Just curious, do employees actually lose company match when they borrow within their 401k? I took loans from my 401k a few times in my earlier years but we didn't have matching contributions in those days. I always found borrowing your own money and paying yourself back, with interest, was better than paying a bank that interest. If the loan affects company contributions though, that would negate the benefits for sure.

@hank
>> How many employees have wasted their company match 401 K money by “borrowing” against it in their working years or taking highly speculative market risks with it?
so ... what's the answer? do go on.

I don’t know. Thus the reason I used a ? at the end.

Howdy folks,
So typically government. How many years ago did they auction off the spectrum? Duh.
That said, I favor 5G over the airlines. It's more important. Sorry, but we've morphed from transportation to communication. Think about it. It's a continuum. Albeit moving goods and moving busses of data.
I also don't believe the airlines. They're not having issues overseas AND these are the peeps who lied to us for what? 10? 15? years over cellphones in planes.
Nah, roll it out completely. It's more important.
and so it goes,
peace and wear the damn mask,
rono

@hank
>> How many employees have wasted their company match 401 K money by “borrowing” against it in their working years or taking highly speculative market risks with it?
so ... what's the answer? do go on.

We are inundated here in SE MI by TV ads for several online sports books. All of them appear to offer “risk free” wagers to the newcomer. The fine print at the end of the ad gives a phone number for those who have a problem with gambling.

FWIW saying at least for now, the NFL is restricting betting app ads to like 6 per 3-hour game. They're NOWHERE as annoying as State Farm or Verizon ads this season, for sure.
By contrast, a few years ago, the last 5 minutes and first 30 minutes or so of games were filled with back-to-back-to-back Draftking or Fanduel ads.

We are inundated here in SE MI by TV ads for several online sports books. All of them appear to offer “risk free” wagers to the newcomer. The fine print at the end of the ad gives a phone number for those who have a problem with gambling.

Let’s not get moralistic here. How many employees have wasted their company match 401 K money by “borrowing” against it in their working years or taking highly speculative market risks with it? Any of us can login to our accounts and make any number of risky plays 24 / 7. We just don’t call it gambling. Unfortunately, there’s no cure for stupidity.

Here’s 7 High Risk Funds You Can Buy (Click arrows to scroll L - R)
Sorry your days are being disturbed by those ads Ben. I don’t like them either. Michigan is getting to be a challenging place to live. Between the nuts plotting to kidnap our governor and the stoned drivers I frequently need to dodge while driving (because the state’s legalized pot) - YIKES
ARTICLE: Online Gambling Tax Revenue in Michigan Far Exceeds 6-Month Predictions
“After just six months of legal online gambling in Michigan, tax revenues have already exceeded the initial industry predictions, with the state taking in almost $90 million so far in 2021, nearly doubling what some experts had first expected.”
“ Most of the online gambling tax revenue will go to help finance the Michigan School Aid Fund which covers the per-pupil foundation allowance, special education, at-risk programs, school lunch and breakfast, vocational education, and many other costly aspects of public education.
“Also benefitting from these online gambling tax revenues is a fund for state firefighters afflicted with a certain type of cancer as well as a state fund through the Department of Health and Human Services meant for compulsive bettors whose gambling has gone beyond recreational.”

For those waiting on better valuations to buy Equities, at what point would you be a serious Buyer? Do you have a specific plan in place?
What about Bonds (yeah, what about Bonds) - are any type/class of bonds worth holding in 2022?
Current S&P 500 PE Ratio: 25.85
Mean: 15.96
Median: 14.88

If you are on the sidelines congrats. Don’t see much fear in this market just everyone wanting to buy the dips. A lot of complacency. I guess that is what the past twelve years have conditioned investors to do. Should we actually get something more than a garden variety correction ala late 2018 and February/March 2020 would use a Zweig momentum buy signal to get back in. Worked like a charm after those two brief sell offs as well as the longer bear of 2008.
As for bonds the scary consensus is buy floating rate/bank loan funds as they are the place to be during periods of rising short term rates. Can’t argue with that ( and I have an allocation there) other than it seems a bit too pat and overwhelmingly embraced. If you get a really bad bear market in stocks/junk bonds, the floating rate/bank loan category will not protect you,

Derf, I don't post anywhere what I own or trade, sorry.
Generally, I own, in the last several years, only 2-3 funds. See (link).
Today I was down just -0.02%(it's the correct figure).

I too notice that DODBX is up while the balanced index is down, +3.2% vs -2.3%. Will see next week if that is a typo reported.

It’s nuts. DODBX is heavy into banks which are benefitting from the spike in interest rates. Throw in an overweight in refiners (reported about 2 years ago) and add a 5% short on the S&P (reported within the last 12 months) and you get a 3+% start to the new year. There’s some kind of sorting-out process taking place in the markets. We’ll see where it all leads …
Marty Zweig - “I’m nervous Lou. Very nervous.”

Not a strategy. But I’ve uncovered a link to a trove of old Wall Street Week - With Louis Rukeyser shows which, of course, aired on PBS from some time in the 70s until the 90s. We all learn in different ways. For me this was the best “primer” I ever had in finance. What’s fascinating is that many of the programs seem as relevant to investors today as they were 30, 40, 50 years ago. I guess that’s because the basic principals underlying financial markets and good investing practices really don’t change much with time. Your grandson could do worse than to sit back and enjoy a few of these shows.
Best wishes to you and grandson
https://americanarchive.org/catalog?f[special_collections][]=wall-street-week&sort=asset_date+asc&f[access_types][]=online

Thanks for the chart. You can see that even for a dip below the 200 MA it's only about a 2.5% dip in the NAV, and with the dividend yield above 4% even at today's elevated price, risk seems reasonable. I do have "trial" initial limit order in at slightly below the current 200 MA.
Ditching the corporate funds is a little more involved since they are in Roth IRAs and it's a PITA to do direct transfers. (They always seem to find a way to reject the transfer. Once it was because my middle initial didn't have a period after it, so I needed a notarized change of name document.) I do my one 60-day transfer a year, just to flush out the stragglers, this years it's probably going to be USAIX since it's my smallest holding and I'm not overwhelmed with the move to Victory.

My corporate bond funds (DODIX Dodge and Cox Income, USAIX USAA Income, etc) are taking the expected nose dive, but some junk and preferred ETF's I've been keeping an eye on (USHY iShare High Yield, PEF iShares Preferred, etc) have gone down a lot less. What's up with this? Flight to better income yields? A delayed effect because the duration of the junk bond funds is shorter than the bond funds?
The junk bond funds have twice the yield of the corporate bond funds and their alphas are higher and betas are lower, although that's to some extent apples and oranges. I don't think there's as much risk for the junk bond market as there was the last few years, the losers have been flushed out, everyone's almost done with their dodgy restructuring deals, and the main sectors in that area, energy and real estate, seem to be on the rebound.
Any ideas? I'm intrigued and a little suspicious of these funds.

Given that those 4 items have generally been true for most of the last 40+ years, they're just background noise at this time. I suppose one could get into the weeds of the ebb and flow of those 4 items and discern whether there is any pattern but I doubt that exercise would reveal a signal that can be exploited.

Direct real estate fund CPREX is an interval-fund, a special type of unlisted fund that can be bought from brokers any time, but redemptions are limited.
For CPREX, that redemption is up to 5% per quarter at NAV (so, may take 20 quarters (5 years) to get completely out). There are about 3 dozen such interval-funds that are suitable for illiquid securities. These are sort of in between ETFs and CEFs. Some describe them as roach-motels.

Thanks. Most interesting. I wondered about CPREX as Lipper couldn’t locate it. From what I could find, there’s a $1,000,000 minimum. Of all the mentioned funds (I already own GLFOX) this one looked interesting. Generally I won’t open a new position in anything that’s up 20-30% in a year’s time. Prefer to buy low and get paid to wait. I suspect, that like real estate funds generally, CPREX has already seen a nice run up - hence off my radar.
PS - a link to its 1, 3, 5 year performance would be appreciated.

Direct real estate fund CPREX is an interval-fund, a special type of unlisted fund that can be bought from brokers any time, but redemptions are limited. For CPREX, that redemption is up to 5% per quarter at NAV (so, may take 20 quarters (5 years) to get completely out).
There are about 3 dozen such interval-funds that are suitable for illiquid securities. These are sort of in between ETFs and CEFs. Some describe them as roach-motels.

This is a fascinating and lengthy look at the markets past and present. I highly encourage folks to obtain and read the full text. While I quote a few lines from different participants, realize each had a unique point of view. And, sometimes those viewpoints diverged sharply.
Participants:
Todd Ahlsten - Parnassus
Rupal Bhansali - Ariel
Scott Black - Delphi
Abby Cohen - Columbia Univ.
Sonal Desai - Franklin Templeton
Henry Ellenbogen - Durable Capital
Mario Gabelli - Gamco
David Giroux - T. Rowe Price
William Priest - Epoch
Meryl Witmer - Eagle
Quotable Quotes:
Cohen: “Unlike in recent years past, we will see that diversification, stock selection, and risk control matter.” She terms 2022 “the revenge of the nerds”.
Bhansali: “My (year-end) forecast implies a double-digit decline in U.S. markets (S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100) …”
Giroux: “The asset class today with the most attractive risk/reward profile is leveraged loans. I’ve taken leveraged loans to 12% of my portfolio …”
Giroux: “I would make a bet that the 10-year doesn’t get above 2.5% in the next year.”
Witmer: “What has been noticeable in the past year is extreme volatility in individual stocks.”
Witmer: “If the music stops and crypto tanks, there could be a contagion into the stock market. It could set up a good buying opportunity.”
Black: “The NTF craze in the art market is reaching the heights of delirium.”
Black: “I would avoid fixed income like the plague.”
Desai: “With TIPS, you end up taking on duration risk. If there is a selloff in Treasuries, TIPS won’t deliver …”
Priest: “There is also an existential political risk to the market around the question, ‘Does market efficiency require a democracy in order to operate optimally?’ “
Some of the funds mentioned favorably by various panelists at different points in the interview:
GLFOX, PAVE, EAPCX, SRLN, FRIAX, FEIFX, MPACX, CPREX (closed end)
From Barrons - January 17, 2022

TIPS are controversial. They have higher durations than Treasuries of comparable maturities, so they are hit worse from rising rates. Almost 25% of TIPS are held by the Fed, a price-insensitive buyer. And TIPS funds behave quite differently from individually held TIPS to maturity (well, other bonds do too, but TIPS more so than other bonds). There is also confusion on how the TIPS funds report 30-day SEC yield (some report only real 30-day yield, others add CPI to it).
True, I don't know of any allocation fund based on stocks and only TIPS, but there may be good reasons for that.
Many TDFs do include TIPS. Vanguard TDFs switched from IT-TIPS (too volatile) to ST-TIPS (to capture most of the inflation effects) years ago.

Continuing on …
It was a good article in Barron’s (By @LewisBraham) :) as Yogi mentions. The details are rather complex and I don’t understand it as well as @msf (above).
Anyone invested in short duration corporates must have noticed something “spooky” going on starting in mid March 2020. TRUBX, which I owned than, had been conservatively administered by TRP for years. Pegged at $10.00 it rarely budged - just a penny or two on rare occasions. But after the Covid-19 lockdowns & stock market fall began, it lost at least a dime very quickly - probably a bit more than that. And, it stayed down for a number of weeks afterward. A reflection of stress at the short end of the corporate bond ladder.
My take from a cursory reading of the Barron’s piece was that these “reforms” are mainly to reassure (institutional / corporate) investors that delaying or postponing redemptions will not “shut the gate” on them and make it harder to access their money down the road. It was this fear that led many to “rush” the funds and try to get out ahead of everyone else.

@bee ; "Do you find you spend your entire RMD or does some end up puddling in a taxable account?
At this time all of the RMD goes into taxable.
When I retired I left enough in cash to carry RMDs for a number of years. Thus no need to sell any equities in a down market to cover RMD's. That turned out NOT to be the right move as for the last 12 years Mr. Market has done very good !
We'll see what the next 12 years brings.
@yogibearbull : thanks for the new RMD table

I'll go with an ETF that did well for me last year and I see doing well again this year with rising rates and if energy continues to make up years of poor performance. Invesco DB Commodity Index Tracking Fund - DBC.