Wow, 25 shares! When Met Life demutualized, I got 10 whole shares. So little that when they spun off Brighthouse Financial I would have gotten less than one share, so I was forced to accept cash in lieu.
I was notified about the shares when the demutualization occurred, and I was notified of the Brighthouse shares (well, cash) as well. So I'm a little surprised that you got no notifications. Perhaps the problem lies with your old insurer?
My MET shares were held in a trust (also via Computershare) that enabled me to buy and sell shares with no commission. The Brighthouse shares would have been held there also, had there been any shares to hold. These days, one can trade stocks for next to no commission, so I don't see much value in retaining the shares in the trust.
Be advised that the IRS has always asserted that your cost basis in the shares is zero. There is some disagreement across courts about this, but the IRS remains unmoved. https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2016/mar/basis-of-stock-in-insurance-demutualization.html
Given the fact that I'd owe taxes on 100% of the value, or could get a deduction on 100% of the value by donating them, I figure I'll donate this year, while I can still itemize. (If the tax "reform" legislation passes, then between loss of SILT deductions and higher standard deductions, I'll not likely itemize in 2018.)

As the result of a "de-mutualization" of my insurer (NE Financial merged with MET Life) I received 25 shares of MET Stock. These shares, originally held at BNY Mellon, recently were transferred to Computershare which provide shareholder services for the shares. Nothing that I initiated. In fact, I stumbles upon this revelation after doing a yearly checkup on the BNY Mellon account. I never received an email nor a mailing of this change. It was hell finding the correct department at Computershares and then proving to Computershares who I was since I was using BNY Mellon Accont information that I had screenshots of (the account nor longer was accessible to me online).
Anyway, this year MET spun off BHF (Bright House Financial...an annuity service of MET) which provided me with 2 shares of BHF. I realize I am not going to get rich here, but these are the kinds of transactions (that even the owner has a hard time following let alone an heir). It happen all the time and these financial assets get lost in the shuffle of life.
I mention this because my parent (a physician and original member of the formation of Mutual Hospital Insurance later known as Anthem) dead very young. My remaining parent, now 94, discovered (by another family member 40 years later) that she was the beneficiary of over $100K of WLP stock (which bought Anthem at one point in time and now WLP is traded as ANTM..don't try to keep score here).
Here a brief history if you are interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_Inc.
My point is... Fast forward 40 years from today my MET/BHF stock could one day be a small fortune. The power of compounding over time.
So, organize these financial "loose" ends for yourself as well as your heirs. It may seem time consuming, but it is worth every penny of the time that you spend on it.
Also, has a Mutual Fund ever de-mutualized?

FYI: (I will link episode as soon as it becomes available, early Saturday morning.)
Regards,
Ted
November 9, 2017
Dear WEALTHTRACK Subscriber,
Question: what have been two of the most distinctive features of the recovery from the financial crisis of ‘08-‘09? Answer: historically low levels of inflation and interest rates. Despite years of numerous predictions to the contrary inflation has stayed stubbornly subdued and, with some help from central banks around the globe, so have interest rates. But is this nearly decade long pattern finally being broken? This week’s guest says yes and there is evidence to back her claim.
As a recent headline in The Wall Street Journal reads: “Inflation the slumbering giant begins to stir.” To illustrate the point the Journal showed a chart of year over year changes in consumer prices in the U.K., U.S. and Eurozone. They bottomed in 2015 and have slowly risen, with fits and starts ever since… Japan has shown a similar pattern.
Meanwhile interest rates on benchmark 10-year government bonds are rising. U.S. rates ticked higher recently and yields in Germany and Japan are off their mid-2016 lows.
There have been other episodes of rising inflation and interest rates before this which didn’t last. This week’s guest is betting this one is for real.
She is Kathleen Gaffney, Director of Diversified Fixed Income at Eaton Vance where she is also the lead portfolio manager of the Eaton Vance Multisector Income Fund which she launched as the Eaton Vance Bond Fund when she joined the firm in early 2013.
The fund is known for its flexibility to seek higher total return opportunities anywhere globally and throughout the capital structure of the companies chosen. As a result it can buy common and preferred stocks, convertible securities and bonds. It also invests in currencies. That approach however has also meant “significantly more volatility” than its peers in Morningstar’s Multisector Bond category. Case in point: the fund declined 17% in 2015 and rocketed up 22% in 2016.
Gaffney is also lead portfolio manager of the somewhat more traditional Eaton Vance Core Plus Bond Fund. It carries a 5-Star rating and has ranked in the top performance percentiles in its category for the last 1, 3 and 5 year periods, both under her leadership and that of former managers.
If you miss the show on television you can always watch it on our website at your convenience. If you’d like to see the show before it airs, it is available to our PREMIUM subscribers right now. We also have an EXTRA interview with Gaffney about how she finds "think time" in the midst of information overload. It will be available exclusively on our website.
If you would like to take WEALTHTRACK with you on your commute or travels, you can now find the WEALTHTRACK podcast on TuneIn, Stitcher, and SoundCloud, as well as iTunes. Find out more on the WEALTHTRACK Podcast page.
Saturday, November 11th is Veteran’s Day. Please take a moment to remember all of those past and present, who have sacrificed so much to give us the freedoms we enjoy today. I personally salute my Dad, Husband and Son. I am so grateful for their service.
Have a great weekend and make the week ahead a profitable and a productive one.
Best Regards,
Consuelo
Video Clip:

M* Snapshot EBABX:
http://www.morningstar.com/funds/XNAS/EBABX/quote.htmlutm_term=0_bf662fd9c0-2b02004c36-71656893
Lipper Snapshot: EBABX:
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/fund/ebabx
EBABX Is Unranked In The (IB) Fund Category By U.S. News & World Report

(Double-dipping here)
Along a similar vein to the card’s professed wisdom ... the simplistic slogan I credit with turning my financial life around more than 25 years ago is: “Pay yourself first.”
I first heard it voiced by an (ironically) unlikely mutual fund promoter of the time, Richard Strong. His Strong Capital Management used the slogan prominently in its advertising. Up to that point I’d thought of saving only as depriving oneself of something. The slogan turns that idea upside-down and makes saving sound much more like a reward. Sure helped me get turned around.

Thanks @Ted,
If you ever have an opportunity to read or listen to a Dan Fuss Interview, do so. Like Bogle, Fuss is a grandfather like figure that is both engagingly dry and full of financial wisdom.
From @Ted's article on owning bonds in today's market:

“I do know from my 59 years of experience, when the ice was very thin, it’s always good to be very cautious,” he said. “You can skate around the edges but you can’t go out to the middle.”

and,

“I‘m not trying to be an ‘end of the world person’ here, but it is a possibility,” he said. “It used to be one percent, now it’s a 15 or 20 percent possibility. Would you get on an airplane if there was a 15 percent risk? And that’s a good way to ask a person about risk,” he said.

Maybe investor confirmation bias, but I sold my "middle of the pond" position in AGDYX about a month ago. His concerns about a lack of buyer of bonds and a higher risk of inflation paired with do nothing politicians is what you pay a bond manager to worry about. Bond index funds provide none of this risk management.
Wish the article dug a little deeper into Dan Fuss and his bond choices over the next part of the market cycle.

FYI: Dan Fuss, one of the world’s longest-serving fund managers, said his flagship bond fund has cut exposure to high-yield corporate bonds and raised the quality of its holdings, warning that the U.S. bond market is more vulnerable to a sell-off now than at any time since the financial market rout of 1974.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-markets-loomissayles/u-s-bonds-look-most-vulnerable-in-four-decades-loomis-sayles-fuss-idUSL3N1NE2T3

These rules may be dumb and hard for financial literates like the ones on this board, but provide very good, simple directions for 70% of us who are not financially literate by at least one measure (Google three question quiz). Those who do not save at all, those who don't know that minimum payment on credit cards should be ignored, those who do not contribute to retirement accounts, etc.

Came across this old useful index card. For most (all?) investors, this is an easy and useful advice to follow.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/09/16/this-4x6-index-card-has-all-the-financial-advice-youll-ever-need/

FYI: (Click On Article Title At Top Of Google Search)
Tax professionals are ringing alarm bells that a House proposal unveiled last week deserves financial advisers' attention. Should the measure become law, taxpayers who decided to convert a Roth IRA to a traditional, or pre-tax, individual retirement account, would no longer be allowed to elect to change it back to a Roth within a certain time frame. And that means advisers should be checking in on clients about Roths before the start of 2018, said Ed Slott, founder of Ed Slott's Elite IRA Advisor Group in a conversation with InvestmentNews reporter Greg Iacurci.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=AH8BWtDnA8y3jwTe5qeAAQ&q=Ed+Slott+on+Roth+IRA+conversions+becoming+permanent&oq=Ed+Slott+on+Roth+IRA+conversions+becoming+permanent&gs_l=psy-ab.3..33i160k1.4590.4590.0.7188.3.2.0.0.0.0.93.93.1.2.0....0...1..64.psy-ab..1.2.178.6..35i39k1.85.2pswNHS_oXI

FYI: We again asked experts to help us answer readers’ questions about saving for college. This month, it starts with an overarching concern parents have about “529” college-savings plans when thinking about how to pay for school.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-529s-affect-financial-aid-1509937920?tesla=y

FYI: First came the Panama Papers, which revealed personal financial information about wealthy individuals and public officials that had previously been kept private.
Now, the latest shitstorm to come from a hack of a law firm is the Paradise Papers: The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists received the world’s second biggest data leak, consisting of offshore financial records, purporting to expose a global array of corruption:
Regards,
Ted
http://ritholtz.com/2017/11/paradise-papers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheBigPicture+(The+Big+Picture)
MarketWatch Slant:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/paradise-papers-6-things-to-know-about-report-exposing-tax-havens-of-the-mega-rich-2017-11-05/print

Swedroe is cherry picking studies:
https://db.com/newsroom_news/2016/ghp/esg-and-financial-performance-aggregated-evidence-from-more-than-200-empirical-studies-en-11363.htm

Dear friends,
I'm delighted that a number of folks joined us this month who we haven't heard from in a while.

• Sam Lee reflected on the tiff involving Morningstar and the Wall Street Journal.
  
• Mark Wilson shared some brief and welcome reflections on the capital gains season
  
• Dennis Baran wrote a Launch Alert for American Beacon Shapiro Equity Opportunities Fund (SHXPX), which has a phenomenal track record as a private strategy
  
• Likewise, I wrote one for Northern Trust Quality US E.S.G. (NUESX), a really low-cost, low minimum way to target two useful attributes at once: a high quality corporation and a record of avoiding problematic behavior.
  
• Sean Stannard-Stockton participated in an Elevator Talk about his Ensemble Fund (ENSBX)
  
• We profiled Fuller & Thaler Behavioral Small Cap Equity (FTHNX) and, in the process, get to play with Charles's rolling three year average metric to see how consistent the fund has been compared to its neighbors.
  
• Charles debuted a new Premium correlation tool which allows you to identify category outliers; it's an interesting way to find out whether you need to discount a fund's ratings since there's a pretty good chance that a fund with no correlation to its peers or benchmark is probably miscategorized. It is, at the very least, driven by forces unrelated to those driving the category.
  
• Ed vents, just a bit, about the cultural elements that permit sexual harassment in the financial services industry; he's not sure that we've seen the end of this one.

Hope you find some useful nuggets in their somewhere.
David

This has to be disheartening to Billionaires (or even Millionaires) when the very thing (their financial valuation) is trash. What are future Trillion-aires to do?
I still think many Hundred-aires and Thousand-aires find cash a necessary part of their everyday life and are impacted greatly by its "trashiness".
Here is an interesting read on today's financial alchemy which, in part, explains why "Cash is Trash" and other assets aren't much better.
Volatility and the Alchemy of Risk:
Artemis_Volatility+and+the+Alchemy+of+Risk_2017
Ray on Volatility:

FYI: Robo advisors are undoubtedly responsible for some of the most important changes in the financial industry over the last few years. More transparency, lower fees and at least part of the rise in passive investing can be traced to them.
But now there’s a bigger question. Are robos becoming the more expensive option?
Regards,
Ted
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-26/in-the-battle-for-low-fee-financial-advice-diy-beats-the-robos

I agree but I do not think that is the general opinion of most people and financial advisers and certainly not what is in most advertisements for mutual funds. M* ratings are usually the only featured information piece of any fund ad. Most people think they will predict future performance.

@sma3, I understand, but the ads I see like that are in the print edition of Barron's, and I've never seen one that didn't include a note with a description of what the star ratings are. I guess most people need to learn to read the notes. It's probably confusing since star ratings in other walks of life (movies, books, etc.) are clearly opinions.
In any case, the star ratings are still the wrong data set if evaluating M*'s forward-looking ratings of funds is the objective.
@old_joe, thanks for the additional excerpts for us non-subscribers.

I agree but I do not think that is the general opinion of most people and financial advisers and certainly not what is in most advertisements for mutual funds. M* ratings are usually the only featured information piece of any fund ad. Most people think they will predict future performance.

To put this in perspective, the new DOL regs for fiduciaries allow different levels of compensation for selling different categories of products, up to a certain level.
BICE allows higher compensation for selling complex products that require more work to explain to the customers. (DOL FAQ: "variation [in commission] is permitted ... based on neutral factors, such as the time and complexity associated with recommending investments".) This arises from the reasonable compensation rule.
At the same time, BICE forbids the additional compensation to be so high as to create an incentive to push these products. More generally (again from DOL FAQ) "financial institutions cannot 'use or rely upon quotas, appraisals, performance or personnel actions, bonuses, contests, special awards, differential compensation or other actions or incentives that are intended or would reasonably be expected to cause Advisers to make recommendations that are not in the Best Interest of the Retirement Investor.'"
If it takes someone twice as much time and effort to sell product A as product B, and compensation is equal, that person has a disincentive to sell (or "push", as Ms. Morgenson wrote) product A. That is true regardless of how much more or less profitable one product or the other is for the company. Unequal compensation for different products can be reasonable. Whether the differences merely equalize the sales incentives for different products or bias them (presumably toward the more profitable product) is a matter of the magnitude of the differences in compensation.
According to the DOL, the mere existence of compensation differences does not automatically create an incentive to sell one over the other, Ms. Morgenson aside. Yet she leaps immediately to the conclusion that it must, with no numbers, no explanation.
The TIAA Form ADV Part 2A that she cited mirrors the DOL regs: "TIAA’s compensation philosophy aims to reward Advisors with appropriate compensation, recognizing the degree of effort generally required of the Advisor in gathering and retaining client assets in appropriate TIAA accounts, products and services offered by TIAA affiliates."
Ms. Morgenson also leaps from writing about "advisers" in the first paragraph (who are bound by fiduciary duty, BICE, etc. not to be incentivized to "push" higher profit products) to "sales representatives" in the second paragraph, who are under no such constraints. Which one is it? Is the undisclosed complaint talking about sales reps or advisers?
That matters because, as I stated before, while this doesn't help TIAA's reputation, it doesn't paint them as an exceptionally bad actor. I've written before about Fidelity's reps having similar compensation schedules. Here's Fidelity's 2017 Introduction to Representatives’ Compensation.
"Certain representatives also receive differing compensation for different product types, for example, managed account and insurance product sales, which require more in-depth engagement with clients, provide more compensation than products such as money market funds." For example, Fidelity reps get quarterly compensation of 1 basis point for investments in MMFs, while10 basis points for investments in Fidelity's Portfolio Advisory Services and/or insurance products.
For anyone who's suggested going to a brokerage to discuss ideas "for free", tell me again how great a bargain that is.

While I enjoy Ms. Morgenson's columns and generally agree with them, they nevertheless tend to resemble hit pieces with the occasional questionable statement or two. Never factually wrong, but laden with innuendo.
She decries the "often hefty costs associated with TIAA funds". Yet elsewhere in the article she she states that "the average asset-weighted expense ratio on TIAA’s mutual funds was 0.32 percent in 2016", and acknowledges that this was "lower than the 0.57 percent mutual fund industry average".
She attempts some jiujitsu by arguing that this is still too high (though not calling the fees "hefty" in this section). Here's how she does that:
:
"Although lower than the 0.57 percent mutual fund industry average, it is more expensive than a low-cost provider like Vanguard, whose average expense ratio was 0.11 percent in 2016."
She gives M* as her data source. Here's what M* had to say:

The asset-weighted average fee of Vanguard’s funds fell to 0.11% from 0.14% during the past three years [2013-2016]. This 21% decline was the largest percentage decline among the largest fund providers, thanks to large flows into Vanguard’s low-priced ETFs and index funds and falling fees in some of Vanguard’s largest funds as the fund company passes improving efficiencies to fundholders. During that period, Vanguard has strengthened its leading position, as its market share rose to 22% from 18%. Vanguard’s 2016 asset-weighted average expense ratio of 0.11% was significantly below that of the second-lowest-cost provider, SPDR State Street, at 0.19%, followed by Dimensional Fund Advisors at 0.36%.

What we glean from this is that (a) you need to look at active/passive mix before chastising a family for high fees or lauding it for low ones, and (b) TIAA's 0.32% is right in line with other low cost families. Is Vanguard the only family that advisors are now allowed to use? Who are these other low cost providers that are like Vanguard?
That's not to say TIAA may not have been taken some dubious actions. Likely enough to take some of the shine off its white knight image. But ISTM not enough (or at least not enough documented) to paint it as an especially bad actor.
The one complaint she linked to seems to have merit IMHO. We have to take her word on the whistle-blower complaint though, since it is currently confidential. We don't know what else is in it, just as we didn't know the additional M* data that I gave above. (Yup, there's my own innuendo, without AFAIK misstating facts.)
To repeat, I like Ms. Morgenson's columns, I think she does a great job at digging through the underside of the financial world. But I don't take them (or any columnist piece) as gospel.

I'm bumping up this thread, because there's great info in it, and I'm not the only one looking for cash alternatives right now.
Here's a new question: anyone know cash-alternative funds which have a track record that extends back through the 2008 global financial crisis? A whole lot of ultra-short bond funds crashed and burned then. I'd feel better parking my money with a manager who successfully navigated that crisis.
Of course PIMIX/PONDX did well, and Ivascyn is maybe the best bond manager around, but I don't really consider that a cash alternative. It takes lots of risks, and even if so far it has managed them brilliantly, I want something more conservative for this bucket.
Right now I am using RPHYX and SUBFX, and I'm happy with both, but neither has a record back to 2008.