FYI: Let me show you an investment strategy that has had only four losing years since 1971. Its ugliest drop was in 1981 when it fell just 4.1 percent. In 2008, when stocks dropped about 37 percent, it lost less than 1 percent. This portfolio makes sense. Why? Because, as recorded by Richard H. Thaler, in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, we hate investment losses more than we enjoy investment gains
Regards,
Ted
http://assetbuilder.com/andrew_hallam/the_worlds_best_investment_strategy_that_nobody_seems_to_like
Mental Accounting Matters
RICHARD H. THALER
Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, USA:
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/Richard.Thaler/research/pdf/MentalAccounting.pdf

I'm heavy in FAIRX and FAAFX. I'm planning to hold. I remember all those investors in Ken Heebner's funds, CGMFX, etc, who sold at the end of a long stretch of underperformance and bought at the end of a long stretch of overperformance.
Berkowitz surely has seen all those studies of Sears and he keeps buying. He sees something we and the rest of the market don't. That's what I pay him for. Maybe his vision is bad, but I plan to give him a couple more years.

M* has had this problem off and on for years. Plus, you can't tell in M* PM what the as-of date is.
As alternatives, Yahoo's decent, faster and more consistent, and you can keep a simple portfolio for checking everything without a lot of hassle.
Fidelity reports a little faster than Yahoo, but I'm not sure what you can set up there if you don't have an account.
You can tell at both Yahoo and Fido while in portfolio mode whether a mutual fund price is same-day or not.

FYI: REITs are an inferior form of real estate investing. – Real estate investment trusts have become quite popular in recent years, as the Fed’s easy-money policies have sent investors to all corners of the financial markets in search of yield. From my perspective, buying the common stock of publicly-traded REITs is an inferior form of real estate investing.
Regards,
Ted
http://learnbonds.com/this-weeks-top-bond-market-stories-november-8th-edition/

FAIRX ytd -1.68% last month +8.56%
Maybe it is time to sell.
Holdings top 2: AIG +6.34%, BAC +11.95%
The rest... with exception of St Joe, all are down double digit ytd.

Interesting discussion comparing JOE and the Ackman-chaired HHC from a couple of years ago. You can see the difference in the two stocks since.
http://www.tilsonfunds.com/pdf/A Tale of Two Stocks-Kiplinger's-8-11.pdf

The beginning of the end? That's what it looks like to me.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/07/us-sears-holdings-reit-idUSKBN0IR13B20141107
Up to 300 stores to be sold. If they want to make it an online presence, they still have to change the whole model of what Sears is.

Sears is selling the stores to the REIT and leasing them back. So, effectively, Sears is the tenant of the REIT in those cases. It's sort of what Ackman wanted Target to do several years ago, but Target wasn't having it.
If Sears does this REIT, "While the REIT move would raise money, it also would bring additional expenses. McGinley estimates that the company would pay about $150 million in mall rents if it goes through with the plan. It’s one additional burden on a company that’s burning over $1.5 billion in free cash flow,” he said. “This places Sears as a retailer in a more precarious predicament.”"
They've sold a number of the best locations already, including the most profitable in the chain to General Growth. (http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303643304579109023202738550)
"Investors have speculated ever since that part of the attraction for Mr. Lampert was the underlying value of Sears's real estate. Yet, only a quarter of Sears mall stores are in the best centers, with the rest in average and even subpar malls, according to Green Street Advisors, a real estate research firm."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-07/sears-considers-sale-and-leaseback-deal-to-strengthen-finances.html
"Not all of Sears’s space is in prime locations, though. About 27 percent of the company’s square footage lies in what CoStar Portfolio Strategy calls “weak local trade area demographics.” That means households in the surrounding neighborhood aren’t big spenders.
An additional 23 percent of Sears’s space is in “questionable” locations, with somewhat better buying power, according to Suzanne Mulvee, CoStar’s director of research in Boston."
If they are leasing back the stores, it's effectively providing a liquidity boost in the near-term. Why are they not just getting rid of this valuable real estate outright? You have this case that Simon Properties has X amount of space and Sears also has a huge amount of retail space, but that doesn't mean that the quality of the real estate is at all similar.
There's value there, but I think the relative silence in terms of people interested in buying this space from Sears over the years speaks volumes as to the value of it.
There's a ton of net lease REITs in existence. No one wanted to take this on? I do think it will be interesting to see the reaction to the Sears REIT from the standpoint of showing what the market thinks of the value. If some other REIT took this on, that's one thing, but this will be a purely Sears REIT and will be judged as such when it starts trading.
Meanwhile, you effectively play a game of Jenga with the core business, taking out parts and pieces and weakening what's left of the core. All of this discussion about Sears creating a member-centric retail operation is incredibly unrealistic from the standpoint of, you have a CEO who has neglected the retail operations for years and suddenly he goes, "Lets be Costco, only without the membership fees or value proposition." I've said previously, either Lampert is not being honest (this was never about a turnaround of the retail, and Berkowitz has said as much in an interview) or he really does think a turnaround of the business is possible and in that case, I think that's almost laughable.
Meanwhile, he's dragged out his time wrecking value at Sears to what, almost a decade now? He has a legacy as a skilled and intelligent investor. He's been a complete disaster as a retailer and as an investor, he's attempted to turn Sears - still a very large company - into his own personal financial Frankenstein experiment. Take a classic American brand and add the worst aspects of financial engineering, take nearly a decade and wind up with enormous losses and a more irrelevant brand than ever. Just take the thing private already.

We should also add here that Eddie Lampert has his own hedge fund. ESL Investments. SHLD is over 46% of the funds portfolio.
http://www.insidermonkey.com/hedge-fund/esl+investments/14

How much in the way of redemptions has Lampert seen due to Sears? Probably lots.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/investors-pull-back-from-lamperts-fund-2/?_r=0

FYI: LIKE millions of retirees who assumed their companies had taken care of them, Ronald Tussey never thought that his retirement plan might be flawed. He trusted his company so much he kept his money in his 401(k) long after he left.
Having worked as an engineer for 37 years, ultimately at ABB Inc., where he retired 11 years ago, Mr. Tussey said he never paid much attention to the fees in his retirement plan and “assumed the company was looking out for my best interests.”
But after seeing a television program on the negative impact that 401(k) expenses can have on retirement savings, he hired a lawyer, who filed a class-action lawsuit in 2006 against ABB and plan administrators.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/08/your-money/hidden-costs-of-401-k-plans.html?ref=your-money&_r=0

Hi Old_Joe,
In answer to your question ... Why SGGDX?
For starters ... Here are three.
1) It is about 80% invested in the miners and about 20% the metal. In reviewing rono's comments I took that rono's outlook was the nearterm better action would be in the miners more so than the metal. For sure, rono knows more about the metals than I do and has over the years posted his thinking. His thinking seems to right more times than not.
2) This is a M* five star rated fund and one I have watched over the years and just yesterday put it back on my watch list after reviewing and studying other funds in this category. Centeral Fund of Canada (CEF) is another good fund that I have own in the past. I still might buy some of it too and let SGGDX be my play on the miners and let CEF be my play on the metals (gold & silver).
3) I felt that the metals and miners are/were presently very oversold and it seems I was right as over the past two days alone this fund is up about 8%. Wish I'd got to it last week.
It will be interesting to see where this goes next week as it seems others might have been thinking along these lines too.
Old_Skeet

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-sears-is-still-a-sell-2014-11-07?link=MW_home_latest_news
Creation of a REIT would amount to “just buying them some more time,” said Ken Perkins, president of Retail Metrics. “Almost all of what they have done over the past several years is financial engineering and not addressing the core business problems.”
EXACTLY. People complained about IBM's financial engineering - what Eddie Lampert has done to Sears over the last several years is the biggest example of the worst aspects of financial engineering.

Your kidding right? My wife could beat these returns! with no help from me and her own picks from 5 min.looking over Funds!
Their Real Record during the best (5 yr) market in the last century:
Harvard’s endowment posted annual average gains of 1.7 percent in the five years ended June 30, 2013, according to data compiled by Charles Skorina & Co. That compares with annual returns of 6.8 percent at Columbia University, 5.4 percent at University of Pennsylvania and 3.3 percent at Yale University.

7/1/2008 to 6/30/2013 was hardly the "best five year market" in the last century. The investment in VTSMX from 7/1/2008 - 6/30/2013 turned $10,000 into $14,254.52, an annual return of 7.3%, well below the average yearly return of 11.5% for the S&P 500 from 1928-2013.
That period did, however, coincide with the worst sustained market downturn in over 70 years. and turned $10,000 into $5381.58 on 3/6/2009. (The same investment in VWELX turned $10,000 into an almost identical $14,169.26, an annual return of 7.1%, and only lost 30.5% on 3/6/09.)
Harvard lost ~27% in the downturn. Yale lost 24.6%. As Scott pointed out, endowments that size do not act like individual's portfolios and shouldn't be judged the same way. At the very least, one has to consider that money is constantly being distributed to fund massive research institutions. That David Swenson somehow returned slightly less than the market over the period, with less volatility than the most recognizable 60/40 portfolio in the world, is remarkable.

Not so sure that Craftsman tools are still made here, Ted. Seems to me that I've heard or read otherwise. But they sure as hell were made well, years ago. I've still got quite a few that I bought over 50 years ago.

Nice going Ol Skeet--- I do recall some discussion about falling knives a few weeks back. Don't know if it was related to the near 10% drop in the S&P. Might have been.
But it might have had more to do with my decision to buy into the NR/commodity areas when they were falling. Actually, despite the hysterical media coverage, the two funds (QRAAX & PRNEX) have held up pretty well over the past 3 or 4 weeks since I bought in - although both are showing big losses YTD. PRNEX was actually up .90% yesterday - far better than anything else that I own or track. I view both as long term hedges against a frothy equity market. So if the 2 funds do reasonably well over the next 3-5 years, I don't particularly care about shorter term performance.
Nice bounce for gold today. Up $28 last check. Energy sector showing strength in recent days - especially nat gas and heating oil due to some pretty extreme weather. Recall seeing 37 and snow flurries in Atlanta few days back.
Apologies to Ol Skeet. My spellchecker preferred Ol Skirt - I've now corrected it. :)

Your kidding right? My wife could beat these returns! with no help from me and her own picks from 5 min.looking over Funds!
Their Real Record during the best (5 yr) market in the last century:
Harvard’s endowment posted annual average gains of 1.7 percent in the five years ended June 30, 2013, according to data compiled by Charles Skorina & Co. That compares with annual returns of 6.8 percent at Columbia University, 5.4 percent at University of Pennsylvania and 3.3 percent at Yale University.
.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-18/harvard-money-managers-exit-on-subpar-private-equity-bets.html

Certainly interesting to watch...

But a lot of altitude to make up given its decline the last 5 years...

Ira shared this MFWire story with me this morning and suggested I might pass word along. Barron's hired a new guy to succeed Brendan Conway at their funds blog.

This WSJ Alum Will Focus On Funds, and ETFs
Reported by Neil Anderson, Managing Editor
Fundsters, there's a new voice at Barron's you should be paying attention to.
MFWire has learned that Chris Dieterich recently joined the publication as a staff writer and blogger focused on funds, especially ETFs. He now leads both the realtime "Focus on Funds" blog and the weekly "ETF Focus" column.
...
Dieterich ... he hails from Regis University and the University of Missouri-Columbia. He joined Barron's sibling Dow Jones Newswires four years ago, before moving to the Wall Street Journal [where he] served as a markets reporter, focusing on stocks and ETFs.

I welcome him to the neighborhood and wish him well. I worry, a bit, about the term "realtime" (sic) in the story since it suggests that he, like so many others, is locked into the high output/low reflection model where the need for "six new posts by the market's close" drives the job.
David

FYI: Most Japan open-end and closed-end funds and ETFs that have been around 15 years have lagged the S&P 500 in that period, and all lag year to date.
A $10,000 investment in Japan-invested open-end mutual funds on Sept. 30, 1999, would have grown to $16,504 by Oct. 4 this year, according to Morningstar.
Regards,
Ted
http://license.icopyright.net/user/viewFreeUse.act?fuid=MTg2MzQ5MjQ=
Enlarged Craphic: http://news.investors.com/photopopup.aspx?path=WEBlv1106_1K.jpg&docId=725220&xmpSource=&width=1000&height=1047&caption=&id=725221

:) Yes, you guys must be using the Institutional share-class ticker. I'm glad I'm in DLFNX. Over two years, now.
http://quotes.morningstar.com/fund/f?t=DLFNX&region=USA

@Andy, I think DBLTX has a slightly better downside protection (3 years) than DBLFX according to M*.
http://performance.morningstar.com/fund/ratings-risk.action?t=DBLFX&region=usa&culture=en-US

FYI: Over the years I’ve dished out lots of investment advice, and I believe I’ve gotten it right most of the time. Lately, though, I've wondered: What’s the best advice I ever heard?
Regards,
Ted
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-best-investment-advice-ever-2014-06-11/print

Very interesting, Charles. The M* analyst report for GONIX (assuming the details are accurate) has a good description of the strategy.
Basically, it's designed to be 25% net long (120 long, 95 short, but with such a tiny beta that it falls into the M* market neutral category). They do a quant sort on adjusted cash flow and earnings for a universe of 2,000 U.S. stocks, and then, based on the rankings they come up with from doing their preferred math, go long the highest-rated 400+ and short the lowest-rated 400+.
I've never looked into MN funds much before, so have no idea how this approach compares to others, but from a quick view, I'm thinking this one at least bears watching, on the off chance they'll eventually make retail shares available at less than outrageous cost.
GARIX, the long-short fund, goes 60% long using the same methodology, with ~ 400 long and 300 short positions.
I do like this wave of quant and rules-based strategies that have been coming out over the last few years.
Thanks for the reference,
AJ

it's still a regular IPO process with 5% underwriting fee and over-allotment shares (support). It takes around 45 days to get rid of the premium most of the time. under certain market conditions and in several "star" offerings, premium might only increase over and above 5%, but it is indeed a rare occasion.
underwriting fees are paid by investors who get access via financial advisors associated with the underwriting, most notably UBS, MS, BAC.
for a semi-educated investor, the time to buy after the IPO premium has disappeared. it could be due to the price going down or due to exceptional performance of the NAV catching up with the price.

My understanding of the ipo issue with CEFs: There are costs to bring a new closed end fund to the market. Those costs are borne by those who purchase the initial public offering. When I looked into it years ago, those costs averaged approx. 5%. So at the time, most closed end funds, at the ipo prior to the first trading day, were priced roughly 5% above the NAV, due to those costs.