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.
That's a good point about inheritance treatment...I hadn't considered that because I'm young and don't currently have any heirs, but my point was simply that debit or checking features should not generally be desirable for HSAs because, during one's…
Reply to @bee:
Neither BRUFX nor Saturna Brokerage are good custodians for using your HSA to pay medical expenses directly as neither offer debit card or checking features, but that's not a problem if you're making the most of your HSA because it'…
Also The Bruce Fund (BRUFX) is a fund that's available for direct purchase only (ie not through brokerages) and they charge the same custodial fee for HSAs as they do for IRAs (which is the $15/year that I believe all IRA custodians must pay to the …
There seems to be some confusion on this issue:
Saturna Brokerage is clearly the best and cheapest HSA custodian for mutual fund investors because their brokerage division uses a Pershing backend (the same backend that used to be used by Vanguard B…
Reply to @msf: That is interesting, but we don't need to speak English...it is enough to know that section 1036 applies to direct exchanges and so, if we alter the procedure for accomplishing this, we only need to work backwards to see what if anyth…
Reply to @msf: Although it is true that most mutual fund families (such as the Royce Fund) are Delaware trusts, the "portfolios" (or whatever the trust chooses to call them) are also regulated investment companies which must be corporations as defin…
Reply to @Investor: Absolutely incorrect. As mentioned in some cases (ie wash sales or non-wash sales attributed as such in different accounts) the IRS actually REQUIRES 1099-Bs to be submitted to them contrary to what MUST BE reported by the tax pa…
...and also worth noting that there's also now a similar situation with wash sale rules where brokers are REQUIRED to report INCORRECT information on a 1099-B and the tax payer is REQUIRED to disregard it and file and pay tax on what is known to be …
Reply to @Investor:
It's not risky, it's the only correct way to account for such a transaction regardless of what the 1099-B says. Granted it's better to also have a correct 1099-B by initiating the conversion through a broker/fund, but the proble…
I also think it's worth mentioning that you don't technically have to do a fund-family initiated "conversion" for it to be a non-tax event. While I can't remember off the top of my head the section of the internal revenue code which governs this, th…
Granted if you're reducing credit quality then your risk of loss is going up, but I don't see why those who have been investing in a consistent quality of junk since the beginning of the financial crisis should feel compelled to get out now. What wo…
Reply to @msf: "The larger cap funds have done okay, but some small caps - which were supposed to be Brideway's bread and butter - have not." - They haven't? While I've never had significant holdings in Bridgeway large cap funds, I'm up 60% on my Br…
msf,
How does Bridgeway's execution leave something to be desired? Their trade executions are excellent which is why they were commissioned by an outside firm to make their "omni" index funds (though I am not a fan of these nor am I of Buckingham …
The article linked in the OP says, "Around 70 Fidelity Funds have them; 27 Vanguard Funds, 9 Janus Funds, 5 Pioneer Funds, Bridgeway Funds and many one-offs."
...not that I necessarily think these funds are superior, but this is often cited as evid…
Ok here's the magic incantation for finding all Fidelity funds with performance fees. Search google for:
"performance adjustment" site:fiiscontent.fidelity.com
Found a few: FSSMX, FCVSX, FLPSX, VINEX...oddly the Vanguard fund doesn't detail the specifics of the performance fee but just says the fee varies with performance and the Fidelity funds specify a formula which seems to also fall as AUM in ALL of Fi…
Tell your nephew to go to the bar and have a drink so that the next morning he doesn't remember which kind of account was which.
Why punish yourself for being more intelligent then the dummies working at Vanguard and why waste your time when the m…
When it comes to tax efficiency I think it's important to remember that any fund you couldn't live with holding forever (and never selling) will not necessarily be tax efficient. And I think this should always be your goal because I'm of the old sch…
Reply to @bee:
VPGFX only allocates 5% of its portfolio to Vanguard's Market Neutral Fund (VMNFX), which catch22 mentioned is not risk parity. And Vanguard's management fees are cheap enough that even if I expected VMNFX to experience guaranteed l…
Reply to @Old_Joe:
I have to admit it's hard to stay humble when being right enables you to retire before most people twice your age. But I'm not sure which is worse hubris or poverty because as the years go by all the old farts nagging me about m…
Reply to @catch22:
I would recommend that your friend's first priority should be to do whatever it takes to convince himself that "capital preservation and appreciation" are NOT the goals he should set if he wants to satisfy his needs/wants...
If…
Reply to @hank:
I predict the market will go down at some point and I also predict it will go up at some point as well as predicting the securities that compose the market will, in aggregate, continue to pay some amount of dividends and I predict …
Reply to @Old_Joe:
My definition is 100% in agreement with the dictionary. A drop in market value is not a "loss" which the dictionary defines as "detriment, disadvantage, or deprivation" because there is, in fact, no detriment, disadvantage, or de…
Reply to @Investor:
"Liquidity risk", "bankruptcy risk", etc, etc...Bottom line is I went to the check market last Sunday and the amount I received for my check was 1 dirty penny, just like when I went to the market in 2009 the amount I received f…
Reply to @Investor:
Reply to @MikeM:
If I go to the bank to cash a check today then I get 100% of its face value, but if I go to the bank tomorrow (Sunday) then I'd be lucky to get a dirty penny from the bum that sleeps in the alley. Plot that on…
Reply to @mnzdedwards: I'm surprised by Eugene Fama's comment when he champions an essentially similar strategy with small and value "risk factors". In other words, since small and value stocks have historically been less volatile relative to their …
bee,
Only thing is IMO the diversification via actual cash dividend streams is much less ephemeral than diversification via price appreciation....reason being that prices are a function of other investors, how they behave, when they are liquid, etc…
These charts only show two things: spending the dividends vs buying more of the same
But what it doesn't show is what happens when you reinvest the dividends into a different investment which is, IMO, the key to successful investing and why total re…
You can add me to the muppets on the balcony:
Risk parity is nothing but the pinnacle of all this silly, speculative, portfolio theory, total return, nonsense. Guess what folks, even if AQR can meet their goals by matching the return of the VBINX w…
First off, Fidelity is not a bank and although they do a good job at creating the illusion of seamlessness, the fact remains that the right and left hands are not actually appendages of the same entity and must, therefore, abide by multiple layers o…
"Hedgehogs below Chimps (purely random forecasters); Foxes scored higher than Chimps; Extrapolation analytical models outperformed Foxes, and Auto-regression formulaic models outdid Extrapolation methods. In a sense, this outcome is yet another vind…
Because BIP is a Master Limited Partnership it doesn't pay corporate taxes, but rather the taxes pass through to the investors who may use the depreciation on the infrastructure owned by the partnership to defer the taxes until the shares are sold (…
When you say "reliable dividend yield" do you mean the yield defined as the amount of the cash dividend divided by the share price should be relatively constant (ie so that cash distributions are a fixed, let's say, 3% of share price so that if the …
Kenster,
I don't mind the flexibility of a fund that targets both microcaps+smallcaps either...I'm just not willing to pay those kind of expense ratios for stocks I could buy individually in my own brokerage account. That's not to say I'd want to t…
Some thoughts:
According to the direct fund websites WAIOX and GPIOX have average market caps of $800-$1000 million, but isn't that a bit big to be called "microcap"? With an average market cap of ~$300M ROIMX is truly microcap (at least in domestic…
Uh oh, if Royce is liquidating this fund then their international microcap fund (ROIMX) is sure to be next because it has 33% less assets under management (4 million vs 6 million for the mid-cap fund), is costing Royce over 2x as much in fee waivers…
