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.
As noted before, often you don't need to rewrite the URL. Just put your ticker into the search box and it will (usually) take you to the brokerage page for your desired fund. For example, a search works for VFIAX or GLFOX but not for the institu…
The third or fourth Capital One rep I spoke with said that some people are reporting problems with Firefox. So if you're unable to open an account, try a different browser.
Another problem: Capital One kept our "profiles" on file from when we had…
"Vanguard’s flagship funds charge about 10 bps for wrapping the entire stock market, SPY (an ETF, which structurally has lower costs) does it for 4 bps"
Since Vanguard funds have an ETF share class, they share the structural cost advantage of ETFs…
I believe @hank is largely correct in both the purpose of the guarantee and the increasing lack of knowledge in the industry. On the latter matter one would hope, in vain it appears, that the reason such knowledge is diminishing is because newer, …
Strip away much the text and what the writer is referencing becomes clearer:
Unlike Congress, the IRS has been working on the issue and took an important first step toward reducing RMDs for most retirees. ... Back in January, I observed that if the…
Link or no link, IMHO this is obvious. Target date funds are designed to manage an entire portfolio for a hands off approach. If an investor isn't using the TDF for virtually one's whole portfolio, then the investor isn't buying into that idea, …
Nice piece, non-technical. Thanks.
Several of the limitations presented are discussed in the NYU paper. One that isn't is what Nocera presents as gaming:That sounds good in principle, but managers began to manipulate the VaR by loading up on wha…
Just a guess, and definitely not legal advice ...
I got the same notice, and have a few takeaways from it:
1. As far as T. Rowe Price is concerned, an escheatment from an IRA constitutes a distribution. No surprise there: "When an IRA escheats…
SEC press release: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2019-242
SEC proposed rule: https://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/2019/34-87607.pdf
The proposal would apply not only to ETFs, but "to mutual funds (other than money market funds), exchange-tra…
This seems not so much like an argument that the merger doesn't make sense as an argument that all discount brokerages are in trouble.
"With brokerage commissions now zero, and Schwab charging no fee to access its basic Robo-Advisor platform ... th…
It's confusing, the distinction between accounts and positions.
On the Vanguard site, there's a drop down, My Accounts-> Account Overview.
When you go there, you see a list of accounts. Each of those accounts may have zero or more positions. …
The transition itself should be easy. There are various minor differences depending on how one holds a fund account (separately or inside a brokerage). I've noticed some of those differences at Fidelity.
Fidelity made it much easier to deal wit…
Possibly you're right about being able to retain legacy accounts. While I still have my doubts, I went back and checked my father's records and later mine at Fidelity.
Fidelity originally offered individual fund accounts (much like T. Rowe Price …
If it's that complicated then why don't people just go to their own brokerage's website and look it up? People can do that to answer the question "does my brokerage sell this fund?" And that's all some people care about. But that's only one of…
To put the FAMEX list in perspective, here's what it looks like on the M* legacy page:
http://financials.morningstar.com/fund/purchase-info.html?t=FAMEX®ion=usa&culture=en-US
Not nearly as ugly as it appears in the machine readable forma…
Sometimes things are simpler than they appear. Just own the annuity inside the Roth IRA. That preserves its Rothiness.There is one instance in which annuity payments could be tax free: if you bought an annuity within a Roth IRA or Roth 401(k). In…
Shadow's post: Baird Municipal Bond Fund & Baird Strategic Municipal Bond Fund in registration
https://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/52558/baird-municipal-bond-fund-baird-strategic-municipal-bond-fund-in-registration
McAllister, Sch…
No.
Record 2019 MLR Rebates Of $1.3 Billion
Section 2718 of the Public Health Service Act, as added by the ACA, establishes an MLR for all health insurers offering individual or group health insurance coverage. This provision applies to grandfather…
I gather you've been watching the esurance commercials ("Let's be honest. Nobody likes dealing with insurance.") :-) See video below.
That aside, IMHO people focus too much on cost as opposed to value received, but only from some products and ser…
An update on my status and that of Merrill Edge.
Until a few months ago, Merrill Edge was tracking mutual fund lots incorrectly (See April 28th post, above.) I sent Merrill a request to correct the figures. Its response was to rejigger the num…
From the paper:
"For both immediate and deferred annuities, the quotes for men and women are averaged to arrive at unisex pricing. This step is necessary since employer-sponsored plans are legally prohibited from discriminating on gender with resp…
There are the matters of withdrawal (income) stream and investments.
To keep it as simple as possible, I would suggest whittling the accounts down to five (assuming you trust your spouse enough to keep all taxable moneys in a joint account):
1. J…
Here's the whole paper:
https://crr.bc.edu/working-papers/how-best-to-annuitize-defined-contribution-assets/
About a third is in (relatively) plain English. It discusses why people might want to use annuities and why they might not (both rational…
I think the point is that if you want to keep cash at your current brokerage (here, TDA), there may be decent alternatives, depending on the brokerage.
Here's Merrill Edge's list of non-proprietary MMFs they offer:
https://olui2.fs.ml.com/Publis…
For completeness, the three footnotes all say that these funds may lose money and are not insured (standard boilerplate).
In addition, footnote (1) generally applies to prime and muni MMFs, which "may impose a fee upon the sale of your shares or …
Are you talking about Medicare supplemental plans or Medicare Advantage plans? The government completely standardizes Medigap plans, except for minor perks like Silver Sneakers that insurers can throw in as sweeteners.
Since the government stand…
Legg Mason Family ETFs:
https://www.leggmason.com/content/dam/legg-mason/documents/en/tax-information/capital-gains-distribution/2019-year-end-distributions-etf.pdf
"The average retiree will receive a bump of $24 to their average monthly Social Security benefits." Way more than the $9.10 increase in Medicare payments. So most people's checks will still go up by double digits.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/da…
Since you mentioned WATFX, have you looked at WBND? Same management team. Seems to fall somewhere between WATFX and WACPX. Duration closer to WATFX (around 6 years), portfolio sector distribution closer to WATFX (½ MBS, ¼ IG), but with the fle…
While the article highlights downsides of inflation (higher medical costs, higher premiums), it omits an upside of inflation.
For the first time in a decade, the amount of income you can receive before triggering IRMAA is going up. Since 2010 the…
I and others have speculated that this is a result of M* shifting its business model to focus on software and data that targets the financial industry. That includes licensing its proprietary indexes. For all we know, its industry software may …
Is this really an article on " alternative places to park your money" (from the column), or just a random list of investments (and non-investments like cash) outside of stocks?
1. Federal Bonds ...
In early January 2019, the yield from a 10-Year Tre…
You are guaranteed to earn 0.5% above the rate of inflation if you buy [Series I savings bonds] before Oct 31.
The fixed rate on new savings bonds is 0.20%. Anyone nibble on the old rate?
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/ibon…
I (guess) that works the same on the upside as well as the downside !?Actually not. Lots of research papers come to the conclusion that bad performance has a stronger tendency to persist than good performance.
That is, if a fund performs poorly…
@BenWP - thanks for the plaudit, but I really know only enough to be dangerous (especially with a search engine at my fingertips).
Morningstar has made such a mess of things that there are people posting links all over the web to its old pages. …
Start with the URL below (it will give you the places to purchase DLTNX), and then either insert your ticker into the page's quote box, or replace the DLTNX in the URL with your ticker.
For a few funds, the quote box doesn't work, but rewriting th…
I don't look for managers who "rule", just ones whom I reasonably believe will turn in an above average performance over time. However, since we're talking about a MCV fund manager, why not look at my 2012 list of MCV funds?
https://mutualfundobse…
While I agree that Tillinghast is a fine manager, I'm wondering on what basis he appears to "absolutely rule".
In 2008, FLPSX returned -36.17%, less than the -33.79% return of its chosen benchmark (R2K, per prospectus). Personally, I would have ch…
I completely agree with Lewis. Similar reasoning is why I've advised caution in looking at 3,5,10 year figures if the market in the last 1 year has been particularly good or particularly bad. That one year distorts all the longer term figures, an…
@hank - interesting that the article you posted says the same thing as I did about I-bonds being tax-efficient. But with respect to its comment that TIPS are better left to IRAs, that may be true for TIPS, but not for TIPS funds.
From the prospec…
