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Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.
  • Dividend Paying with Funds
    Does any one have suggested Dividends that are good buys either quarterly or monthly by companies who has paid them for many years. Thank you so much.
    Ron Dombcik
  • How to get rid of comment, that I didn't post ?
    Thanks to ALL for their suggestions. With that said I could have stated the problem with a little better wording.
    I took my comment, that I forgot to post & sent it to "save draft" where I was able to relieve myself of the post I forgot to post .
    Happy New Years to ALL, Derf
  • VWINX
    @sma3, note that @Sven was talking about both VWINX and VWELX. Only VWELX has modified its equity orientation from value to blend/growth. I haven't heard any such recent thing for VWINX (of course, it has changed gradually over the years).
  • Time is your friend.
    @MikeM. Gotcha. Of course, Hawaii is super expensive. And Honolulu is the most expensive. I would not choose to own, unless I could go back to my teens and re-orient my entire life so that I had some level of interest in things practical, technical and mechanical. The maintenance overhead never goes away, no matter where the house is.
    Rochester is snow country, but you also have the universities. So, there's THAT. I lived in the Southern Tier for 5 years. The sky never needed a reason to throw snow down on us. Miserable. In nearby Olean, NY, you can still buy a house for $60,000.00. "Location, location, location." STILL, it would not be worth it to me. I pay rent, but the headaches belong to the Landlord. We seem to have found a trustworthy, reliable guy. Something to be glad about in such a stinky year.
  • VWINX
    In the long run, VWINX is a fine allocation fund for conservative investors. Wellington has a deep bench of managers and new managers are likely been a co-manager for several years before assuming the role as the full manager.
    LewisBranham is spot on. It is common that value managers buy growth stock when valuation becomes attractive (and potentially providing better earning in the future). So timing is crucial for getting at a good price. Case in point, VWELX picked up several FAANG stocks too early this year and it did the opposite.
    On the bond allocation, VWINX’s duration was a bit longer than the intermediate term bonds, 5-6 years. This was pointed out by another MFO poster. It is tough to have more long duration bonds in the mx in order to provide decent yield to investors, but also affect the bonds more with the aggressive rate hikes. The recent reduction on its duration is to improve the bond risk going into 2023.
  • How to get rid of comment, that I didn't post ?
    Select the 'Flag' to the right of 'time'. This will open a message window. Type your comment and send. David receives the message and reviews what was written. I've used this several times many years ago, when there was a time period of several trolls who had created an account and writing nasty stuff.
    Derf will have to clarify the circumstance he is trying to correct.
  • The PCE index, an inflation measure closely watched by the Fed, slowed to 5.5% in November
    @Old_Joe, I notice the same changes in bank CD yield too, but I don’t know more than you do. Wonder if that is related to mortgage lending and the demand has greatly reduced after rounds of rate hikes.
    Right now there are few 2-3 years non-callable CDs with yields above 4.60% at Fidelity. Have you consider treasury bills? 26 weeks (6 months) and 52 weeks (one year) treasury bills are yielding about 4.75% at auction as of past Tuesday. I was expecting the yield would go up a bit after the 50 bps rate hike, but it didn’t.
  • Time is your friend.
    I know I don't know how to invest for the end of civilization as I know it.
    I know I have some investments that have been sitting around through 30~40 years of sturm und drang, I wish I had had more to invest at the time.
  • Time is your friend.
    Unfortunately, @Bopa appears to have deleted most of his original content (OP) on July 31. The intellect here is so massive that a great discussion has ensued for nearly 5 months afterward. :)
    I can only say that I’m glad I retired nearly 25 years ago to live in a home I already owned rather than relying on the vicissitudes of the rental market. Your experience(s) may differ.
  • SEC comes through for small investor
    It did not really take much doing. I just filed a complaint with the SEC with the details like Ticker symbol, share amounts, price change etc. IT took about ten minutes.
    I had a similar thing happen several years ago but for only 20 or 30 busks difference I think. Still is probably worth complaining even for $20.
    Beats filling out all those class action lawsuit things. I have never gotten more than a few bucks from those
    Same. Often the amount of time it takes for a person to research stuff to complete the class action form far outweighs the pittance we get by joining the class.
  • SEC comes through for small investor
    It did not really take much doing. I just filed a complaint with the SEC with the details like Ticker symbol, share amounts, price change etc. IT took about ten minutes.
    I had a similar thing happen several years ago but for only 20 or 30 busks difference I think. Still is probably worth complaining even for $20.
    Beats filling out all those class action lawsuit things. I have never gotten more than a few bucks from those
  • Time is your friend.
    Count yourself lucky. We lost a large amount of money on our house in CT 1987 to 2020. We got about $50,000 more than we paid for it but in the 30 years we redid two BRs, kitchen, all the windows, new roof, finished the basement, new deck and sunroom, etc.
    My parents would say "so what you had to live somewhere. We never made any money on any house we owned"
  • Minimizing Tesla exposure
    I tend to agree with LB that TSLA does have an advantage over GM F etc that have to retrofit all of their manufacturing, but both have made projections of meeting these goals in the relatively near future.
    M* has the fair value of all three near double their price today, but TSLA PE is over 30, while F and GM are around 5. Same discrepancy for P/sales etc.
    While it is uncertain what it will cost the legacy automakers to retool etc, I think there is a lot less risk in their stocks than TSLA at it's current valuations, even if they have crashed along with the stock. Add Musk and the risk goes up.
    While electric vehicles are surely going to be take over the automobile market, it is uncertain how long it will take and the other question is who will pay for all of the infrastructure required for 50+% electric cars?
    This and battery capacity will become limiting factors as more and more EVs hit the road. Not a bad idea to keep a legacy nonEV plant or two humming as people will be buying gasoline cars for years to come.
  • Minimizing Tesla exposure
    Well, all of that is true right now, but I'm thinking that ten years out the big guys will own the market, as usual. But, a big unknown is if there is a possible major breakthrough in removing carbon from the environment. If that should happen, all bets are off.
    While I really like electricity, I'm telling you there are really bad things that can and will happen with an all-electric energy network, and those things...
    *** ARE NOT BEING DISCUSSED OR ADDRESSED ***
  • Minimizing Tesla exposure
    Even if Musk isn't ill, Krugman's question about Tesla's valuation and Wall Street's expectations of it as a business versus other tech giants is a valid one. From the article:
    Even if that’s the case, though, it’s hard to explain the huge valuation the market put on Tesla before the drop, or even its current value. After all, to be that valuable Tesla would have to generate huge profits, not just for a few years but in a way that could be expected to continue for many years to come.
    Now, some technology companies have indeed been long-term moneymaking machines. Apple and Microsoft still top the list of the most profitable US corporations some four decades after the rise of personal computers.
    But we more or less understand the durability of the dominance of Apple and Microsoft, and it’s hard to see how Tesla could ever achieve something similar, no matter how brilliant its leadership. Apple and Microsoft benefit from strong network externalities — loosely speaking, everyone uses their products because everyone else uses their products.
    In the case of Microsoft, the traditional story has been that businesses continued to buy the company’s software, even when it was panned by many people in the tech world, because it was what they were already set up to use: Products like Word and Excel may not have been great, but everyone within a given company and in others it did business with was set up to use them, had IT departments that knew how to deal with them, and so on. These days Microsoft has a better reputation than it used to, but as far as I can tell its market strength still reflects comfort and corporate habit rather than a perception of excellence.
    Apple’s story is different in the details — more about individual users than institutions, more about physical products than about software alone. And Apple was widely considered cool, which I don’t think Microsoft ever was. But at an economic level it’s similar. I can attest from personal experience that once you’re in the iPhone/iPad/MacBook ecosystem, you won’t give up on its convenience unless offered something a lot better.
    Similar stories can be told about a few other companies, such as Amazon, with its distribution infrastructure.
    The question is: Where are the powerful network externalities in the electric vehicle business?
    Electric cars may well be the future of personal transportation. In fact, they had better be, since electrification of everything, powered by renewable energy, is the only plausible way to avoid climate catastrophe. But it’s hard to see what would give Tesla a long-term lock on the electric vehicle business.
    I’m not talking about how great Teslas are or aren’t right now; I’m not a car enthusiast (I should have one of those bumper stickers that say, “My other car is also junk”), so I can’t judge. But the lesson from Apple and Microsoft is that to be extremely profitable in the long run, a tech company needs to establish a market position that holds up even when the time comes, as it always does, that people aren’t all that excited about its products
    So what would make that happen for Tesla? You could imagine a world in which dedicated Tesla hookups were the only widely available charging stations, or in which Teslas were the only electric cars mechanics knew how to fix. But with major auto manufacturers moving into the electric vehicle business, the possibility of such a world has already vanished. In fact, I’d argue that the Inflation Reduction Act, with its strong incentives for electrification, will actually hurt Tesla. Why? Because it will quickly make electric cars so common that Teslas no longer seem special.
    In short, electric vehicle production just doesn’t look like a network externality business.
  • Off-Shoring: "There's no such thing as Free Lunch"
    You're probably right that I'm being overly-sensitive to the term "enemies." But then I think the term is also almost certainly being used by some of our own current leaders to refer to these nations and they aren't referring just to leaders like Putin. They do mean the entire nations. The term can so easily escalate to real warfare. Leaders can be replaced, ousted, arrested, extradited, ocassionally assassinated. Enemies of the broad national kind tend to be targeted for extermination.
    The term "enemies" also tends to have ramifications in nations like ours where there are immigrants from every nation. I don't think it's an accident that there has been a sharp surge in anti-Asian hate crimes and attacks in the U.S. in recent years since the political rhetoric attacking China as the enemy responsible for our economic woes and Covid also increased: https://nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-hate-crimes-increased-339-percent-nationwide-last-year-repo-rcna14282
  • Secure Act 2.0, Roth's, RMD's, 529 to Roth conversions, employer plans, etc.....changes
    Secure 2.0 (2022) has important changes for 529s.
    Excess funds from 529s can go to Roth IRAs of the beneficiary (2024- ). Taxes and penalties won't apply to these rollovers. Several limitations apply: 529 must be 15+ years old; only the money contributed or earned 5 years prior to rollovers is eligible; normal annual contribution limits for IRAs apply; but there are no income limits or earned income requirements; lifetime maximum transfer is $35K.
    https://ybbpersonalfinance.proboards.com/thread/18/college-529?page=1&scrollTo=877
  • Off-Shoring: "There's no such thing as Free Lunch"
    I suspect some of the board members here are old enough to have been alive when the first atom bombs were dropped, or, at least, to have grown up with the "duck and cover" school lessons in the early years of the atomic age. I sometimes wonder what that was like mentally, not the dropping of the bomb itself, which has its own unique horror, but the realization that we now really have the means to destroy ourselves entirely. After that, doesn't it becomes a question I think of whether we can afford to have the same tribalistic mentality we did regarding "enemies" prior to that age? The stakes seem so much higher than when we just had sticks and stones.
    Yet I don't deny there are significant geopolitical risks today. It would be good to recognize though that both OJ and Crash used the word "leaders" subsequently in mentioning the problems. It's the leaders, not the entire people of Russia or China or the U.S., who are the problem. If we start buying into the premise that entire nation states are the enemy, it seems to me a perilous path in the post-atomic age. Shouldn't something have changed strategy-wise, or psychologically, for all of us after those first bombs dropped? Interestingly, I would also say something should have changed psychologically when Darwin realized we had common ancestors, but people continue to perpetuate these tribalistic and ethnic myths that are toxic for us as a species in the post-atomic age. We have too much to lose now for those myths to continue.
    @Crash Regarding labor unions, how can labor unions recover if capital is global while labor is local? Sure, on-shoring, but maybe that ship I think has permanently sailed. Even if you on-shored everything, which I think is impossible today, much of labor isn't even part of a company's permanent employees anymore to unionize, but are independent contractors and freelancers--the so-called Uberization of our economy. For labor to have power again, there must be global labor standards and/or global unions to address the global economy. Again, recognizing our commonality as opposed to our tribal national differences is essential to survival in a world that has changed so much in the past century. Folks like Putin and Trump represent that old tribalistic world--extreme nationalism at the expense of humanity.
  • Southwest Airlines Meltdown Cancels 60% of Flights
    TWU Local 556 President on Southwest's canceled flights
    The above is an NPR interview. There’s a written transcript of the full interview. But also, at the top, there’s a link to the (6 minute) audio version, which I found more compelling.
    Once upon a time (80s and 90s) this was a great little airline for some of us living in downstate Michigan (and I presume elsewhere). Low cost, easy to deal with, very consumer friendly - including no-cost (or very low cost) schedule changes. Their “on-time” was as good as or better than the majors. I never cared for their “stampede” boarding method in which all lined up and then dashed aboard to grab the best seat they could. But to the airline it was a time saver. And one did tend to have an extra connection when flying any distance - for example, from Detroit to Florida. But all in all it was a fine operation.
    What happened? Dunno. But their once warm labor relations have turned decidedly cold in recent years. Chill may be evident in my linked interview. And their sole reliance on the 737, for many years a strength, may have turned against them in a number of ways.
    I have to believe this affects its stock too.
    LUV: Down 6% today. Down 23% YTD according to Google
    Airlines are fun to fly on (usually), but I wouldn’t want to own stock in one.
  • Minimizing Tesla exposure
    Re: TSLA
    YTD -72.7%
    1 Month -40.36%
    Today -11.41%
    (Numbers from Google)
    ISTM @Sven ‘s original question has been largely answered. Your exposure to TSLA has now been diminished whether you did anything or not.
    Began tracking TSLA a week or so ago. Some astounding daily losses over that time. ISTM there’s some valuable lessons here for investors, as the stock seemed like a “sure bet” that just kept going up for many years. A look at what can go wrong with an investment and how quickly the tables can turn. Perhaps some needed humility.