Barron's had some recent stories on Colorado River situation.
EMERGING MARKETS (4/3/23). To benefit from the US Chips and Science Act to promote domestic semi-CHIPS manufacturing, TSM (Taiwan) and INTC are building huge facilities near Phoenix, AZ. But chips manufacturing is very WATER-intensive and that is a scarce resource in AZ. Phoenix draws 40% of its water from the COLORADO RIVER that runs through 7 states, and AZ is the last one. Almost 70% of Colorado River water is used for farming. In a hyperbole, Kathryn SORENSEN, a former director of Phoenix Water Services, and now with Kyl Center (Arizona State U), said that the state’s water planning goes back “thousands of years”, so it can handle the water demands. https://ybbpersonalfinance.proboards.com/post/998/thread
(If wondering why this US-related story is under the Emerging Markets, note the reference to TSM and Taiwan is part of most EM indexes; BTW, S Korea is considered EM by MSCI, but developed by FTSE)
COVER STORY (8/29/22), “(ESG) Beyond Drought: The Coming WATER Shortage Is a Threat from Main Street to Wall Street”. Water shortages in CA and elsewhere have changed consumer behaviors, HOME lawns and plantings. Investors are paying more attention to water impacts/risks/metrics on portfolios and BUSINESSES (agriculture, apparel/fashion, energy, mining, semi chips, data centers, etc). The SEC will require climate risk disclosures by 2022 yearend. Only 3% of world’s water is FRESH, and 2.5% is locked up in glaciers, polar ice caps, atmosphere, soil, so only 0.5% of the water is fresh and readily available. Many companies are RECYCLING water for reuse or alternate uses. Number and durations of DROUGHTS are rising globally. Problems in the US are acute in Colorado River areas (with Lake Mead and Lake Powell below 30% capacity). Global water DEMAND will exceed supply by 40-56% by 2030. Many companies have to write off assets stranded/idled by water scarcity. https://ybbpersonalfinance.proboards.com/post/753/thread

Water is the lifeblood for the western half of US. TSMC is following Intel who has built a plant in Phoenix many years ago. Clearly the management picked the location due to the largest $ and land granted by Arizona. Will see how this will plays out.
Again, we are getting off track on the topic of AI. As I posted above, my comment was

Another play in this AI space is the “picks and shovels” companies that enable this technologies. TSMC is the largest semiconductor foundries in the world in producing chipsets for many electronic devices including Apple. However, the geographical risk with China is causing many investors to pause.

IMHO, I think picking Arizona as the manufacturing site is a mistake. Semiconductor manufacturing is a very water intensive process and the West is having severe water shortage in past decade.
[snip]

This should be a major concern. Forty million people depend on the Colorado River for water.
An epic drought (23 years!) and historic mismanagement of water resources (Colorado River Compact, 1922)
brought record low water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell last year.
Link

...
Dear stillers:
1) Let me ask you an easy question. Why did you use 3 different names(stillers,Arriba, Albie) on different sites? Did you try to hide something?
2) Why don't you try to register on BB as stillers? You have no chance with the moderator who knows you for years.
BTW, the subject of this thread is bond, why not make comments on it?

Ah, the classic FD/Red Party way: Deny Delay, Deflect.***
(1) Ah, C'mom man! You've asked that questions several times and I've 'splained the answer to you, well, several times. Memory problems? Or just another example of the above***?
Or, as Dan Rather once infamously stated, "No Mr (xxx), are you?"
(2) The Moderator of that forum is a fellow Trumper of yours who has cut you unbelievable slack there since that forum started. Apparently you finally overstepped your bounds netting a 90-day ban, and now need to incessantly push your wares elsewhere for that stretch . (See just about every other forum you've ever participated on.)
Aside, and "For kicks" as capecod used to say: Given my use of other names in the past, maybe I AM registered there and you just don't know it!
(3) Well dummy, if you had read the whole thread, you'd have seen that I DID make comments about the OP topic long before you entered the thread post-BB ban.

...
One aspect of the CHIP Act is to bring manufacturing capabilities and capacities back to US. TSMC is on track to build a manufacturing plant in Phoenix, Az and another one in Germany. This will take several years to complete but it will stabilize the manufacturing capabilities in US and Western Europe.

So we were out at a club last weekend and via some mutual, professional friends, we met and spoke at length to one of the many Project Managers at the AZ site. The man has been a PM all of his career and engaged in many national/international high $ and high profile construction projects.
We asked him how things were progressing at the site.
Um, OUCH!
He related some stunning (and detailed) comments (that I won't detail here) about the company's lack of understanding and appreciation for the many layers of regulation, inspection and certification on US construction projects. For much of his time during the early stages of construction, he would get to the site, 'splain again why they need to adhere to this/that regulation, tell them to Just Do It, and then go home for the day. Next day, rinse and repeat. In his over 30 years as a PM, he stated he's never seen anything approaching the issues on this job.
LOTS of other issues surround this project and they are being documented daily by local press, TV and the like. Online searches will easily locate many of the biggest issues.

Yogi: "FR/BL are great for rising rates. But when rates are steady or declining, they act just like risky short-term HY (FR/BL are low-rated). That party is/maybe ending soon too."
There is always a risk/reward decision to be made in investing in bond oefs. FR/BL did very well for many years, in the last 10 years, when rates were flat and certainly not rising. As a junk bond category, (most BLs are B rated), I frequently used them in the past, as a "lower risk" option for junk bond investing. When I read the Feds intentions regarding rates, I am not struck with the impression that a rate drop, is very likely this calendar year. On the contrary, I see the Feds raising rates very gradually the rest of the year, and trying to find their happy place for a smooth landing, and trying to keep inflation under control. The beauty about Discussion Forums, regarding bonds, there is often varying opinions about what the market is presenting to an investor as an opportunity. At any rate, I thought this thread should have an option of actually discussing "Bonds", as an alternative to some of the other topics on this thread, that do not appear very constructive!

There is lots of work to be done on the software side. It may take several more years of refinement before they will start be deploy. On the hardware front, NVIDIA and other gaming chipset manufacturers are the spotlight lately.
Another play in this AI space is the “picks and shovels” companies that enable this technologies. TSMC is the largest semiconductor foundries in the world in producing chipsets for many electronic devices including Apple. However, the geographical risk with China is causing many investors to pause.
One aspect of the CHIP Act is to bring manufacturing capabilities and capacities back to US. TSMC is on track to build a manufacturing plant in Phoenix, Az and another one in Germany. This will take several years to complete but it will stabilize the manufacturing capabilities in US and Western Europe.

Hank: FD - Just a reaction to your use of “proprietary”. It sounds as if you can’t share your approach on a board dedicated to sharing and helping one another. But perhaps I misunderstood your intent. Sorry if I offended you.
FD: I did share, read the link. The following is a main tech indicator I have used called, three line break. For over a year now, all my bond trades were in HY Munis using 2 out of the 3 funds each time (ORNAX,NHMAX,XXXXX). This (chart) shows how it works. Green bars=buy, Red bars=sell. This is a decent indicator that works with many bond funds. How and What else I do is proprietary, especially using mainly 2 funds. This is why I bought in the middle of last week.
But, there is a change. The Fed fund rate, as we know it now, is stabilized at +-0.25% for the next several months. This means to me that finally, the risk of higher rates is lower, I can use other categories, and Multi is where I find unique funds. Munis were easier to predict with my trades and behave better than treasuries.
I already posted that this time I bought NHMAX. This fund is usually the riskiest, the chance is for a better upside this time. As of April 30, it has an effective leverage of 27.3% per Nuveen site, there isn't other HY Muni OEF with such a leverage, unless I missed it.
So, after more than a year trading only HY munis, this time NHMAX is only a small % of my portfolio, the other bond fund isn't.
========
Dear stillers:
1) Let me ask you an easy question. Why did you use 3 different names(stillers,Arriba, Albie) on different sites? Did you try to hide something?
2) Why don't you try to register on BB as stillers? You have no chance with the moderator who knows you for years.
BTW, the subject of this thread is bond, why not make comments on it?

Curious, as I'm not as knowledgeable in the least bit on bonds as many of you are-with our large allocation to TRAIX/PRWCX and the significant holdings for a number of years of the fund in bank loan/floating rate bonds, how do these bonds typically react to a reduction of interest rates by the fed?

And so it begins.
Banned from BB for 90 days, he will need an alternate forum to many times, each and every day, spew his condescending, self-aggrandizing crap. And sadly for MFO posters, this will be his likely spot for the duration of his 90-day stretch.
No surprise his likens himself via parallel acronym to his true god. Funny how he used to boastfully post daily about his god but has duly STFU about him over the past months/years as the buffoon charts paths to incarceration in multiple jurisdictions.

Some people have T-DS and some have FD-DS.
Hank, if you think that my system is too funny, I welcome you to dive a bit into it(link). Several did and doing very well. The whole idea is to find great risk/reward funds, small AUM is a plus, an uptrend is a must + owning only 2-3 funds. In the last several years it's mostly bond OEFs. These funds eventually get discovered. I held PIMIX for about 7-8 years, then came IOFIX. HY Munis have always been a part of it.

@Charles, check out Barron's,
TRADER. Stocks rose as the wall of worry faded away. The RALLY broadened beyond large-caps to small/mid-caps and cyclicals (financials, industrials). The SP500 was in a bear market for 248 days (Edit - the longest since 1948) and it may reach a new high that is +10% away. Of course, there are economic data, the FOMC meeting(s), and a possible recession along the way. Enjoy the rally while it lasts.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/stock-market-gains-as-wall-of-worry-crumbles-what-happens-next-75e1dc1e?mod=past_editions
You may be thinking of the time it took for the SP500 to recover fully, and that was about 5 years after the GFC; however, the allocation funds recovered much faster.

Appreciate those thoughts, @hank. Am I shooting myself in the foot? Maybe so... But the dividend, even after taxes, is lovely. And I have deliberately chosen NHYDY to be the stock I own in that investment sector: Aluminum and green energy. They even mine their own bauxite. Did a lot of homework on it. One of the biggest in the world. It's not at all in any financial pressure. They just bought back a lotta shares, last year. Taxes are not an issue for us, in our circumstances, though--- so it pinches when that happens, and there's no way to get it back on the 1040. Nothing to deduct it against, if you know what I mean. So I get credit for paying a bit of foreign tax. It's like a certificate hung on the wall telling me I'm a part-owner of the Green Bay Packers on account of my donation to the team in the lean years.

@Anna : Is it possible that building didn't meet code requirements for assisted living ?

No there was no problem that I know of. I knew someone whose relative lived in assisted living there for years. She finally died and I lost track of what happened after that. It was an old landmark hotel. At this time it has been modernized and converted back to a hotel. So whoever ran the assisted living facility must have sold it.

correction indicator :)
For many years my father had an investment timing / trend analysis service whose most beautiful feature was his individual (per client) hand-drawn and -colored moving averages serving as graphics for his nicely written newsletter. That is some swing in the WSJ poll.

@LewisBraham- Sorry, but I have to disagree on this one- the Examiner article refers to an individual as I described above in reply to Anna: an ordinary person who has fallen on really bad times. There are in fact a number of organizations here in SF who do really excellent work in helping out in those types of situations, and my wife and I have substantially supported them for many years.
To repeat- the majority though, at least here in SF, are druggies, thieves and crazies who respond to nothing other than their next high. A number of the hotels described in the Examiner article were substantially trashed during the pandemic temporary housing program- something that the Examiner chose not to report.
A short excerpt from a pertinent report in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Hotels are seeking millions from S.F. for damage when they were homeless shelters.
Hotel Union Square’s cleanup bill was steep — $5.6 million to repair rampant smoke damage, broken light fixtures, mold and other problems.
As city supervisors consider shelling out millions to settle the dispute over damages at one of San Francisco’s hotel homeless shelters, taxpayers could be on the hook for millions more to settle similar claims from other hotels that participated in the program.
In September 2021, the owners of Hotel Union Square filed a claim with the city, alleging unhoused residents who the city had placed there had caused $5.6 million in damages — and cost the Dallas-based hotel operator hundreds of thousands more in lost rent.
City officials created the Hotel Program in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and used it to house more than 3,700 high-risk residents in 25 hotels. With federal and state funding drying up, the city has gradually closed most of the hotels.

Old_Joe said , "For a couple of years during the pandemic SF leased a number of smaller hotels- decent buildings- to use as temporary housing for a number of the street people. When the leases were up, the hotels were found to have been largely trashed. Now the taxpayers are on the hook to fix that, too."
I don't doubt that one bit !!
@yogibearbull : Are you suggesting the city use TIF to convert the hotels to living quarters ?
Heck, hire a doorman & desk clerk & let the homeless in !
Just joking, Derf

Tax-incremental-financing (TIFs) only waves future incremental tax revenues for a while (20-30 years) and there is no immediate money commitment from the local government. So, the current "low" taxes on that property continue now, and for the future, until the TIF period expires (and taxes jump to the new property assessment level). Real cost to the local government is higher level of city services it has to provide on the new property if it comes to fruition (many such projects are delayed or fall through, and then the local government doesn't lose anything except face).
If in addition, the local government issues bonds (munis), to be supported by the future property revenues, then it on the hook to the extent spelled out in the bond issue. Those holding munis know these as AMT munis.
However, there is multiplier effect with the TIFs because private funding becomes more easily available, and some federal funding can also be tapped.
I think TIFs are great.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_increment_financing

@Derf- For a couple of years during the pandemic SF leased a number of smaller hotels- decent buildings- to use as temporary housing for a number of the street people. When the leases were up, the hotels were found to have been largely trashed. Now the taxpayers are on the hook to fix that, too.

DT: Good on ya. Can't tie up my $$$ for very long like that. Of course, I'm investing, and that's long-term. What you're doing with CDs, I'n doing with bond OEFs.

Crash, I understand. I am retired and focused on preserving principal, while making a decent TR with CD interest payments. After I retired, I focused on making 4 to 6% TR, but CDs paid nothing, and so I chose to focus on low risk bond oefs. Loved those years with PIMIX from which I collected monthly income payments that were very predictable and dependable. I had several other bond oefs that I did well with--SEMMX, VCFIX, NVHAX, etc. When the FEDs got serious about raising interest rates, bond oefs got less appealing to me, but CDs became attractive alternatives. I have no idea how long I can ride the CD gravy train, but for now, I will enjoy the stress free 5% returns during my "golden years". I keep watching Floating Rate Bank Loan funds, which I played with for a few years, and keep wondering when they will start benefiting from the rising interest rate period.