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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.
  • BONDS, HIATUS ..... March 24, 2023
    Thanks @Catch22
    From Whitman: “The ship has weather’d every rack …”
    Owning bonds / bond funds felt like “bow-shock” aboard ship or plane all year long. The talking heads and market gurus I monitor mostly speak optimistically of a splendid 2023 for longer dated bonds. In particular, Rick Rieder of Blackrock appears to have trouble “containing” himself during interviews on this point. We shall see. I had plans to pull some $$ from PRIHX about now after having held it 3 years or more. But stinks so badly now that I won’t touch it. I’ll let the money “ferment” longer (like fine wine) and hopefully recoup this year’s losses some day.
    You really need a sense of humor to invest today. :)
  • Riverpark Short Term High Yield - divs and availability
    They settle on a relatively consistent, usually conservative monthly distribution early in the year, with the result that most years, there's excess income to distribute at the end of the year.
    This is by design. Many CEFs including PDI have a managed distribution policy. It's a little hard to see this in the prospectus, but it is there.
    Closed-end fund managed distribution programs are designed to facilitate regular, relatively consistent distributions to shareholders, typically by:
    1. Estimating a fund’s long-term total return (both income and long-term appreciation, net of expenses)
    2. Setting a regular monthly or quarterly distribution amount intended to match the fund’s total distributions to its total return over time
    https://www.nuveen.com/en-us/insights/closed-end-funds/understanding-managed-distributions
    From the PDI prospectus:
    The Fund makes regular monthly cash distributions to Common Shareholders at a rate based upon the past and projected net income of the Fund. Subject to applicable law, the Fund may fund a portion of its distributions with gains from the sale of portfolio securities and other sources. The Fund’s dividend policy, as well as the dividend rate that the Fund pays on its Common Shares, may vary as portfolio and market conditions change, and will depend on a number of factors.
    RPHYX/ RPHIX doesn't manage its distributions. Generally, what you see (earn as income) is what you get (as income divs).
    ----
    David Sherman's CrossingBridge Pre-Merger SPAC ETF, ticker SPC, also gave a .24/share distribution yesterday. Nice Christmas present from these 2 holdings.
    I hadn't taken a close look at SPC. Interesting fund. Follows Sherman's RPHYX approach of investing in "remnants", but in a different pool ("money good" SPACs, i.e. ones "trading at par value or at a discount" ).
    These divs come out of NAV, unlike divs in funds that declare divs daily. Whether the fund sells more assets to pay a larger div, or the shareholder sells shares to generate the same cash flow, the effect is the same.
    This is why I prefer to focus on total return. Though I do understand that receiving a dividend (especially a large one) "automatically" somehow feels different.
  • Riverpark Short Term High Yield - divs and availability
    Pimco has a habit of making special December income distributions, larger than the previous months' in their OEFs and CEFs (maybe their ETFs too, don't have much experience with them). They settle on a relatively consistent, usually conservative monthly distribution early in the year, with the result that most years, there's excess income to distribute at the end of the year. No idea if that's what's at work w/ Riverpark.
    Two Pimco examples from this year: PDI had a consistent 0.2205 income distribution through the year and then issued a special income distribution of 0.65 Dec 27; PIMIX (which somewhat uncharacteristically boosted the monthly twice during the year) put out a special income distribution of 0.1036 the same day.
    I'd guess that funds with shorter durations (and/or high turnover) during a period of rising rates might tend to land in that situation -- as they replace lower yielding securities with higher yielding ones.
  • 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