Dear friends,
It’s fall.
By the oddity of scheduling, Augustana’s fall trimester ended just as it felt that fall had descended. My students decamped on November 1, numbed from long nights of study and challenging finals, anxious to get home for “some real food.” They leave behind a campus preparing itself, at long last, for the sere and snowy season to come. Continue reading →
“In three words I can tell you everything I have learned about life. It goes on.”
Robert Frost
One of the more entertaining stories of September, reflecting just how far we have fallen, was to be found in the Business Section of the New York Times on Continue reading →
October was an exciting month for investors. By various reckonings, it was the worst month since September, 2011. US stocks declined by $2 trillion in value, with Amazon alone dropping $250 billion. It was so bad that Jeff Bezos reportedly had to postpone plans to buy several small countries. Global markets, equity and fixed-income together, shrank by $5 trillion. Unless you ask The Guardian, which tallies the global equity loss at $8 trillion. That seems unnecessarily depressing (and unattributed), so I resolved not to ask Continue reading →
by Mark Wilson, APA, CFP®, publisher of Cap Gains Valet
It’s that exciting time of year again – mutual fund companies are letting us know how much of a tax headache they will be giving us! Or, others call this mutual fund capital gains distribution season.
The question of the day is: Continue reading →
“In God we trust,
all others bring data.”
William Edwards Deming
Beginning with our October monthly data update to MFO Premium, we will incorporate one of largest improvements to the site since launching our beta version in November 2015, three years ago.
The improvements began, like most of the features on the site, by user requests … this time, for more evaluation periods. All risk and performance metrics will now be provided for Continue reading →
The managers seek long-term capital appreciation by investing in a concentrated portfolio of 30-40 mid and large capitalization companies over $2.0B that use sustainable business strategies (SBA) to drive future earnings growth.
They focus on finding companies whose Continue reading →
It is rare that we issue a Launch Alert for a seventeen year old fund. Then again, it is rare that we find a 17 year old fund as remarkable as Seven Canyons World Innovators (WAGTX / WIGTX). World Innovators was launched on December 19, 2000 as Wasatch World Innovators. The fund, with its sibling Strategic Income Fund (WASIX), was rechristened with the new Seven Canyons identity on September 10, 2018.
Seven Canyons Advisors was formed in September 2017 with Continue reading →
On November 12, 2018, RiverPark Funds launches RiverPark Floating Rate CMBS Fund (RCRFX/RCRIX). Like several of RiverPark’s funds, RCRIX began life as a hedge fund (2010-2016). Unlike any of its predecessors, it originally converted into an interval fund, a sort of closed-end fund under which structure it operated for two years (RiverPark Commercial Real Estate Fund, 2016-2018) where investors only had quarterly liquidity. That fund began begin life with $50 million in assets from its private predecessor, of which $10 million is the manager’s own money. The newest package presents the fund as a traditional open-end mutual fund with daily liquidity and both retail (RCRFX) and institutional (RCRIX) share classes.
(Why “2A”? This is not only the second Continue reading →
Before funds can be offered to the public, they’ve got to be submitted to the SEC which has 70 days to review the application. That means that funds hopeful of launching by December 30th needed to be filed by October 15th. We’re looking for funds that might be accessible to the average investor or advisor; we include active ETFs but not passive ones. That last restriction allows me to pretend that neither ProShares Pet Care ETF nor the US Vegan Climate ETF is about to be inflicted on us. Continue reading →
In the course of a normal month we’ll highlight 60-70 manager changes in equity and allocation funds. We mostly skip bond funds because, frankly, it’s a danged rare fixed income team that’s materially affected by the departure of a single individual. In a really quiet month, 38 funds saws partial or complete team changes. That’s not only half the long-term average but only about a third of the changes reported last month.
By far the most significant, if only symbolically, was the announced retirement of David Poppe at Sequoia Fund (SEQUX). Mr. Poppe was famously a champion of the Valeant investment Continue reading →
Each month we round up the bits and pieces of industry news, from name changes to fund liquidations, that strike us as consequential but not consequential enough to warrant a stand-alone story. Perhaps distracted by the market’s recent turmoil, advisers have authorized far fewer changes this month than in most over the past five years. Continue reading →
