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.
In the early days of gold mining, doing laundry was outsourced to China, because outsourcing was less expensive. Plus ça change.In order to wash your own clothes in San Francisco, you had to buy water, paying 25 cents for two buckets’ worth. Then, …
Nuance? GARP and value investing are more than subtly different.
M* offers FCNTX and ANEFX as prominent examples of GARP funds. Investopedia says that "GARP investing was popularized by legendary Fidelity manager Peter Lynch." That would be t…
Clipped from Stars and Stripes
https://www.stripes.com/news/us/captain-crozier-captain-crozier-videos-show-sailors-sending-off-ousted-uss-roosevelt-commander-with-cheers-1.624732
Do you think this guy missed the cutoff then? It seems the bill just went into effect:
https://jacksonlewis.com/publication/new-employer-obligations-under-slightly-revised-families-first-coronavirus-act-hr-6201Possibly. The article does mention th…
MSF Interesting details, thanks. Do you know if other states are following suit? Also, I wonder if some insurers won't file lawsuits contesting this ruling down the road?I can't believe I missed this, but Congress passed a bill, signed into law on M…
I'm not sure how much flexibility the federal and state governments have, but they do have some power under their ability to regulate insurers. For example, if the USPSTF were to add a procedure (such as COVID-19 screening) to its list of preventi…
I also would have guessed currency (but Lewis beat me to the punch).
I ran FMIJX, TBGVX (mostly hedged), VEU (unhedged reference), and HEFA (hedged EAFE) through Portfolio Visualizer. While the hedged funds have somewhat better correlation betwe…
If the southern border constituted a significant health threat, then Trump failed us. It took him seven weeks after restricting travel from China (Jan 31) to restrict travel from Mexico (March 21).
As far as construction of the wall for reasons …
Here's the original letter by Captain Crozier:
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6821571/TR-COVID-19-Assistance-Request.pdf
I tend to latch onto numbers. Here are a couple that jumped out at me:
From the Chron article:[Chief of Naval Op…
While two days is not a trend, does this give you any sense that muni money market funds are stabilizing? It seems the answer is it depends on the daily net shareholder cash flows.
Certainly that's a part of it. However, ⅔ of these funds are in …
In fact, Muni MM and prime MM can have the following: "The fund may impose a fee upon sale of your shares or may temporarily suspend your ability to sell shares if the fund's liquidity falls below required minimums because of market conditions or o…
"I'm fairly certain Dr. Fauchi will find employment in any endeavor with half a brain cell"
Assuming he wants that after working since 1968 as a civil servant in the National Institutes of Health. David Rubenstein, the billionaire head of the Car…
Regarding Boeing, it's quite possible that the company is just using the virus as a cover for eliminating its dividend. Sure, it put on a brave face in January ("Boeing CEO says it will keep paying its dividend despite Max crisis").
But it di…
§2201 of CARES reads in part:
“(c) Limitation based on adjusted gross income.—The amount of the credit allowed by subsection (a) (determined without regard to this subsection and subsection (e)) shall be reduced (but not below zero) by 5 percent of …
You said that specific funds (not ALL) were not managed, period. And yet they are managed, but you knew that.
More from the WSJ: "Vanguard's bond index funds will continue tilting toward corporate bonds instead of Treasurys, to take advantage of…
" Lots of people have written to me to ask about all the “pork” that Democrats demanded in this bill ..."
Further down, her writing reveals that "pork" is literally in the bill: "There was money for the ... Agriculture Department to grade beef and …
DODIX, FTBFX, BOND are managed bond funds while AGG,BND and VBTLX follow the US Total bond index and why they are very close long term.
Usually, but not always. Index funds, especially bond index funds, are also managed, though perhaps not in th…
Certainly that's possible.
Suppose in 2019 someone had an adjusted gross income (AGI) of $99K, including a $24K RMD. And withholdings/estimates were just enough to cover taxes owed. At $99K AGI the individual would receive no advance credit.…
Probably not. This Congressional Research Service paper says you won't have to pay back the excess:If, when taxpayers file their 2020 income tax returns in 2021, they find that the advanced credit is greater than the actual credit, they would not …
It's a refundable credit, meaning that you get the money even if you don't owe any tax against which to apply the credit.
Here's Grassley's FAQ on the bill:
https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/cares-act-recovery-check-faq
Even individual…
Upon rereading the text for the umpteenth time, I have come around to believing that one might get an additional refund if one's 2020 AGI implies a bigger credit than one's 2019 (or 2018) AGI.
The text seems to read that the credit is given on t…
Four Republican senators wrongly stated that the bill effectively encouraged people to quit their jobs. If the people charged with voting on the bill misrepresent it, I wouldn't put too much trust in any of rushed quotes or reports.
Senators Tim …
I guess I shouldn't use so much hypertext (embedded links). They can be hard to spot in the text. Here's the link to the fund's NAVs:
https://www.schwabfunds.com/public/csim/home/products/mutual_funds/current_nav.html?symbol=SWKXX
msf, could Vanguard prop up or support (I am not certain what this mean) VMSXX so that it does not deviate by more than a cent from $1.00, thus not have the need to re-price its shares to something other than $1.00 (breaking the buck), resulting in …
@Sven - Just that the muni bond market is in chaos. Keeping in mind that average maturities of MMFs tend to run in the 60 day range, we have this from Bloomberg (via Yahoo):
Take a note issued by New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority th…
Different people have different expectations and risk can mean different things to them.
There's a difference between expectations and certainties. Stocks had a dismal decade in the 2000s. "Investors would have been better off investing in pret…
In this crash, it [RPHYX] has underperformed both vanilla bond funds like MWTRX and Vanguard's bond index fund, VBMFX ...
It was supposed to offer minimal downside. As it turns out, in this stress situation, it has offered more downside than a tot…
It was only seven years since I made this post about STADX specifically and "enhanced cash" funds generally. How soon they forget :-)
https://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/comment/21712/#Comment_21712
Until the GFC when most of these f…
There are a lot of different situations that are getting mixed together here.
@MikeM raises the question of employer plan rollovers in kind. Often employer plans require you to liquidate your holdings and transfer cash. If they make an exceptio…
Few years back I recall someone bringing a bill to congress which would make it illegal for members of Congress to trade on insider information. The bill was soundly defeated.
STOCK (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge) became law in 2012. It w…
Glad to see @David_Snowball start this thread. I was thinking about starting a thread that was a bit broader - what's happening locally - that would include things like this.
I received email from one local restaurant asking people to buy gift ca…
Mark - This article https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/us/politics/kelly-loeffler-richard-burr-insider-trading.html?searchResultPosition=1 refers to Sen. Feinstein's office stating that her investments are in a blind trust. (There's a link.) Not s…
I think people tend to conflate libertarians and Austrians with a lot of other people and ideas on the right.
But hey. I know "conservatives" that think I'm a downright "communist" because I voted for some Democrats.
Politics are closer to an M* s…
Finally, the corporation's first duty wasn't always to shareholders. In the original history of corporate charters, a corporation had to be shown to be beneficial to society to exist. This shareholders' first and screw every other stakeholder--emp…
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/20/the-federal-reserve-is-expanding-its-asset-purchases-to-include-municipal-bonds.html
Good find. Here's the Fed's PR piece and the actual term sheet.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary2…
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Friday that Tax Day would be moved to July 15, giving Americans an additional three months to file their income tax returns.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/world/coronavirus-news.html
Mr. Mnuchin said th…
What's the point of the obfuscation if the next document filed with the SEC (the reorg proxy) reveals all? (Don't even try to answer that.)
LREOX is the Predecessor Portfolio. It's a series of the Lazard Funds. The predecessor fund to the Prede…
That's a good question. These days I haven't been paying too much attention to muni MMFs because they're paying less than online bank accounts (after tax). So it doesn't make much sense to take on their additional risk. (Aside from consideratio…
In another thread, I wrote that according to IRS guidelines, taxpayers are allowed to defer their first quarter estimates until July 15th, though their second quarter estimates are still due a month earlier, on June 15th.
As to what I will be doing…
