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.
New diabetes/obesity drug prices per month (image below should open), https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1692641465363493146
Only injectables, no oral tabs yet.
Most insurance cover them only for diabetes, not obesity.
The key word in the graphic…
The five year CD might have a penalty of a year (it would almost certainly have at least a six month penalty) for early withdrawal. That could still make this a good move.
But if you bought the CD from a brokerage it would be little different fro…
I believe D&C is changing their funds to institutional shares and they need to be registered with SEC. They are still sold through Fidelity Retail brokerage, but it has not been completed yet.
That's an interesting theory, but the new filings…
I’ve long held a slug in international bonds thru an etf. Seriously considering shifting that into an etf that’s about 70% U.S. & 30% foreign. ISTM that with the 10 year near 5% U.S. bonds are the better choice now. What am I missing?
FWIW, tha…
What's the connection? Is the cheapest quintile requirement intended to bias the selection toward Vanguard, American Funds, D&C (not one of the three firms totaling 18 funds on the list), and Baird? If so, is it also intended to bias against …
Below is the complete response received from Fidelity. There's really little else Fidelity could say.
Thank you for your email that we received on October 6, 2023, regarding SEC rule 2a-7. As your concerns are important to us, your email was forwar…
Some fund companies will allow you to do a direct rollover into a closed fund even if you have to liquidate your employer-sponsored plan assets to do a rollover. (Having to liquidate for a rollover is not unusual.)
Try calling TRP and asking if th…
My approximation for the closed PRWCX is a mix of TCAF + PYLD + USFR.
PRWCX - often imitated, never duplicated.
It varies its equity sleeve between 56% and 72% of its assets (per M* analysis report). That's going to be hard to mirror, let alone…
@Old Joe . My guess is the CMS just pulls numbers out of some data banks which are not accurate.
Enough with the guessing, please. Not when two minutes of searching can turn up the actual practices one is interested in.
BLS data collectors visit (…
Vanguard has two different cash sweep programs. They both use the same banks. For reasons described below not having to do with safety, I wouldn't be inclined to keep much money in either sweep account.
Vanguard Cash Deposit uses the FDIC-insured…
We go through the same ritual every year - anecdotes about how prices of some class of items or another has shot up. Then a leap from that to inferring that the average increase in prices nationwide can't possibly be what the BLS is reporting.
Th…
Also:
If I'm reading it right, the links provided by @msf apply to Medicare Advantage Plans. But I have traditional Medicare, and pay for a separate Part D Plan.
Part B incr: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/your-money/social-security-cola-2024.h…
CPI-W "fingers". https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/supplemental-files/cpi-w-202309.xlsx
Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W):
U.S. city average, by expenditure category, September 2023
[1982-84=100, unless …
My guess is that after the expected Medicare part B and D cost increases for next year this 3.2% will be a joke and more closer to 0%.
You would guess wrong. The average monthly increase in SS (based on a 3.2% increase and the average current payme…
To clarify: you don't get interest in the month that you sell.
So if you sell at the beginning of a month you've only lost a day's interest (for that month). But if you sell near the end of the month, you get nothing for those 30 days or so.
It…
It depends on how likely you are to need the money. You can get a 5.65% 1-year CD not counting a 3 mo penalty if you redeem early. Depending on how likely you are to draw on the money, your expected return could beat the MMF.
Either way, you're …
Here's an interesting piece written a week ago on divining the next fixed rate. As the writer states, there is no rule that the Treasury follows, just heuristics.
https://tipswatch.com/2023/10/08/the-i-bonds-fixed-rate-will-rise-but-by-how-much/
Tr…
M*: Cash Is No Longer Trash, but the Opportunity Cost Might Be Greater Than You Think
https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/cash-is-no-longer-trash-opportunity-cost-might-be-greater-than-you-think
This M* piece is oriented toward the long te…
Other strips of short term bond funds got hit this week.
Ultra short term IG floating rate bond ETFs did nicely. I've been considering using them in lieu of bond funds in tax sheltered accounts for now.
"All" floating rate ETFs, including bank l…
I try to avoid putting my foot in my mouth (not always successfully), so I did check the SEC filings before sending a followup to Fidelity. I'd never looked at N-MFP filings before, but they're the equivalent of N-PORT filings (monthly holdings) f…
I've sent a note to Fidelity, as it has not updated its prospectuses.
Unfortunately, I was a bit too tactful in my note. I indicated that the Federal Register reports that a prospectus is change required by the SEC not later than Oct 2. I asked…
Several people have commented in other posts about cumulative performance figures being distorted by a recent year's hot performance ("what have you done for me lately"), including Prof. Snowball, me, and others.
In Prof. Snowball's piece (linked …
Have a heart, Your Honor!
Perhaps the judge did and may have offered parole in say just under 10,000 years :-)
Several countries have introduced CBDCs. The Fed is still evaluating digital-dollar.
Cryptocurrencies and central bank digital currenci…
Not exactly.
The bank then has two options:
1. Sell the property at a significant discount (let's say $200M)
2. Add value to the property themselves then sell it
Assuming the lender perfected its security interest (i.e. did a UCC 9 filing to put t…
A debtor files for bankruptcy voluntarily. The idea behind voluntary bankruptcy is to protect the debtor, to provide breathing space for the debtor to restructure or start over.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/voluntary_bankruptcy
OTOH, creditors…
Here's a good piece from the Sept. 8 (online) or Sept 9 (print, p. B2) edition of the WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/taxes/bonds-bond-funds-state-taxes-cd066239
[Per SC] [T]he Constitution prohibits the states from taxing federal debt. Bu…
As of Dec 31, the best rate on a CD in the 10-12 month timeframe may have been 4.90% APY for a 10 month term.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221222065208/https://www.depositaccounts.com/cd/1-year-cd-rates.html
That comes out to about 3.653% yield (…
focus only on bonds that are very close to maturity
That seems a bit excessive. Even MMFs can have debt that doesn't mature for 397 days. One only needs enough liquidity to meet redemptions. The SEC is increasing liquidity requirements for MMF…
I cited the requirement above - 5% net redemptions and liquidity costs above 1 basis point.
There is another set of rules for discretionary redemption fees. These may be imposed only if the fund board deems the fee to be in the best interest of t…
Those "certain money market funds" are institutional funds. This is in lieu of the earlier swing pricing proposal.
institutional prime and institutional tax-exempt money market funds will be subject to a mandatory liquidity fee when net redemptions…
bonds are higher up than stocks in terms of principal protection
This sort of principal protection concerns bankruptcy. When a company goes bust, whatever assets it has go first toward paying off debt (bond holders). If the company has anythin…
The 3.5% is just the cap on what an intermediary may charge. I'm confident that if one were to invest via Fidelity, Schwab, E*Trade (Morgan Stanley), Merrill (BofA), Vanguard, etc. there would not be a load.
Accounts at financial institutions are considered to be inactive if there has been no activity (aside from automatic divs/interest/CD renewals) for some period of time, often 12 months.
The institution continues to hold your assets, though it may "…
For the most part, this looks even worse than described. The S (retail) shares will have management fees of 1.25% plus shareholder servicing fees of 0.85% plus implicit borrowing fees. The expense table suggests this adds another 6.08% to the an…
The CR is only 71 pages long, double spaced (25 lines per page). Throwing out the first couple of pages (essentially title pages), and recognizing that it is in three sections each ending with partial pages, there are approximately 68 x 25 = 1700 …
Congress will get paid
That's part of the Constitution: Article I, Section 6, Clause 1.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S6-C1-1/ALDE_00001044/
for no work
There's the problem. The Constitution doesn't require them to actuall…
Ideally, one would just copy the HTML table () from the original page to here and be done, but MFO supports only limited HTML. That doesn't include tables.
However, MFO does support preformatting (), so one can copy the whole table as text (inclu…
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here's the bar chart of the predecessor (privately offered) fund's performance. I don't care what this fund is investing in, I'll pass.
This is one of the few downsides of investing via brokerages (necessary for ETFs) rather than directly with fund companies.
When your 1099's come from the fund companies, they usually include all this supplemental information personalized to your…
Schedule 3, line 1 (foreign tax credit) gets totaled in Schedule 3, line 1, and carried over into 1040-SR line 20 (in the "taxes and credits" section).
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040s3.pdf
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040s.pdf
Mutual f…
