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.
@Anna - that's a nice table there on the 2023 brackets. It makes the numbers concrete. Some people work better that way, some people prefer the abstract "Standard", "Standard * 1.4", etc.
Regardless of how one looks at it, the ratios between br…
MAGI calculation for IRMAA includes only the taxable portion of Social Security. The entire amount of SS is included in other MAGI calculations, e.g. for Medicaid. Below is the major part (but not all) of a table from a Congressional Research Rep…
There are various factors that affect net Part B premiums. IRMAA is just one of them. It is almost impossible for IRMAA alone to cause the premium to triple when filing status changes from MFJ to single.
Part B Premium 2022 Coverage (2020 Income…
For the most part I agree and have been incremental Roth conversions for years. But there are also reasons to retain some traditional pre-tax funds. Two charitable issues come to mind:
- It is much more tax efficient to leave T-IRAs to chariti…
It is too bad that funds that liquidate can't just transfer the positions to the sharehoders.
They can, unless they have promised not to (see below). While redemption in kind works for Authorized Participants who arbitrage huge slugs of equities,…
How many of those Vanguard defined contribution accounts are held by people who have only worked for their employer a few years? How many of those participants have other DC accounts at former employers or have additional retirement savings in IRAs…
I agree with your observation. So many posters on this board seem to assert American financial exceptionalism - why invest overseas when the US market is superior? Just go along with Bogle and Buffett. Yet no objection has been raised to using…
Normal annual purchase limits (without special tricks) for individuals for #IBonds has varied:
10/2002 Limit raised to $30K
01/2008 Limit reduced to $5K
01/2012 Limit raised to $10K
https://treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/history/histtime/histti…
This is just conceptual and largely off the top of my head, so take it for what it's worth. Also, I'm discussing taxable bonds with (original) maturities of more than one year that are not zeros. So this excludes T-bills and STRIPS. In additio…
The rules are different for each fund. I believe that when Core was closed previously, Flagship customers were allowed to invest an unlimited amount, unlike the other Primecaps.
From the prospectus:
The Fund is closed to new accounts for invest…
Folks (not just @hank), when you quote something, or even just state a figure, please give the source. The quote above seems to have come from here:
https://lplresearch.com/2022/05/24/how-do-bonds-perform-during-and-after-equity-bear-markets/
I g…
Generally, falling equities are good news for bonds.
Out of 94 years (1928-2021 inclusive), bonds rose over 80% of the time: 76 years (80.8%). Stocks fell in 25 of those years. Random chance would suggest that bonds would rise in 20 of those ye…
One can avoid CG distributions by selling around the distribution. Sell by the record date and repurchase on or after the ex-date. In most years the size of gain one realizes when selling exceeds the size of the potential CG distribution renderi…
Certainly this ETF has underlying assets - JPM bank accounts. In contrast, an iPath ETN has no underlying assets; it is itself an IOU of Barclays.
Think about those ETF assets. They are bank accounts, just general liability IOUs of the bank. A…
Have you considered holding pounds sterling in a US bank account? TIAA (formerly Everbank) is the best known provider, but I believe Cathay Bank and perhaps others offer this type of account as well.
Of course you would pay to exchange dollars fo…
One fund to report - According to CNBC, ARKK is off -57.35%YTD and -65.56% for 1 year. Posted not to dump on Cathie, but to provide some perspective - ie: to show how much highly speculative, highly leveraged stocks have lost this year.
Highly spe…
Real rates to rise across the board
Are you talking about rates for all maturity Treasuries, or various Fed rates (discount rate, Fed funds, ...), or something else? Certainly real rates will rise as inflation declines, unless the cure is worse th…
I've done that and then transferred the shares to a brokerage for convenience. I have seen soft closes where the fund says that shares purchased directly in a new account cannot be transferred for some period of time. But even then, the time lim…
While I won't say that there's never any need for human intervention, ISTM you are stretching the point in raising the task of fund redemptions.
Of course "phone" redemptions can't be done via the web interface, but redemptions can. At least un…
Relating "The Jungle" to the RR workers situation is apt. While people often think of the novel as a critique of the meat packing industry, Sinclair wrote it to illustrate the exploitation of immigrants and laborers.
As he later observed, “I aim…
There were several views but no comments on a previous post on this,
https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/60008/m-on-iofix
That was one of several threads I had comments on, but little time now. Quick post ...
Whatever happens, …
According to VBS, the five Treasuries you see at Fidelity is the full list of open auctions. For auctions that are not yet open, there are no indicative yields available for them.
VBS shows the nearest offering for each Treasury maturity period …
Yogi explained things very well. It looks like the only thing you're missing is the definition of YTM (yield to maturity). That's an annualized yield.
So for a bond maturing in 135 days, a 4.08% annual yield translates into approximately 4.0…
JPMorgan is only the latest bank to be raided.
From four months ago:
The German branch of Morgan Stanley was searched by prosecutors in Frankfurt in relation to "past activity" on Tuesday, a spokesperson for the U.S. bank said.
...
A large number o…
Nothing else is required
Something rather important is required. The assumption that active management costs more than passive management. If I manage my portfolio myself, I am actively managing my assets with 0.00% assessed management costs. …
Perhaps M* read the prospectus.
The amounts shown in the table are 0.00% to reflect the fact that the Fund does not pay any advisory, administration or distribution and service fees, and that Loomis, Sayles & Company, L.P. (“Loomis Sayles” or th…
explains that street whores make way more than whorehouse employees, trading wages for risk reduction.
Not here in Ecuador, where ladies of the night work the streets when they can't get employment in the clubs. They make less due to both lower ra…
I believe that the credit union is required to publish a blended APY, combining 4% for 4 months and 1.65% (the current rate for the remainder) for the final 12 months.
See Reg DD Appendix A. This is a stepped rate CD. Section B talks about bl…
the threatened penalty for keeping VG mutual fund account is $20/yr/fund holding. [...]
[...] people also got notices to switch to electronic statements to avoid $20 annual fee. [...] the previous threshold to avoid that fee was $50K in household …
For Vanguard bashers, I believe (not going to check now) that Vanguard will not cancel a Vanguard mutual fund order that has been submitted on its legacy Vanguard fund platform (even hours before closing). It will cancel orders for Vanguard or oth…
Exxon doesn't care who its owners are.
That's a pretty good definition of poor governance - ignoring your shareholders. Ultimately that comes with consequences.
A year ago this month [May], a small hedge fund won an unlikely victory against Exxon…
Making alcoholic beverages is morally wrong
Certainly some ratings penalize (or exclude) the manufacture of alcoholic beverages for moral reasons. However, M*'s Sustainalytics concerns are not moral but (surprise) sustainability:
Based on assess…
Follow the money. M* needs to show these metrics have value:
CHICAGO and AMSTERDAM, April 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Morningstar, Inc. (Nasdaq: MORN), a leading provider of independent investment research, today announced it has reached an agreement …
In a sense, the mark-to-market prices are not much different from the redemption with early withdrawal penalty. Each represents the price one could get today for offloading a CD. It's just that in one case one is offloading to an arbitrary buyer…
These are features of legacy pages from two iterations ago. M* hid them many months ago, though it has only recently completely disabled them.
In its current iteration (at morningstar.com) one can still compare fund performance by using interacti…
Not directly on point but worth keeping in mind is that active share is only a measure of how many stocks held by a fund are not identical to stocks in its benchmark index. So a 100% active fund could hold Pepsi instead of Coke, UMC instead of TSM…
As one digs a little, it just keeps getting better.
It seems that the 10% performance fee used to be 11%:
https://prdistribution.com/news/tbo-capital-announces-reduction-of-performance-fees-for-all-balances-2.html
The application form lets you sen…
