Welcome to summer!
It’s really rare that acts of explosive deconstruction are the highlight of my month, but June was a special month. It welcomed summer and saw us bid farewell to a Quad Cities icon, the I-74 Twin Bridges.
Photo credit: Our friend, Roberta Osmers, Illuminated Scene Photography
The first span Continue reading →
In the military realm, “fire and forget” designates a weapon that you don’t need to think about once it’s been launched. In investing, “fire and forget” could be used to describe several sorts of mistakes centering on our impulse to look away once we’ve made a decision. One of those mistakes is to buy a fund (presumably for a good reason) then sell it (presumably for a good reason) and then never re-examine your decision.
Managers – both corporate and fund – make Continue reading →
The Securities and Exchange Commission, by law, gets between 60 and 75 days to review proposed new funds before they can be offered for sale to the public. Each month we survey actively managed funds and ETFs in the pipeline. Summer is a slow time for new fund launches, with the pipeline filling up in November in anticipation of reaching the market by December 30.
Many new funds, like many existing funds, are bad ideas. (Really, you want an ETF that invests in a single AI stock?) Most will flounder in rightful obscurity. That said, each month brings Continue reading →
Dear friends,
Welcome to summer.
Had I mentioned that I have the coolest job in the world? I love a challenge. Augustana offers them to me at the rate of sixty a week, approximately the number of students I work with. They often leave me stunned.
(See how important punctuation is? “They often leave me stunned” and “they often leave me, stunned” are two very different observations. Hmmm … both might be accurate, now that I think of it.)
My college started in 1860 with a very humble mission: it wanted to help the children of immigrants build a good Continue reading →
Taylor Swift might be the swiftest young investor of her generation. Ms. Swift, 33, saw her net worth creep up over the past year, from $570 million at the beginning of 2022 to $740 million now. Most of that wealth is driven by the feverish desire of her fans, the 120,000,000 or so Swifties, to transfer their money to her. At the same time, she’s done prudent and profitable things with her wealth. Other young investors can learn from her reasoning and parallel her strategy.
(Well, give or take the “multi-platinum pop Continue reading →
Leuthold Core pursues capital appreciation and income through the use of tactical asset allocation. The objective is to avoid significant loss of capital and deliver positive absolute returns while assuming lower risk exposure and lower relative volatility than the S&P 500. Assets are allocated among stocks and ADRs, corporate and government bonds, REITs, commodities, an equity hedge, and cash. Portfolio asset class weightings change as conditions do; exposure is driven by models that determine each asset class’s relative and absolute attractiveness. Equity and fixed-income exposure each range Continue reading →
Dear friends,
Nominally Chip and I reside in the Quad Cities, whose t-shirts describe them as “twice as nice as the Twin Cities.” It’s a lovely and surprisingly diverse urban area with about 450,000 people and an agglomeration of two dozen small cities and towns. Half of us reside in Illinois, just south of the Mississippi River, and half in Iowa, on the river’s north bank.
The Mississippi River actually flows from east to west here. Recently, though, it has been flowing east, west, north, south, and, more than occasionally, up. As I write, the Mississippi is cresting at 22′, about five feet above the level at which we declare a major flood. People in Davenport take notice. That’s one Continue reading →
The good news is, in the long term, things will work out okay.
The bad news is that there are a lot of miserable short-terms between now and then. The most successful long-term investments are ones that allow you to endure the short term with a minimum of trauma.
Or drama. (Comedian Anita Renfroe offers, “Difficulty is inevitable. Drama is a choice.”)
Or ulcers. (Philosopher Marilyn Monroe: “If you spend your life competing with businessmen, what do you have? A bank account and ulcers!”)
Ulcers are to be avoided. We have a way. Continue reading →
Dear friends,
Chip and I celebrated the start of Spring – or at least Augustana’s spring break – with a long sojourn to New Orleans. Our options were either a series of flights totaling about 10 hours or a 14-hour drive. For better and worse, we chose the latter, loaded the car with snacks, books, and music, and headed down the Mississippi from the Quad Cities to the Big Easy. The drive took us through seven states and one swath of utter destruction. The night before our passing, a tornado in Mississippi decapitated a forest adjacent to Interstate 55. Imagine, if you might, hundreds of mature trees either snapped off five feet above the ground or ripped up by their roots. It was spectacular and a sobering reminder of the price we’ll pay for a heating planet.
We ate well – she more Continue reading →
“Yearning for the good old days is not an investment strategy”
The strategy is to preserve capital and attain long-term total returns through a combination of current income and moderate capital appreciation. The managers invest in income-producing securities, primarily high-yield bonds, but will shift the allocation to managing a changing risk and opportunity set. Such changes might include shifting toward higher quality or shorter duration securities and increasing the fund’s cash stake. As of February 28, 2023, 77% of the portfolio is invested in high-yield bonds with an average duration Continue reading →
The fund is seeking high current income and capital appreciation consistent with the preservation of capital. The managers invest in “money good” securities; that is, in securities where the underlying strength of the issuer is great enough that “the risk of loss of principal due to permanent impairment is minimal.” It can invest in both investment grade and non-investment grade securities depending on market conditions and opportunities. They can also invest in Continue reading →
“It’s like the tide going out; you’re starting to see all the things that have been waiting to happen,” David Sherman of Cohanzick Management, 15 March 2023 web call summary.
David Sherman is one of the industry’s most consistently successful fixed-income investors. He founded Cohanzick Management on the premise “return of capital is more important than return on capital.” His specialty is the pursuit of distinctive, low-risk diversifying strategies for fixed-income investors. “We try to focus on what we know and what we do well. We do not pursue investment ideas or strategies that are Continue reading →
“We are living through investment regime change”
Seafarer Overseas Value pursues long-term capital appreciation. The fund typically invests in common stocks, though the managers have the ability to add both preferred stocks and fixed-income securities. The investable universe includes both emerging markets, as traditionally conceived, and companies domiciled in selected foreign developed nations Continue reading →
Dear friends,
Welcome to Spring. Some diehards erroneously insist that they’re “officially” winter-bound until the Spring equinox, March 20th this year. It need not be so.
There are two springs. Meteorological spring, which is aligned with temperatures and growing seasons, is March 1st. Astronomical spring, which is aligned with the wobble of the earth on its axis (called “precession”), begins with the Continue reading →
The US stock market remains among the most extreme valuation of the past 150 years, at least as measured by the Schiller 10-year PE ratio.
Traditionally bear markets bottom out with a Continue reading →
It is painfully clear that many investing sites operate at the lowest common denominator level. They might rely on mechanical articles written to a pretty crude template; you could refer to our analysis of Zacks as an example. Continue reading →
Dear friends,
Welcome to February. It’s a month we associate with love, St. Valentine’s Day. As holidays go, it’s another triumph for the marketers. The holiday began life as a Roman fertility festival, Lupercalia, and its attendant parties. Eventually, the Christian church made the same move here as they did with the pagan year-end festival; they repurposed the December solstice festival into Christmas and the February fertility festival into St. Valentine’s Day. The moves gave them one more tool for converting party-loving pagans into … well, party-loving Continue reading →
I’m a sucker for an intriguing headline, and CityWire’s John Coumarianos came up with a doozy: “EM managers had (another) year to forget. But one fund defied the gloom” (1/9/2023). The triumphant reveal was:
only one out of the 816 funds in the Morningstar Diversified Emerging Markets category with a 2022 track record posted a positive number. That was the relatively unknown Cook & Bynum fund (COBYX), which returned 9.29%. Continue reading →
A tradition dating back to the days of FundAlarm was to annually share our portfolios and reflections on them with you. My portfolio, indolent in design and execution, makes for fearfully dull reading. That is its primary charm.
2022 was replete with adventures and surprises: Continue reading →
On January 11, 2023, Matthews Asia launched Matthews Emerging Markets ex China Active ETF (MEMX). It is an actively managed ETF that might invest in every country in the world except China, the United States, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and most of the countries in Western Europe.
Our January issue originally, and mistakenly, suggested that the fund had launched on 12/31/2022. That was corrected as soon as Matthew’s representatives let us know of the error. Our regrets!
The fund will be Continue reading →
