“The average money market fund is now offering dividends of about 0.09%.”
That doesn’t sound right. I don’t invest in money market funds, so have no idea what the better ones return. I just checked my cash substitute, TRBUX. At the end of June Fidelity is showing a 30-day yield of 2.31% with an average weighted maturity of only 1.3 years and a duration of just 1 year. YTD it’s up about 2% - but provided a wild ride during the March / April period.
TRBUX

Hi Sir Old_Skeet, you are exactly right.
In my experiences, the first 100K 'balance' in our portfolio is so hard to get with all the market gains/401K div-redisbributions. The 2nd, 3rd 100K gained are easier than the first 100K [after 5-7 yrs or so].... So are the subsequent gained monies. You may have same feelings once reaching 1M [then 2M].. We did have a great bull run since 2009 when I first started investion. Think the rules for 7.5 years for doubling your total assets work well here [unless we have a massive recession/depression - contractions which we are facing right now]
Couch potatoes and picking mutual funds that you like work well too if you have no time to fiddle around. Hard to time the market these days; we have to trust the managers that we hired to run our Mutual Funds or ETFs. Although stocks may appear cheap still these days. We may have Dows @ 35K by next few years - [12 months]; we did have NASDAQ at records highs recently [yesterday]
fwiw
regards

Hi johnN, Thanks for posting the article.
If one has the right risk tolerance assesment and follows it then they will do well overtime. Let me explain my thoughts. When equites have had the strong run that they have had of late then most investors should find themselves equity heavy. I know I have. With this, sell some equity and book your profit and move it on the other side of your portfolio which most likely will be the income side that holds mostly your cash and bond positions.
And, should the stock market have another swoon most likely the income side will then provide some need ballast for the portfolio to lessen the effect of the falling stock market prices and it's swoon. As equity valuations fall this should put one heavy on the income side and light on the equity side. Then rebalance and move some money to the equity side staying within the confines of your asset allocation, of course. Then play the rebound with rising equity prices as the stock market recovers you should find yourself equity heavy again. Then repeat the process.
This is not rocket science; but, I call this throtteling my portfolio and for many this seems hard to do. However, I have followed this process for many years ... and, I plan to keep doing it ... hopefully ... for many more years to come. Why? Because it works.
I wish all ... "Good Investing."
I am, Old_Skeet

https://www.morningstar.com/articles/989371/were-forecasting-a-strong-long-run-economic-recovery
We're Forecasting a Strong Long-Run Economic Recovery
We don't think the market's engaging in irrational exuberance.
Preston Caldwell
Jun 30, 2020
The Morningstar US Market Index has come thundering back since its late March nadir and is now down merely 7% year to date, even as the coronavirus pandemic persists. While many investors are wondering if the market is exhibiting irrational exuberance, we think the rebound has been broadly warranted, as we forecast a strong long-run recovery in the U.S. economy. We expect U.S. GDP to drop 5.1% in 2020 but surge back in 2021 and experience further catch-up growth in following years. By 2024, we think U.S. GDP will recover to just 1% below our expectations before the pandemic.

The whole rotating-discount/cash-back thing is a turnoff to me. Every quarter or month you need to remember which card to use to maximize which benefits ... too much work! I stick w/my Amex Plat and Amazon Prime Visa and keep things simple so I can worry about other more important things. :)

Hi sir MSF...BOA credit probably one if best credit card around, give 5_10% off on certain places frequently use (this quater starbuck dumkin donuts and LaMadelin)...also 3% cash bsck gas restaurants and 2% everything else. We like our merrilllynch advisor know him for many yrs charges 1% annually and only minimal in managed acct

Yep - To each his own. 25-30 years ago I ran into debt & spending issues related to credit cards. Going to 100% cash (except where credit is absolutely necessary) really helped turn things around. That was than. This is now. Today, I still have the same “dirty” $100 in my wallet it held in early March, as credit is safer to handle in light of Covid-19.
To the ongoing discussion here, what I demand of my one credit card is: friendly 24-hour service, reps who speak English and are easy to access, honest dealing, no sales pressure or product promotions. My company (Elan) throws in a few hundred dollars a year as some kind of bonus. That’s nice, but not the reason I chose them. Now, just think of all the investment research and strategic decision making you might be doing with the time otherwise allotted to deciding which cc to use this week or next? An investment in knowledge always pays the best dividend.

For us we have Vanguard 13 years, schwab 11 years, and merrilledge 7 years. All are easy to talk to representatives, low cost trading, good bonddesks, schwab offers excellence research for stocks/mutual funds. All maintenance fees extremely low (for instance merrilledge charge you 0.7% annually fees but you need only 100ks And 1%if less 100k in acct [rest can be self managed without financial advisor])
Mama has Fidelity and we use it to buy etf and bonds, its reasonable but I heard they have best cd/ visa cards 2% cash back
Which firms do you folks prefer

A decade ago I looked fairly closely into different brokerages' bond services. What I found at the time was that while offerings were of course different, they tended to rely on third party services for inventory. So their offerings at any given time, while different, were similar. Fidelity would offer the same bonds at a lower price than Schwab.
Things may have changed, but a very small spot check (1 bond) suggests that this pricing differential remains. Calif (Sacramento) muni, callable starting in two years, maturing in five, CUSIP 786073BG0. Schwab price: 118.636 (2.394% YTW), Fidelity price: 118.536 [sic] (2.407% YTW). Both charge a $1/bond commission. I've bought bonds at Fidelity. Because of the higher cost, I haven't at Schwab.
If you're looking at keeping $100K at Merrill, BofA credit cards can come out better. Their cash rewards cards (with the $100K balance) pay 5.25% on the category of your choice (e.g. online purchases), 3.5% on grocery and warehouse purchases, and 1.75% on everything else. (The higher rebates are limited to $2500 in purchases/quarter). Of it you travel a bit (which can include mass transit, zoos(!) and other oddities), there's a cash back card that pays 2.625% on everything. The catch there is that the rebate must be used to cover travel costs.
With respect to mutual funds, Merrill Edge is limited in its offerings. Essentially, just NTF share classes are available. So you can't buy lower cost institutional shares even if the total cost of ownership would be less for you. Fidelity and Schwab are better in this regard. Fidelity also enable you to buy additional shares of a TF fund for $5 while at Schwab it's still $50. Vanguard's advantage is that it offers some institutional shares with lower mins than at Fidelity or Schwab. My impression is that T. Rowe Price's third party fund offerings are slim, but TRP hasn't posted its "catalogue" for years.
ETF and stock trading are free at Merrill, Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard. At TRP they can cost $20, unless the ETF is on their NTF list.
IMHO where TRP shines is in it broad offering of fine mutual funds. Essentially what @rforno said. In addition, it offers a free individual 401(k) plan with Roth option, as does Vanguard. Schwab doesn't allow Roths, nor does Fidelity. Merrill doesn't offer a free individual 401k.
I've found TRP's service to be on par with Fidelity and Schwab. I have found service at Merrill and Vanguard wanting.

Is Trow better than Vanguard Fidelity? What are their best qualities
For us we have Vanguard 13 years, schwab 11 years, and merrilledge 7 years. All are easy to talk to representatives, low cost trading, good bonddesks, schwab offers excellence research for stocks/mutual funds. All maintenance fees extremely low (for instance merrilledge charge you 0.7% annually fees but you need only 100ks And 1%if less 100k in acct [rest can be self managed without financial advisor])
Mama has Fidelity and we use it to buy etf and bonds, its reasonable but I heard they have best cd/ visa cards 2% cash back
Which firms do you folks prefer

Howdy folks,
I've been a major T. Rowe Price investor for going on 20 years. I call them T. Rowe Price. That's their name.
rono

"Nothing follows"? Jeez, that seems a bit cruel ... or perhaps despairing in a Yeats sort of way: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" sort of way.
T. Rowe Price Multi-Strategy Total Return keeps ticking up. Positive by 4.7% YTD, as of 7/6/20. Cheap enough to be in the running for "the new 60/40," at least if you assume that the "40" in question is fated to fall flat. From my perspective, the challenges are my inability to explain to myself what exactly the strategies do - I can repeat the words back to myself after I read them, but they don't stick - and, by its nature as a quant fund, the portfolio's positioning is inexplicable.
Queens Road Value keeps ticking along, down 9% YTD which is still top tier for a LCV fund. Sort of regrettable that it's losing assets even in years when its relative and absolute performance as both excellent (2017, up 20% and top 10% performer - investors flee). Increasingly it's the poster child for a "friends and family" fund: Queens Road manages over a billion for rich folks but can't get much past $30 million here.
The BlackRock and DFA ETFs-in-registration are interesting, at the very least. The active ETF / non-transparent active ETF development should be changing a lot of calculations.
Chip thought Lynn's piece was his most useful ever, in part because she can make the translation of investment options into Excel. Charles's was a great change-of-pace and I dearly appreciate Ed's willingness to become more directive about alternative investments.
- - - - -
Two personal notes. Yesterday Will's Covid test came back negative ("none detected"), eight days after its submission. Sadly, the tests still have a high false negative rate; research published in June by Johns Hopkins says that there's a 30% probability that a person with a negative result is actually positive. Still no symptoms, we remain cautious and cautiously optimistic.
Chip shared online part of my short reflection on the reciprocal relation between rights and responsibilities. That went about the way you'd expect. The angrier respondents - like the woman (founder of a public relations firm? Oh, good.) caught on camera destroying a mask display at her local Target store - sort of skipped "thinking about the argument" went straight to "outrage." The results fell into two camps: the "you can't make me do nuthin'" camp and the "if you can make me wear a mask, then I can make you give up red meat and get your sorry *ss to the gym" camp.
I wonder if learning to talk about "externalities" would help address either? Sometimes my actions affect only me. Other times, my actions affect you. "Externalities" is the term economists give for the effects on you. Sometimes those effects are welcome; if I improve the exterior of my house, the value of your adjacent property goes up. That's a positive externality. If I shoot wildlife and dump their carcasses to rot in my yard, that's a negative externality.
Every culture implicitly decides what level of negative externality justifies some sort of sanction. If you get drunk at home, no sanction. Drunk and disorderly, some sanction. Drunk while operating a motor vehicle, major sanction. In general, as the magnitude of your effect on others risks, so does the swiftness and scope of the sanction. A person's decision to eat meat (negligible externality) is seen as a lot different from their decision to poison a public waterway (major externality).
All of which only works if people are willing to listen to each other, agree on the underlying facts and discuss the response that best reflects our shared responsibilities as members of the same neighborhood, city, nation, culture or whatever.
- - - - -
Take great care and, as ever, thanks!
David

I believe the barometer has a good value in accessing short term market movement which is difficult to achieve. Good work :-)
In the last several years I find Tony Dwyer to be pretty good at forecasting short term market movements. Yesterday has said the following (link)

These articles have been published when the market were lower by 5,10 and 15%. I have heard in the last 10 years that rates can only go up, that the stock market is overvalued for years, that inverted yield signals top, that PE + PE10 are too high.
One day it will be right, I just like to know exactly when

Thanks for your opinion.
I would also like to read your thoughts on the Morningstar forums. I was told that you were put on suspended status. Has M* lifted the suspension?

These articles have been published when the market were lower by 5,10 and 15%. I have heard in the last 10 years that rates can only go up, that the stock market is overvalued for years, that inverted yield signals top, that PE + PE10 are too high.
One day it will be right, I just like to know exactly when

Old_Skeet, your method is good but has lots of moving parts. Just an observation, not criticism :-)
A typical rebalance achieves similar results when stock prices go down and you keep switching from bonds to stocks to keep the same asset allocation. That is a good way until a black swan shows up and every time you buy more stocks on the way down you keep losing more.
The question of timing occupied my brain for many years.
I always want to be fully invested as long as I can. In the last 10-11 years, I was in cash for about 12 weeks, which means I was fully invested 98% of the time.
Until 2008-9, when I was younger with a much smaller portfolio. I just stayed the course because my fund managers (SGENX,OAKBX,FAIRX) played it right. After I lost 25% in 2008 I decided that the only way not to lose is to set up a simple selling %.
From 2009 and for the next several years, I would sell any stock fund I owned if it lost more than 6% and bought a bond fund. I would sell any bond fund that lost over 3% and searched for another more conservative fund. If I could not find any bond fund then I would go to cash.
When stocks bottomed and rebounded, I only increased stocks using a pyramid up. That means that every time I buy more stock mutual fund the price must be higher than the previous one,
In 2018 at retirement, I made my selling criteria stricter. I only trade stocks short term (hours to days) using charts. I used bond funds most times. Any bond fund I own that loses more than 1% I sell and then I look for a better bond fund, if I can't find any I go to cash.
BTW, the above is probably too complicated. Stay fully invested and buy and hold is a good way for most investors :-)

ANBEX is one of the funds I posted about several months ago. See its chart(link) compared to the index.
When I look at Fidelity funds screener ANBEX has the best performance for 1-3 years in the Intermediate Core Bond + Intermediate Core Bond plus categories.
Second to ANBEX are SCCYX+SCPZX from Carillon Reams.

Fund F = Barclays Capital U.S. Aggregate Bond Index.
As expected it did its job as ballast to stocks.
What is going to be its performance in the next 5 years? maybe 2-2.5% annually.
I don't expect inflation to rise beyond Fed expectations. I have seen many predictions by experts to be off in over 10 years.

Mr. Hasenstab is a former star manager. Two of the funds he managed, Templeton Global Bond and Templeton Global Income, consistently generated some of the highest trailing returns in the World Bond¹ category. The funds' performance in recent years has been underwhelming. Perhaps Mr. Hasenstab will get his mojo back someday?
¹now in Morningstar Nontraditional Bond category

How does it hold up over ten years ?
3.99 compound over that time period !
Derf
P.S. That 3.99 % was from 2019- back ten yrs.

TRP has been doing this in most of its asset allocation and retirement funds for a few years now. They're doing more barbelling than timing the market as they give you both long treasuries and short TIPs with mild adjustments in allocation.
PRWCX goes in-and-out, i.e. market times. I've seen them do this twice in the last 10 years, buying with good timing but selling too soon.
Price's fund, TRULX, gets a lot of its money from the allocation/retirement funds. Its AUM is not too different from when I bought it 1-1/2 years ago. I wonder if this stabilizes it from the rush inflow situation.

“It's just I'm surprised that I rarely see it used as an asset class in asset allocation, multi-sector, or unconstrained funds. It seems that they would add value & diversification”
I don’t know if this answer satisfies - but a good house with its own highly competent credit research department can do a lot better playing in the corporate bond sector than it can with Treasuries. But msf induced me to look at a couple multi-asset funds.
Here’s what Price’s Spectrum Income fund (RPSIX) does. Its latest bond holdings (from Yahoo) show 0% in U.S. government bonds, 33% in (other) AAA and an average duration of about 5 years. Since the fund typically invests 15% (more or less) in an equity fund, the percent allocated to AAA is lower than might appear at first glance. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RPSIX/holdings/
TRRIX is one of Price’s conservative balanced funds. Normally it targets a 60% bond, 40% equity mix. According to Yahoo the fund is currently underweight bonds by 8% at 52% of portfolio. Like RPSIX, the fund holds 0% U.S. government bonds. And, like RPSIX, they’re holding the duration to just over 5 years. The fund hews to a higher credit quality than RPSIX - with 59% of bonds rated AAA. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TRRIX/holdings/ ..... T. Rowe is right a lot more often than they’re wrong on the long term outlook. Problem is most of us consider 6 months long term, while they’re looking out several years. Patience pays off.
Just a personal perspective (not applicable to others): I view bond funds as a “speed-brake“ that should reduce volatility during deep stock market downturns. Earning the paltry income available today doesn’t interest me. After one of my sources, Bill Fleckenstein, cautioned his readers to avoid lower credit grades last March, I’ve strived to stay with mostly intermediate-term bond funds that invest primarily in higher credit quality. AAA, AA A, BBB all fall within that zone. Yahoo is a great spot for viewing a fund’s bond credit quality / duration / maturity. I should add that Bill made that call a couple weeks before the Fed announced their intent to buy corporate bonds. So I don’t know if the advice still stands. Suspect so.

“Though the bottom line is, I don't think I could put 70% of my total portfolio in long-term treasuries and then just forget about it.” +1
Don’t confuse / conflate long-term Treasuries with long-term Treasury funds - or, for that matter, any type of fund investing in bonds. Two different animals. Funds respond much differently to rising / falling rates. That’s because changes rates affect fund flows. If rates fall and prices rise, more investors likely buy in, causing manager to purchase more bonds at higher prices. Prices fall? Investors flee, forcing manager to sell into a weak market at potentially lower prices. Than there’s the matter of fees and operating costs associated with funds that direct bond holders don’t face.
Your question is a good one. I’m but a casual observer of bonds. But in watching multi-asset funds of all stripes over the years, I get the impression that out beyond the 10-15 year duration, you don’t need a lot of those to significantly impact a fund’s volatility and performance. I rarely see any multi-asset fund that exceeds 10-15% in long term Treasury holdings. No doubt, there are some. In essence, a little bit of this asset delivers a big bang in a diversified portfolio. They make a great hedging tool - precisely because they tend to do better in weak equity markets and pack a disproportionate amount of punch.
Not topical - But there’s an even more potent creature called “zero coupon Treasuries”. For additional enlightenment, you might like to read up on those.