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msf

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  • M* charts show that MSEGX (Morgan Stanley Inst Growth fund) is down nearly 30% but stock charts show it is down 25% from its recent high on November 16. To no great surprise, the discrepancy dates to Dec 15, when a cap gain of $18.005 (per Yahoo) …
  • You are correct, I inadvertently read off YTD rather than 2021 numbers in some cases. Thanks for spotting my errors! SNGVX really did lose almost a full percent, but you have the correct figure for BBBMX. GILPX did eek out a 0.02% gain (still effe…
  • added a conservative allocation fund TAIFX to taxable (really like its holdings, muni’s along with strong underlying equity funds). A similar fund (the only similar fund I'm aware of) is VTMFX. Cheaper and has outperformed in almost all calendar…
  • Ave Maria funds were started by Tom Monaghan of Domino Pizza fame. He is a very conservative Catholic who is comfortable with the Dominionist/Integralism belief that religion should be the basis of public law and policy-discussion better suited for …
  • AVEFX is available NTF at Merrill Edge and at Firstrade (which sells all funds w/o TFs). At Ave Maria Funds, "Investments are made only in companies that do not violate core teachings of the Catholic Church as set by our distinguished Catholic Advi…
  • Along those lines, if one of the requirements is just that the fund hold some bonds, one could pick a top performing 85%+ allocation fund. Like GWPFX. Or even better, pick a fund that tracks a pure equity index using derivatives, with most of i…
  • But since I use MERFX as a cash substitute, 2%-3% per year is fine with me The problem is for me a cash substitute fund cannot have sustained a loss greater than 2% in a year, and preferably no loss ever. Why take the risk with such meager returns…
  • She does NOT like to pay TFs so any non-VG AA funds suggested should be NTF at VG With $5M in this account alone, she gets 100 free trades (aside from the normally NTF funds) per year. Frenetic trader? https://investor.vanguard.com/investing/tran…
  • What ever happened to indexes that actually measured something as opposed to defining investable portfolios? Oh well. Saying that the AO* series just invest in various combinations of IVV, IJH, IJR, IDEV, IEMG, IUSB, and IAGG doesn't answer the q…
  • Fair point about the foreign allocation. A drag over the past decade, could be a plus going forward. I did notice the cash component which is odd. One of the benefits of ETFs (including CEFs) is that unlike OEFs they don't need to keep cash arou…
  • VSCGX did have a hard 2008. It was a different fund then, with 25% in an asset allocation fund (VAAPX) that could shift between 100% stocks and 100% bonds. In 2008, VAAPX was (judging from its performance) completely allocated to stocks. It r…
  • See my concluding sentence in the thread Seeking Suggestions for Vanguard Asset Allocation Funds: "Or even push it to a 30/70 fund (VTINX)." This vanilla Vanguard fund of funds returned more than AOK over one day (YTD), one year (5.03% vs 4.37%), …
  • I think you meant: Your job, should you decide to accept it ... This portfolio will self destruct in five years :-) While active management (I'm a big fan of Wellington) can add some value its impact is marginal compared with the effect of allocat…
  • Is the object is to get the maximum return for the minimum volatility (which IMHO is not the same as risk, but a subject for another day) with a traditional fixed allocation? That seems to be what's implied by the observation that a 20/80 allocati…
  • I believe the unnamed article referenced is one from Prof. Snowball: Investing in 2022: The Indolent Portfolio (Jan 2022), citing The case for a stock-light portfolio, version 4.0 (April 2021), or Mutual Fund Commentary Nov 1, 2014 They all referen…
  • FWIW, the investment manager, IndexIQ appears to have thrown in the towel with respect to index construction. This fund currently tracks the IQ Real Return Index, developed by IndexIQ LLC. This index targeted a positive real return. The index is…
    in Inflation Comment by msf January 2022
  • It is complicated. I am not sure why there is so much focus on the "4%" rule when the IRS forces people over 75 to remove 4.07% of your retirement accounts. By 80 it is up to almost 5%. This conflates 4% of starting amount (inflation adjusted) wit…
  • M* makes it easy to look up recent performance of the top 25 holdings. Or in the case of LLPFX, all 17 equity holdings. One can go to the M* legacy holdings page for a fund, get links for each of the top 25 holdings, click on those links and from…
  • While I have a slight personal preference for Fidelity, Schwab is an excellent brokerage and currently shows 3,164 funds there that are open to new investors with a min of $100 or less. Good for starting out. Though a good approach might also …
  • Conservative-allocation (CA2) 30-50% VTMFX +12.63%. VTMFX looks even better when one considers that the income side is federally tax-exempt. Interesting factoid I wasn't aware of from M*'s writeup of the fund: "they have to maintain at least 50% …
  • ytd VONE + STIP 50-50 = ½ x 25.48% + ½ x 5.38% = 15.43%. That would not be the best way to do the calculation since the lack of rebalancing implicit in the arithmetic would see the equity allocation drift up toward:1.2548/(1.2548 + 1.0538) = 54%. …
  • I feel that the perceived decline in fund fees is largely illusory once one controls for: payment to advisors (which has been externalized, moving the source from 12b-1 fees and loads out of the funds to separate wrap fees); the increase in the rela…
  • Without giving it too much thought, the fund site comment might be suggesting that fund's behaviour due to its use of short term options is somewhat like that of leveraged/inverse funds that reset quarterly. That is, the risk/return profile is as …
  • You're correct that the management completed clawing back its fees. From the annual report:For the year ended April 30, 2021, the Investment Manager has fully recovered all of its previously waived fees totaling $401,308. For a period not to excee…
  • CTFAX is an example of a fund that tacks a management fee (0.10%) on top of its expenses including its acquired fund expenses (0.40%). It has put a temporary cap of 0.50% on fees excluding the acquired fund fees. When you add back the acquired…
  • Regarding the 1.85% fee - there's actually a cap in place of 1.45%. But this excludes the cost of acquired funds (0.57%). That's enough to drop the remaining expenses below the cap which in turn allows the fund to claw back previously waived fee…
  • Hard to tell if Carillon Tower has anything strategic in mind. It acquired Scout Funds (including its subsidiary Reams) in 2017 and left the management in place. But it used those funds as acquiring funds to merge two non-Scout funds into oblivi…
  • For context, the source of the figures is Morningstar. See, e.g. https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1072421/existing-trends-in-us-fund-flows-hold-in-november As Vanguard's total AUM of $7.2B is significantly more than the total AUM of iShares,…
  • @yogibearbull - Thanks for the update. You're right of course that most of the money has been flowing into index funds. It has gotten much harder for active funds to compete with index funds. That's especially true in the larger cap space whe…
  • Unless I slipped a decimal place, that's four cents more than you'd good get in total interest from the TBTF banks (0.01% APY).
  • I have a friend who owned a condo (not a co-op) in Ocean Grove - a town where the land is owned by the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association of the United Methodist Church. https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/210652120 Leases there are typically fo…
  • too many! All VG active funds (33% of VG business) have outside advisors Could you source this figure? Vanguard suggests a much lower percentage for its whole business. $1.6T/$7.2T = 22%. Few people realize we’re among the world’s largest active…
  • I was sure Chartwell sounded familiar. Finally found the thread. Chartwell grew its fund business by acquiring Berwyn funds in 2016. It appears that prior to that it had been offering only two funds itself, though it was managing portions of tw…
  • Actually, and as noted in the SEC proposal, "Government funds are [currently] permitted, but not required, to impose fees and gates." So technically some parts of the SEC proposal have scope beyond prime & muni m-mkt funds. Pragmatically, …
  • TRP told me that they will convert all eligible accounts to institutional class shares in January, but that upon request they will do the conversion now.
  • There 'Sales Charge' is $35 compared to Fido's $49.95 so that's better. As I understand it, that's $35 to buy or to sell, as opposed to Fidelity's fees, which range from a high of $75 (to buy shares of Vanguard, Schwab, and D&C funds), to $49.…
  • What I experienced was exasperating and not well handled, but it was the exception. So long as transactions have been ordinary and haven't deviated one iota from the norm, I've not had problems. But once one introduces even the slightest varia…
  • Brokerages do not seem to designate Rolledover Roths as such. All the brokerages I know just have Roth IRA but no Rollover Roth IRA and Roth 401(k) funds are rolled over to a Roth IRA account. Why is there this distinction between Traditional vs …
  • and you do have to file a separate partnership tax return on March 15 that is hard Single member LLCs may be treated as "disregarded entities" by the IRS; they have no partnership tax returns to file. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses…
  • As we're looking at protection given to rollovers by the BAPCPA, we're talking about bankruptcy proceedings. Some retirement assets (employer plans, money rolled into IRAs, another $1.36+M in IRAs) are protected, but this money becomes fair game i…