into the MC simulation, because they're built into the data set (e.g. Black Tuesday, Black Monday). As far as events like these are concerned, it is a ma…
