Heard back from Mr. Schaja this morning. Here's what he says:

The 30-day SEC yield as of May 31 was 4.47% Retail and 4.72% for Institutional class. We estimate the yield-to-worst at 5.2% and the yield-to-maturity at 6.6% (both gross of expenses) and an average of the two, or 5.9% would be a good approximation. The portfolio is on the short side of our maturity range, with an effective average maturity of only a little over 2 years. We expect to generate returns in excess of the yield as we have historically.

I suspect that the nature of the fund's strategy might cause the guys to be a bit chary about publishing a single number but the complexity of the compliant explanation required for yield/worst versus yield/maturity versus SEC yield and the probability that effective yield lies somewhere in between might explain the lack of a single number on-site. Morty did not say that. I'm guessing.
So they wouldn't be surprised to generate 5.9% yield plus some capital appreciation.
For what that's worth,
David

DGoodrow said...
GLRBX is a 50/50 balanced fund...much more to my liking,..
If you're comfy with that fund co. and management,you've got to like JAZZX . The James Long-Short Fund has out performed GLRBX since its May 2011 start.http://www.jamesfunds.com/fund-overview.php?fund=JAZZX A L/S strategy would be a good diversifier as would the previously mentioned Precious Metals.Also you could use E M debt and the M L P /infrastructure space.Also look @ David Glancy's PYSAX or PVSAX. He has a good record and often holds 15-20% cash,mostly for an unforeseen opportunity.Use RSIVX for your 1-3 year expenses .
Scott has often mentioned the need for infrastructure investment across the world and many of the funds specializing in that space are up nicely this year.$$ cost ave. into your chosen alternatives and re-balance @ your comfort level.
From $4 Tril to $9 Tril in next 10 years.
http://news.yahoo.com/global-infrastructure-capital-spending-hit-9-trillion-2025-040519158--sector.html
E M debt for the brave.
A number of companies have plans to sell dollar-denominated bonds, including the US$1.5 billion unsecured notes proposed by state-owned oil and gas giant PT Pertamina; $450 million bonds by coal miner PT Berau Coal Energy and $175 million bonds by property developer PT Pakuwon Jati, among others.
Pertamina’s notes, which are offered with 6.45 percent coupon rate and will be due in 2044, obtained a Baa3 rate from Moody’s Investor Service. Under the rating, the obligation is seen to have a moderate credit risk.
“The outlook of the rating is stable,” Moody’s wrote in a statement published on Friday.
And The Braver!
Troubled coal miner PT Berau Coal Energy released late on Thursday a prospectus highlighting its plan to sell up to $450 million in debt papers
Proceeds from the bond issuance would be used to refinance its $450 million bonds, which were issued in 2010 and are due to mature next year
The new bonds will mature in five years and will be offered with a maximum coupon rate of 12 percent, the prospectus reads. That compares with Berau’s 2010 bond coupon rate of 12.5 percent.
Berau, one of the major coal miners in the country, is struggling to manage its liquidity as the global coal outlook remains uncertain.
The coal miner reported $10.18 million in net loss during the first three months of the year, leading to worries over the company’s ability to pay its debts.
Amid concerns of rising private sector debts, Indonesian companies are continuing to seek external funding in foreign currencies to support expansion or the refinancing of previous debts.
Raras Cahyafitri, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Business | Sat, June 21 2014, 2:47 PM
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2014/06/21/firms-sell-dollar-bonds-despite-rising-concerns-over-private-debt.html

>> Probably won't change the GO definition,
Well, not necessary, then. If it were my Owl award project, I would try to think more deeply on precisely what --- numerically --- would better take into account FPACX and PRBLX (say) superior protective behaviors and dip/recovery ratios since 2007. Otherwise forget it; it is what it is, which to my view is surprisingly less useful than it might be. If it is simply recency bias, well, then. Please don't trot out 'manager departed, strategy changed, ER, stewardship, capital gain implications, category drift, miscategorization, survivorship bias, …' and that sort of thing; no one in this discussion is concerned about or unaware of those muddying variables, which go without saying.

@mrdarcey. Very good!

No indication if a manager has departed, or if the strategy has changed, or what the expense ratio is, stewardship, capital gain implications, etc, etc.

...or category drift, mis-categorization, or survivorship bias, etc.
Hey, maybe next time Mr. Moran asks one of his tough questions, I ask you to help me answer =).

Is there a reason why there are not more comments about defined maturity bond funds? Is it the need to pay a premium at times? They seem to offer downside protection and return your capital at a defined date. ERs vary. This article describes the risks and benefits. The initial comments that follow seem positive.
http://www.aaii.com/journal/article/defined-maturity-funds-a-bond-alternative-with-compromises.mobile

@Dex Me too, but if we are to lean, let us lean in a measured way and not get too extended with our committed capital. :)
I posted a couple on this subject recently, but few picked up on it:
http://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/14161/a-single-silo-credit-allocator-in-crisis-the-fed-may-swing-the-exit-gate-shut-on-you#latest
I wonder if the Fed's concern has to do with the decline in resources on Wall Street for market making. Maybe the cuts have been more extensive than we know. Too rapid a rush out of IG corp bonds (whose issuance recently has been massive, to corporations receiving rates they do not deserve) could lead to a large, bid-less lockup. Otherwise, this Fed "Open Musing" makes no sense, since their expert in-house analysts have already cautioned that this very action, if taken, could lead to the very thing they would seek to prevent.

@davidmoran. No worries. AJ and I just lost lock.
I too worry about downside.
I honestly think Martin is best parameter to use when evaluating downside historical performance.
That's precisely why it's the foundation for the MFO rating system, which is the irony of your analogy.
But these backward looking systems based strictly on performance numbers are just that...M*'s, MFO's. Each provide results consistent with their methodologies.
No indication if a manager has departed, or if the strategy has changed, or what the expense ratio is, stewardship, capital gain implications, etc, etc.
And, like you say, if there has been no downside in the market overall, hard to know how a fund will do when market heads-south.
Just not much help there from a return perspective.
The risk parameter, however, is something that is somewhat less dependent on market cycles. In the MFO system, it's relative to SP500, again, as a flag of downside potential. I personally think that investors should understand their risk tolerance first, then worry about making satisfactory returns. I tend to notice risk color first.
We do our best to define and qualify the ratings, so they become just one piece of an investor's due diligence.
Hey, on the GO designation, we made age group pretty prominent as a way to distinguish between say 20 year GOs and 3 year GOs, while still recognizing the top quintile performers.
Hope that helps, a little anyway.
Thanks again.

That is not a statement that it will outperform any index just that it will show a gain over a specific period of time
step 1 Do nothing until the $+P 500 drops 30% from its most recent high
At that point dollar cost average into a 500 fund over the next 36 months and sell in the fourth year once you have achieved long term gains on your investments. It is possible that this did not work for some past date other than starting in 1970 and selling in 1974 but I have trouble thinking of one.(and am not sure the market had dropped 30% in 69-70

This is a better explanation of what the Fed Reserve is concerned about (an unexpected liquidity event), but also discusses the unintended consequences (to bond investors) of an announcement that a blocking gate has been created:
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/a-horror-show-called-fed-gate-may-be-coming-to-your-bond-fund-soon/
[he's not on his rant box here; IOW, it's a safe read]
"Even the announcement of a rule-making would potentially trigger the very kind of sell-off that it would be designed to prevent. And if corporate bond prices took a tumble, it would not take long for equity markets to recognize that the massive flow of new debt capital which has been used to fund record stock buybacks could suddenly dry up."

The afternoon's last panel featured three former Managers of the Year (Chris Davis of Selected American Shares SLASX, Will Danoff of Contrafund (FCNTX) and Dennis Lynch of Morgan Stanley Institutional Growth MSEQX) talking about stock selection. Most such discussions quickly degenerate into dueling pablum: "I'm looking for growth stocks at value prices" or "we're looking for growth with a catalyst." Ick.
This was less systematic but much more interesting. They got onto the question of whether they bought Facebook, Google, both or neither, and why. Among the highlights:
Davis: "I was a little spooked with a Facebook executive, early on, announced that 'our goal is to fully monetize the trust that you have in your friends.' That struck me as creepy and I hope they never said that in public again."
Lynch and Danoff: young firms need to be judged differently than established ones. In particular, the quality of capital allocation decisions is far less important in young firms; they're going to make mistakes and the more important question is why and how they responded.
Davis: "whenever we invest, we write something that might be considered a 'pre-mortem.' We start with the assumption that whatever we decided was horribly wrong and write up, in advance, what mistakes we made and what conditions ended up costing us. This discipline is critical for avoiding the pitfalls of later convenient recollections about why we did what we did." Vigorous nodding from Lynch and Danoff.
Lynch: "it's incredibly hard to get our head around the idea that a firm with just 10 employees might be massive. With the scalability of operations through the internet, firms can get one small thing very right and suddenly they're global. It's incredibly hard to traditional stock disciplines to accommodate that fact."
Danoff: "we're all been taught that the four most dangerous words in investing is 'it's different this time.' The problem is, in many ways, it is different - fundamentally and profoundly. We need, as investors, to learn to understand those differences."
Lynch and Danoff: the question of whether to invest in Google or Facebook was strongly driven by the subsidiary question, is the monetization pursued by the firms value-added to the users' experience or a degradation of it. That is, when the sites started embedding context-sensitive advertising, was the effect to make viewers value the site more or less? In general, all saw Google as offering a more logical - hence more accepted - inclusion of advertising on their site.
Bottom line: there are a bunch of factors at play in an emerging economy that are poorly accounted for by traditional disciplines. It seems to take some combination of the mastery of the traditional discipline plus the ability to transcend it to thrive. Few achieve that, perhaps for generational reasons - younger managers are impatient with one set of rules and older managers find the other set somewhat alien.
For what it's worth,
David

As for Whitebox planning, put this in your travel folder:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-10/whitebox-shorting-never-never-stocks-in-graham-reversal.html
.

Love the Never Never Index, but Open Table got bought by Priceline, which I totally don't understand. To me, Open Table just feels like someone else could come along and invade that space. Even the website is kind of....blah. It's not slick or interesting.

Thanks David.
For the Arbitrage Fund crew.....don't know how you would ask this....but the fund seems to be 'dead in the water' with respect to performance. Not a happy shareholder. Their 2013 total return: 0.85%. 2012 return: 0.27%. No complaints about 2011. 2010: 1.44%. Not focusing on the category, but on an absolute return basis, can't they do better?

I wouldn't expect anything more than low-to-mid single digit returns from Merger Arb funds. May be worse lately from the standpoint of you have traditionally the idea of shorting the company buying and buying the company being bought. In this market, everything is going up. So, while you may get some minor gains from the company being bought, you're losing if the company doing the buying that you're short goes up anyways.
Again though, not going to be something that does more than a single or - in a really good year - a double.

Of the value-oriented ones, it's interesting how very much better FLPSX does than HWMIX if you start in the summer of 2007, which is what I always advise.

Do you have a tool or financial calculator that you use to determine the total return of any mutual fund using whatever start and end date you want?
You can use Adjusted Closing prices from Yahoo Finance, but I'm not confident in the accuracy of this method.
It's easy to calculate percentage price change using any start and end date, but distributions [dividends, long and short term capital gain distributions] have to be added in to the calculation, making things more complicated. And you have to find out all the distributions that took place from the start and end date in question. The NAV goes down by the amount of any distribution.

Oppenheimer senior energy analyst Fadel Gheit said the oil stocks are overpriced and are trading as if crude was going to stay at $110 per barrel.
"It really depends on what the balance of power is going to be a month from now, a year from now," Gheit said. "The Sunnis are left basically with nothing but arms because they were excluded from the government. They have no oil resources. The Kurds took their share, and the Baghdad government wants to keep their share. Maliki is not an inclusive prime minister. he's doing what Saddam Hussein did but the opposite way. He favored his own tribe over another."
An Alarmist's Worst Case?
As the second-largest and fastest-growing producer in OPEC, Iraq has been pumping 3.3 million barrels a day. OPEC's quota is 30 million barrels. So far, oil production has not been disrupted, but a northern pipeline that takes oil from Kirkuk to Turkey has been damaged by militant assaults and has been out of service since March.
"If they can hold onto Baghdad, and the south of Iraq, 3 million barrels will continue to flow and it won't be a big deal," said John Kilduff, energy analyst with Again Capital. "Any credible threat to central Baghdad or the oil fields— it's $150 just for starters."
Kilduff said any spike higher would probably fade quickly, but consumer confidence would plunge, and it would launch an energy crisis because Saudi Arabia, the global swing producer, cannot make up that much lost capacity.
Originally here.
http://seekingalpha.com/news/1803223-some-analysts-say-energy-stocks-are-getting-too-hot
More detail here.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101763888
Other Energy News and Background.
BlackRock’s Russ Koesterich thinks energy stocks will benefit:
The recent unrest in the Middle East and the potential for higher oil prices confirms our views on two sectors: positive on energy while negative on U.S. retailers and other consumer stocks. Year-to-date, energy has been one of the best-performing sectors while consumer discretionary has trailed the broader market.
http://blogs.barrons.com/stockstowatchtoday/2014/06/16/buy-energy-sell-consumer-discretionary-as-higher-oil-prices-set-to-linger/
I have energy positions in GAGEX ,CRZAX ,CSHAX and NORW.Also two small Canadian plays CDLRF and CESDF .All are at or near Y T D or all-time highs. Blind Hog !
Energy Statistics and World View.
Oil remains the world’s leading fuel, with 33% of global energy demand, but lost market share to other fuels for the 14th consecutive year.
China surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest net oil importer, bringing in 7 million barrels a day.
Coal consumption increased by 3% in 2013, below its yearly average of 3.9% but enough to put coal’s share of world energy consumption at 30%, its highest since 1970, BP said in its 63rd annual statistical review on Monday. The review is an industry benchmark.
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/energy-ticker/2014/06/16/renewable-energy-demand-rises-to-record-2-7-of-global-consumption/?mod=WSJBlog
For 63 years, the
BP Statistical Review of World Energy
has
provided high-quality objective and globally consistent data on
world energy markets. The review is one of the most widely
respected and authoritative publications in the field of energy
economics, used for reference by the media, academia, world
governments and energy companies. A new edition is published
every June.Highlights:
World proved natural gas reserves at end-2013 stood at 185.7 trillion cubic metres (tcm), sufficient to meet 54.8 years of global production.
Total world proved oil reserves reached 1687.9 billion barrels at the end of 2013, sufficient to meet 53.3 years of global production.
World proved coal reserves in 2013 were sufficient to meet 113 years of global production, by far the largest R/P ratio for any fossil fuel.
World coal production increased by 0.8% in 2013, well below the 3% increase in global consumption. Indonesia (+9.4%) recorded the largest production increment – the
first time since 1998 that China did not have the largest growth increment. Global consumption growth was below average but was once again the fastest among fossil
fuels. China and India accounted for 88% of global growth
World nuclear power generation increased by 0.9%, the first increase since 2010. Gains in the US, China, and Canada more than offset declines in South Korea, Ukraine,
Spain and Russia. Global hydroelectric output grew by a below-average 2.9%. Growth in China, Russia, Spain and India was partly offset by large declines in Brazil and
the Nordic countries
48 Page Review:
http://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/pdf/Energy-economics/statistical-review-2014/BP-statistical-review-of-world-energy-2014-full-report.pdf

Hi Ted,
It appears that you have decided to continue the march, at least for now. That's good. Thank you.
Indeed you have been doing this form of research for years, and I have benefited from it since the early FundAlarm days. Compared to your time on the job, Barry Ritholtz is a rookie. He was likely in the 4th grade when you posted your first listing.
I’m happy that you have elected to basically ignore the MFO naysayers except for your very perceptive summary sentence. This too reflects your overarching experience level.
I suspect some segment of these naysayers adhere to the following advice which was published about 7 months ago by Ritholtz titled “Reduce the Noise Levels in Your Investment Process”:
" (1) Constantly consume mainstream media. Financial television is an excellent source of actionable investing ideas.
(2) Play down data. It’s overrated. Stick with anecdotes from people you know personally and your gut instincts.
(3) Pay attention to pundits. They exist for the sole purpose of helping you reach a comfortable retirement.
(4) Get the inside dope. All of the important information about the stock market — especially when it is going to crash or rally — is known only to handful of secret insiders. If you can’t get their magic knowledge, blame them for any losses you incur.
(5) Stress about this. Exert lots of energy, spend lots of time and create lots of tension about all of the following: Federal Reserve and the Taper, the Dollar versus the Euro, the Tea Party and Congress, Hyper-Inflation, European Sovereign Bank Debt, Gold, China, Deflation, Austerity and the Hindenburg Omen.
(6) Don’t do the math. Numbers are vastly overrated, and probability analysis is for geeks anyway.
(7) Stay in your comfort zone. Focus only on those news sources that are in sync with your politics. Seek out sources that confirm your preexisting opinions and investment postures. Never read anything that challenges your beliefs.
(8) Think fast. Trading is where the big money is made! Don’t worry about the long term — it’s way off in the future. Measure your success in hours and days, not years and decades.
(9) Have a Super Happy Fun Time. There is no reason that you cannot also have a good time with your retirement account: It’s tax -deferred, so you have no capital gains consequences. Have fun with it — that’s what it’s there for anyway!
(10) Ask: What Have You Done For Me Lately? Never listen to people with good long-term track records who may have had a losing period. When Warren Buffett underperformed in 1999, you should have written him off. Investing is about recent performance!"
Of course, Ritholtz was just showing off his sarcastic side. He meant and believes just the opposite. He called this subsection of his article “How to Get More Noise and Less Signal”. I love it! In this arena you and Ritholtz share some common characteristics.
Thanks once again for doing this arduous task. It has saved me and many other MFO members countless hours of searching time while wisely directing our attention to meaningful candidate articles that will positively inform us in most instances.
Continue to continue the march.
Best Wishes.

FYI: Copy & Paste 6/13/14: Jason Zweig: WSJ
Regards,
Ted
Investing graybeards like to say that "bull markets climb a wall of worry." This one has been sleepwalking up a wall of boredom.
As of this Friday, the S&P 500 has gone 980 days without a 10% decline, according to Birinyi Associates, the fifth-longest such stretch on record. This past week's nervousness, set off by the insurgency in Iraq and the surprise defeat of U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, is thus the perfect pretext for investors to think about what they will do when the market takes a serious beating.
For, sooner or later, it surely will—and those investors who have honestly prepared for it will stand the best chance of surviving unscathed. In a downturn, you won't be the same investor that you are now—unless you rely on rules and procedures, rather than willpower alone, to regulate your behavior.
New research shows that the kind of stress brought on by a collapsing stock market fundamentally changes how people make financial decisions.
In a series of recently published experiments, Mauricio Delgado, a neuroscientist in the psychology department at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., has found that even a moderate amount of sudden stress can make people more sensitive to losses and indifferent to small gains.
In these experiments, people are put under stress by immersing their dominant hand in ice water (at about 39 degrees Fahrenheit) or wearing an arm wrap cooled to the same temperature. Shortly thereafter, most people show an impaired short-term memory and an elevated level of the stress hormone cortisol. Stress in the world outside the laboratory, often brought on by social interactions, is almost certainly more intense than this simple simulation in the lab, says Prof. Delgado.
People are then asked to choose between simple gambles with varying odds and different amounts of money at stake. Under stress, participants gravitated toward bets giving them a higher probability of making a smaller amount of money. When gambles paid off, brain scans show, the natural response in the reward areas of the brain was blunted by stress.
"Exposure to stress makes people more loss-averse and diminishes their overall sensitivity to reward," says Prof. Delgado. "And if a reward is of low magnitude, [people under stress] often don't care about it very much."
Thus, at the very moment when falling prices make assets more attractive to own, most investors are likely to focus on how much they are losing in the short term—rather than on how much they stand to gain if they hang on for the long term.
They are also likely to fall back on emotional—or what Prof. Delgado calls "habit-based"—decisions. "Stress tends to exacerbate your typical biases," he says. "If you usually make conservative choices, it will make you more conservative." And if you typically make risky choices to avoid locking in losses, he says, stress "will make you more risk-seeking." Other researchers have found similar patterns of behavior.
That helps explain why investors who swore they would never sell often end up fleeing to cash when stocks drop, while others add more to their positions than they ever anticipated.
In calm times, like the markets of the past few months, it's hard to imagine how you will feel when all the arrows turn to red from green. What's more, even in the heat of the moment, when your body and brain show the signs of acute stress, you might not be consciously aware of the pressure you are under.
So it's vital to make sure you have procedures in place now to control your future stress.
Start by asking yourself where the potential is greatest for nasty surprises. One obvious vulnerability: Companies that have rung up a long string of consecutive earnings increases are likely to fall much more steeply than average once their profits falter. If imagining the stock price falling by, say, one-third doesn't make you want to buy more, then you probably should consider selling now.
Force yourself to consider the total value of your portfolio, including all other assets, rather than just focusing on the price of your latest loser. That is often called "thinking like a trader," although you don't have to be a trader to do it.
By netting all your gains and losses against each other, research by several economists and psychologists has shown, you can reduce the intensity of your emotional response to falling prices. Be sure you have set up a spreadsheet or portfolio-monitoring software that displays the value of your overall portfolio more prominently than any individual holding.
If you haven't recently "rebalanced," selling a bit of whatever has gone up the most and adding the proceeds to whatever has gone down the most, now is an ideal time.
Taking moderate action now, while markets are still calm, should help you avoid doing something reckless when investing turns suddenly stressful.

Oilprice.com
FREE
WEEKLY REPORT
13/06/2014
Summation
Turkey has been hesitant until now, but it needs a new bargaining chip with Washington, and it also needs to carefully balance its relations with Russia, upon which Ankara has its own form of energy dependence. In the end, it will be the Ukraine crisis and the need for some delicate geopolitical rebalancing that opens up the Bosporus for a Turkey-Ukraine energy coup.
Brazil has enormous oil and gas reserves. That is what has led to many getting in the way as PBR has fallen out of bed. The problem is that de-risking those reserves requires enormous inward investment of both capital and technology. When corruption is endemic and the oil industry, as a state owned monopoly, is more of a political football than a business, those two things have been virtually non-existent. Even if Rousseff does hang on and win, the election looks sure to offer the possibility of a crackdown on corruption and an economic environment more attractive to foreign companies.
http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=ed58b19f2b88e4a743b950765&id=cf242cee9c&e=41e04eb3d1

This isn't an ETF, it's a closed-end fund. ETF's will trade at approximately the net asset value of the underlying assets. Closed-end funds like this will trade like stocks, meaning they may sell at a discount or at a premium to the net underlying assets. This makes them more volatile.
Another factor that makes them more volatile is that many closed-end funds use leverage, meaning they borrow money, invest the borrowed money, and expect to pay back the borrowed money out of the earnings. If their investments don't pay off, there aren't any earning to pay back the borrowing and they have to dip into their capital to do so. Generally, this means that they go up faster than equivalent etf's (or open-ended managed funds) and can also go down faster. In other words, they are riskier. According to Morningstar, PHT is leveraged at around 26%.
PHT is a junk bond fund. I don't follow those closely, but its equivalents would be other junk bond funds.
Hope this was helpful.

FYI: For enhanced returns, I have always been a believer in focused or concentrated funds for as part of a capital appreciation portfolio.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.fa-mag.com/news/with-concentrated-bets--tiny-u-s--mutual-funds-jump-up-rankings-18276.html?print
M* Snapshot Of BFONX: http://quotes.morningstar.com/fund/f?t=BFONX&region=usa&culture=en-US
M* Snapshot Of VAFGX: http://quotes.morningstar.com/fund/f?t=VAFGX&region=usa&culture=en-US
VAFGX Is Ranked # 143 In The (LCV) Category By U.S. News & World Report:
http://money.usnews.com/funds/mutual-funds/large-value/valley-forge-fund/vafgx
BFONX Is Unranked In The (LCG) Category By U.S. News & World Report:
http://money.usnews.com/funds/mutual-funds/large-growth/biondo-focus-fund/bfonx/holdings

While I wish Vanguard employes were more equitably compensated (but I wonder how many leave from the lower echelon), I'm happy with an ER <.5% average in Health Care, Capital Opps, and Primecap, plus others. Wish my 403b included the company. If I ever buy an annuity, it will probably be there.