Author Archives: David Snowball

About David Snowball

David Snowball, PhD (Massachusetts). Cofounder, lead writer. David is a Professor of Communication Studies at Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, a nationally-recognized college of the liberal arts and sciences, founded in 1860. For a quarter century, David competed in academic debate and coached college debate teams to over 1500 individual victories and 50 tournament championships. When he retired from that research-intensive endeavor, his interest turned to researching fund investing and fund communication strategies. He served as the closing moderator of Brill’s Mutual Funds Interactive (a Forbes “Best of the Web” site), was the Senior Fund Analyst at FundAlarm and author of over 120 fund profiles.

Funds in registration

By David Snowball

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 →

Briefly Noted

By David Snowball

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 →

Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide

By David Snowball

Good news: The US stock indexes are at, or quite near, all-time highs!

Bad news: The US stock indexes are at, or quite near, all-time highs.

Good news: the 3rd quarter of 2018 had the highest returns over any quarter in over five years!

Bad news: the 3rd quarter of 2018 had the highest returns over any quarter in over five years.

Good news: the advance in Continue reading →

Funds in Registration

By David Snowball

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 need to be filed by October 15th. This month’s 15 new funds, including offerings from both DoubleLine and T. Rowe Price, represent the first part of that year-end wave. Continue reading →

Briefly noted

By David Snowball

The imminence of Halloween reveals itself in the deadened thud as the walking dead move toward the graveyard. Summer saw a curious lull in fund liquidations and manager changes both, but the end of summer is ending that reprieve. Our mid-September and October issues recount 70 obituaries, the vast majority of which were announced in the past 30 days. A precious few were high-performing funds that couldn’t attract attention. There seems to be a pattern in the remainder: lots of funds designed to Continue reading →

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

By David Snowball

Investors are forever willing to panic themselves at the prospect that their managers have taken Stupid Pillstm. The presumed signs of ingestion: any period of relative underperformance, pretty much without regard to absolute performance, the brevity of the period, its cause or the appropriateness of the peer group.

The automatic urge: running away, either to cash or to an investment with eye-catching recent returns.

Which is, by Continue reading →

Briefly Noted

By David Snowball

The imminence of Halloween reveals itself in the deadened thud as the walking dead move toward the graveyard. Summer saw a curious lull in fund liquidations and manager changes both, but the end of summer is ending that reprieve. We’ve tracked 33 obituaries for this issue. A few were high-performing funds that couldn’t attract attention. There seems to be a pattern in the remainder: lots of funds designed to hedge against market volatility, lots of funds designed to hedge against rising prices and a few more funds with exposure to emerging markets. A fusty old curmudgeon might note that liquidations in a category peak at the moment of maximum Continue reading →

August 5, 2018

By David Snowball

Dear friends,

Thanks for your patience. The end of July and beginning of August brought a bunch of challenges.

This month’s issue has a lot of interesting content; just not quite so much as we’d planned. With luck, we’ll shift the vast bulk of it to September.

Zoom in to Charles and the MFO Premium walk-through

MFO Premium offers a ridiculous wealth of information for a Continue reading →

Launch Alert: Fidelity ZERO Total Market Index Fund (FZROX) and Fidelity ZERO International Index Fund (FZLIX) 

By David Snowball

We’ve got Coke Zero. We’ve got Pepsi Zero. I guess it’s reasonable to wonder, why not Fidelity Zero?

Wait, we don’t have Coke Zero or Pepsi Zero. They both failed in the marketplace and had to be reformulated, renamed and relaunched.

But we do have Fido Zero.

On August 3, 2018, Fidelity launched two zero/zero index funds sporting zero Continue reading →

Advice not to follow: Inverse ETFs as a hedge

By David Snowball

It’s sensible to think, in advance, about the best responses to a market that is expensive, increasingly volatile and beset by external shocks, from tariffs to rising interest rates and policy instability.

An unauthored piece in ETF Trends recently weighed in with this advice: look at buying inverse or levered inverse ETFs.

With the heightened Continue reading →

Advice not to follow, #2: Avoid ESG funds, they’re losers

By David Snowball

The most consistently strong analyses of US and world markets come from a shrinking handful of sources, The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal prominent among them. MFO maintains a paid subscription to each.

Nonetheless, even they produce the occasional bewildering piece. In “If you want to do good, expect to do badly” (6/29/2018), the Journal’s James Mackintosh revives an old canard. “Investors are increasingly convinced that they can buy companies that behave better than the rest and make just as Continue reading →

Elevator Talk: Jim Callinan, Osterweis Emerging Opportunity (OSTGX)

By David Snowball

Since the number of funds we can cover in-depth is smaller than the number of funds worthy of in-depth coverage, we’ve decided to offer one or two managers each month the opportunity to make a 200 word pitch to you. That’s about the number of words a slightly-manic elevator companion could share in a minute and a half. In each case, I’ve promised to offer a quick capsule of the fund and a link back to the fund’s site. Other than that, they’ve got 200 words and precisely as much of your time and attention as you’re willing to share. These aren’t endorsements; they’re opportunities to learn more. 

People love fireworks, those happy confections of explosive Continue reading →

Funds in Registration

By David Snowball

A surprising number of interesting funds have quietly entered the SEC’s new-fund pipeline. While we don’t cover passive ETFs or funds not available to the general public, even there there were interesting developments. DFA Emerging Markets Targeted Value Portfolio will target small and mid-cap EM value stocks, which is consistent with DFA’s research bent and validates the increasing interest in EM value. Impact Shares YWCA Women’s Empowerment ETF will target firms whose values align with the YWCA’s long-time public goals. Of more direct interest, Rajiv Jain of GQG Partners is launching a fund focusing on US equities, a long-time AllianzGI manager is adding an EM value fund to the mix, The Great Gabelli is seizing the helm of his 15th fund and a team from France is offering a direct challenge to the ideology of market-cap-weighted indexes. Continue reading →

July 1, 2018

By David Snowball

Dear friends,

Welcome to July! You shouldn’t be here.

Welcome to the Observer’s annual “summer light” issue in which you point out the obvious: you need some time away from the headlines, the daily howling, the apocalypse, the partisan glee, the certainty of boom, doom or gloom (to borrow from the name of Marc Faber’s thoughtful reports).

Setting aside the overtly political headlines, here’s a Continue reading →

LS Opportunity Fund (LSOFX), July 2018

By David Snowball

Objective and strategy

LS Opportunity Fund pursues three goals: preserving capital, delivering above-market returns and managing volatility. “The secret,” says manager John Gillespie, “is to avoid large losses.” They invest, both long and short, in individual stocks; they do not short “the market,” they don’t use esoteric options and they don’t typically use ETFs. They normally will have 20-40 short positions and 50-70 long ones. The long portfolio is both all-cap and value-oriented, both of which are fairly rare. The short portfolio targets Continue reading →