Ever try constructing your own “fund of funds”? hank, I have been doing something similar since 2000.
I select the best risk/reward up to 5 funds within top 1-2 categories for my criteria and keep changing. Then, every fund must be in the top 20-30%. Risk control is a lot more important to me.
The more money I have and the best I got, I started using only 2-3 funds.
Stocks: 1995-2000 + after 2010 = mostly LC tilting growth. 2000-2010=Value, SC, International.
Bonds: Preparing for retirement, PIMIX was my first bond fund. I started investing in it in 2010 and it grew to over 50% until I sold it in 01/2018.
Basically, I modeled it after basketball, a game that I played over 4 decades. As a coach, you want to go to the playoffs every year. Winning isn't a guarantee. Why would someone hold value when growth is so much better for many years?
You play your best 5 players every time. Superstars play more, and you give them more rope. A superstar isn't guaranteed. You want to play your best 5 at any moment. You can't have a bad player on the court.
All my funds must perform well within their category. Reliability is worth a lot. I don't play with emotion. A bad fund must be replaced. It gets very easy over the years.
I never diversified since the first day I started investing. Diversification = I must have LC,SC,value,growth,international and others. If US LC does well, it's the easiest to make money. If it doesn't, you diversify more.
What's the catch? when and how to replace funds. That takes discipline and a lot of experience. You can't learn swimming by reading a book. My goals have changed too and that changed my trading too.
Exceptions exist: every several years you find funds/managers that beat the odds. Think PRWCX,PIMIX for many years; I held SGIIX,FAIRX,OAKBX for 8+ years during 2000-10. Some managers do great in specific markets.
Bloomberg Real Yield 21 feb, 2025.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2025-02-21/bloomberg-real-yield-02-21-2025-videoconsumer sentiment down, inflation fears rising. Expectations for sticky inflation are highest in 30
years...Direction trend in the yield of the 10-Year is rather uncertain... Friday: 4.4546%.
brian rheling, wells: expecting higher rates. Inflation a bit higher by the end of 2025. Estimate 10-year at 4.75 by year-end.... jonathan duensing, amundi usa: assuming 2 percent corporate growth, 4.5 percent on the 10-year seems reasonable.... reduced immigration will reduce growth and consumption. Gotta see what happens legislatively also re: spending reductions. (My insertion: And what about all the recent Musk related firings?). Uncertainty lately flowing out of Washington. People want to see some reliable policy decisions and how they will affect us and trading partners.
rehling: Markets have digested the higher level of uncertainty pretty well. Even so, there will be a fair amount of volatility. Markets already becoming desensitized to the extreme rhetoric from the gummint recently.
Europe: Record quick start to the year, getting to 500B euros of issuance. Tops the record set just last year...USA I.G. issuance last week of $52B... Treasury issuance: 20-year: 4.83% and 30-year TIPS: 2.403%. (Why is anyone putting money
there?)
Winnie Cisar on Junk: there is optimism in that market that is not justified. So, too many factors to the potential downside are being ignored. Ashley Allen generally agrees. Even so, yields do look attractive. True of both I.G. and Junk. ... What to avoid: Cisar: stay away from stuff that may take a hit from surprise policy changes, shifting global macro trends. Basic Materials, retail. ... Allen: investors are yield-hungry. Just be careful, cautious.
BRK - Buffett's Annual Letter Buffett's Annual Letter
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2024ltr.pdfFrom Annual Report (150 pages),
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2024ar/2024ar.pdfCash & cash-equivalents $334.201 billion (28.96%)
Stock portfolio $271.588 billion (23.54%)
Insurance assets $315.379 billion (27.33%)
Railroad, utilities, energy assets $232.713 billion (20.17%)
TOTAL ASSETS $1,153.881 billion (100%)
Insurance float is $171 billion - that's the premium pool from insurance written & outstanding that will cover future claims over many
years.
"Cash" is high, but the above data provide the overall picture of BRK assets.
Duplicate threads running in “Off Topic & “Other Investing”? Some members, including myself in the past, have sought to heighten awareness of important threads in “Off Topic” by posting a separate thread in “Other Investing” containing a link to the
off topic thread. It’s well meaning and possibly unavoidable if the topic has both
”off topic” and ”other investing” implications. However, sometimes this leads to two duplicate threads running concurrently with some members posting to the OT thread and others posting to the
investing thread.
The situation can get confusing and even led to some “hard feelings” being misdirected at one board member by another recently (
thread). The more important facet of all this is that some readers are viewing only 50% of the ongoing discussion. (Readers in OT may not be viewing comments made in the investing section. Readers in
Other Investing may not be reading the associated comments posted in
OT.)
Since the intent of these second (ancillary) threads would seem to be to call attention to a thread in OT, is there some way posters could be blocked from posting comments under the ancillary thread and directed instead to the original thread in OT? Presumably, they would click on to the attached link, be directed to the OP and then post their comments in the OT section. Not to criticize anyone. Just seeking to minimize confusion and avoid the problems noted.
M* Portfolio not updating @msf's mention of the Plato/Socrates Allegory of the Cave in regard to reality versus illusion reminds me of reading Plato fifty
years ago. Those of us who read that stuff will remember that what most of us call reality was regarded as illusion by Plato, and according to Plato, Socrates. Somewhere there is a true ideal that only has reflections in our world. Which is probably why we have the old quip about whether a table is a table.
I'm not sure how that ties into reporting NAV's except to say that the prisoners in the cave probably had a better grasp of reality than good old Plato, bless his heart.
I better stop now before I start quoting Nietzche or going on about Gnosticism. Time to get to the local fitness center.
Re-investing RMDs If VTCLX floats your boat, there are a couple of ETFs tracking the R1K. VONE (Vanguard) and IWB (iShares). VTCLX also tracks the R1K though more loosely for better tax efficiency.
The ETFs have slightly higher tax cost ratios than VTCLX (0.41% and 0.40% respectively vs. 0.31%). Over the past 1 and 3
years they have slightly outperformed VTCLX pre-tax (with Vanguard's ETF being the best), though VTCLX has done slightly better over five
years.
Here's
Portfolio Visualizer's comparison of these funds over 10
years.
VTCLX has 65% in unrealized gains while the ETFs have lower exposure (likely due to their ETF structure): 17% for IWB and 35% for VONE.
Again, when it comes to tracking market cap weighted indexes, you can often find "regular" funds that are comparable to ones focused on tax efficiency. This tool may help finding comparable ETFs:
https://etfdb.com/tool/mutual-fund-to-etf/
Re-investing RMDs
Buy Sell Why: ad infinitum. My parents have been in QLENX for the last 4 years or so and have been happy with the yield and appreciation. As Mark said, the dang fund just keeps marching.
★ The most important economic overview that I have read in many years ★ msf: His point, as I take it, is that the numbers, though accurate are misunderstood. So things are worse than people get from the numbers reading them simplistically. True enough. But then he goes and does the same thing by simplistically presenting some reasons why the numbers don't say what people think they say.
***************
Actually, I understood him to say that the tools and metrics do measure what they are supposed to measure, but it's the wrong stuff. It offers a cloudy picture of what it is we want to know: unemployment, inflation. I did not take away a message that the monthly numbers are misunderstood; rather, the wrong tools are being employed.
In a single magazine (online or not) article, not necessarily aimed at the number-crunching wonks, I'd be willing to say that a very particular and in depth presentation would have been out of place. He made his case. He asserted that the tools he and his team created offer a more accurately focused picture of true life. Too early for me to disagree. If he would make available a follow-up which exposes his new statistical method to the light of day, then we could agree or disagree about that. For a million years, I have known that the current metrics are screwy: just simply not presenting a real-life snapshot that corresponds to Reality very well.
He's illuminating and expressing a thing that we all take for granted. Every month, people and the Markets react to the published numbers, but the numbers --- every time--- deliver a "head-fake." As I said above, I'll bet he and his team prefer to keep their method proprietary. We'll see. I'm with OJ: this business needs to be examined and acknowledged, rather than assumed, again and again.
★ The most important economic overview that I have read in many years ★ Its funny what we consider "employment" and what we consider important "statistics".
I stopped my "full time career employment" at age 51. I spent the next 7 years caring for my elderly mom. I went from a well paying 8 hour job to a non-paying 24 hour job. Since this new job paid nothing and provided no resources it required many long nights of research to identify resources and funds for my mom's care. Over these eight years, I managed both my mom's diminishing health and her dwindling net worth.
Most of my other seven siblings were too busy with their employed lives to help much when it came to this non-paying family care position. As alone as I was, I am not the only one who has taken on this type of non-paying work.
From young Moms and Dads who stay at home to care for their children to middle aged adults taking care of their elderly parents, many working age Americans choose to work outside of the workforce, often for their entire working life.
My mom raised 8 Kids; never took a day off in her life, but also never had an "employment record". When my dad passed, at age 54, she received nothing more than a survivor's benefit. At age 88, adjusted for inflation, her survivor benefit was a meager $800/month.
For me, working until 65 would have made a huge difference in my retirement savings, but I am not sure I could have lived with that decision. I chose to care for my mom because she chose to care for the eight of us.
These articles focus on workplace employment statistics, yet ignore the very important non-paying and non-workplace work many of us chose to do for our loved ones and how these hard choices impact the workplace.
★ The most important economic overview that I have read in many years ★ Kyrie Irving has been a Vegan since 2017 and playing pro Basketball at All Star level.
I knew some vegetarian families that for 1000s of years only ever had milk and yogurt for animal products.
I was a vegetarian for more than 40% of the years of my life. After that I ate everything available, including snakes. Now I am down to fish and egg whites. Though no eggs for the last one month because of shortage and I do not miss them. There are other vegetarians in this forum.
I can not imagine there is a standard diet that is a fit for every individual.