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.
I have always thought of an annuity as a deal where you hand an insurance company a pot of money and they promise to give your own money back to you a little at a time. After they skim off a commission and considering future inflation you are almos…
Lets say the bond portfolio alone is worth say $100 million (which may be in the ballpark.) Then it really doesn't make any difference to your retirement lifestyle what you do with the other 90%, so why not go for it and put it in stocks. Unfortun…
In the long run it cannot be good that the only way to keep the wheels spinning involve the government (which borrows 1/3 of the money it spends) to essentially keep buying its own debt.
Joe
I am not much of a technician, so correct me if I am wrong....I guess this is saying the Shiller P/E is forecasting a market rally because there has been a break in the longer term downward trendline. ("Breaks above the longer-term downtrend line i…
Thanks for posting this. Seems quite a bearish view of the rest of the year and a recommendation to underweight equities. I have never seen these before; have they been good at predictions in the past?
On a contrarian note, assuming interest rates do not skyrocket from here (skyrocketing being the common wisdom, which may be wrong given the weak economy) some of the bond funds seem like great buys here. For example PDI, the etf version of PIMIX, …
Good website but it does raise a point I have long pondered, namely, should a portfolio's stock exposure be reduced with changes in age/retirement status? A number of the "target date" retirement funds do this, gradually reducing stock exposure wit…
I like MASNX/MASFX, a relatively new alternative strategy fund. Promises to give bond like returns without interest rate risk and not correlated to stocks. It seems to be fulfilling the promise so far and I think it is an interesting alternative t…
I recently took a position in EVBIX (Institutional Class of EVBAX) for just this reason: for a bond fund, EVBIX seems not to respond very adversely to rising interest rates. In fact, for some periods recently there has been a negative correlation b…
How about an intermediate bond fund that correlated inversely with interest rates? Impossible? I plotted EVBIX versus IEF for the month of May 2013 when rates were rising and got a correlation coefficient of -0.3
Joe
Here is what I think is a better alternative to any kind of bond fund, it is what I call a bond equivilant fund (stable income, price not correlated to stocks or bonds, no sensitivity to interest rates): MASFX, Littman Gregory Alternate Strategy.
J…
I ran the Fund Reveal analysis on my portfolio and was surprised to find it showed my worst fund to be GRT Value Fund (GRTVX) which I believe has received some good press on this board. I am sticking with it.