@equalizer, will you be covered through employer group health insurance plan until 65 when Medicare kicks in?
Years ago, mine did only IF I opted for pension, not lump-sum. But plans differ on this.

I’m taking “early” retirement next week at 57, so been thinking about risk/reward. Have coworkers who couldn’t tell you what WSJ means, but had retirement 100% in SPY for 30 plus years. Compared to 70/30 ratio, could mean 8% AR vs 11%. Over 33 years
, could mean at least one million more. Coulda had the brokers yacht and Ferris Bueler’s Ferrari…gonna drink my big Black Cow…
One of the Ferraris From Ferris Bueller's Day Off Just Sold for $396,000 in 2020. Replica 250 GT.

Yikes. UVXY's been really Ultra the last 4 years: -88%, -45%, -88%, -54% ytd.

Vix started year ar 13 and is ending near 14. This ETF is probably one of the worst ETFs ever designed if you want to make money.

Didn't like long bonds. Doesn't think next year will be good (as the last 2 years) or bad for stocks as too many variables like tariffs, immigration etc... maybe 15%. Stay on the short side of the yield curve. I don't remember most of it either even though I just watched it. He pushed his ETF BINC with has a pretty good quality bonds but it's only been around since 5/2023. I compared it to RCTIX and PIMIX, it fits in between them but I like RCTIX better.

So, what are the bond kids thinking??? A .25 rate cut this coming week and then FINI for a length of time due to inflation. Perhaps there is concern with required skillsets for proper restructuring of multiple departments within the U.S. government by questionable managers, that will be forthcoming in a few weeks and retaliation for proposed tariffs. The Ontario, Canada Premiere has issued a 'Ya wanna play to DJT & Co.'. Perhaps there is overall concern with what comes after January 20, 2025.
NOTE:

My intention, at this time; is to present the data for the selected bond sectors, as listed; through the end of the year (2024). This 'end date' will take us through the U.S. elections period, pending actions/legislation dependent upon the election results, pending Federal Reserve actions and market movers trying to 'guess' future directions of the U.S. economy. As important during this period, are any number of global circumstances that may take a path that is not expected; and/or 'new' circumstances. In the 'cooking pot' we currently have the big ingredients of the middle east and also, how much damage Ukraine may inflict upon Russia and the response.

FIRST: NOTHING TO ADD/ALTER regarding 'Never-Never Land'. The pre-DC world shift of January, 2025 remains 'interesting' at this time! We're in a 'Never-Never Land' (events you never imagined) of potential large impacts upon various economic functions emanating from a central government in the coming months and years. What comes next for the investing world of bonds is not yet known or fully understood, except for those have a better guessing system than I. I can only watch and listen a little bit and let the numbers try to bring forth meaningful directions.
W/E December 13 , 2024. Bond NAV's PINCH your nose, avoid the SMELL
--- 'Course, all the bond sectors in the list find their reasons for price movements, and we find most bond sectors HAD THE BIG HEAD SLAP for this week's pricing. The majority of bond sectors were down all day, each day of the week. All durations pricing were down every day of the week. So, depending on where you're 'hanging' your bond market monies, the pricing this week, was NASTY AND DOWN. The MINT etf, to the best of my recall, has maintained a positive price for the year, each and every week; and this remains for this week.
A few numbers for your viewing pleasure.
NEXT:
*** UST yields chart, 6 month - 30 year. This chart is active and will display a 6 month time frame going forward to a future date. Place/hover the mouse pointer anywhere on a line to display the date and yield for that date. The percent to the right side is the percentage change in the yield from the chart beginning date for a particular item. You may also 'right click' on the 126 days at the chart bottom to change a 'time frame' from a drop down menu. Hopefully, the line graph also lets you view the 'yield curve' in a different fashion, for the longer duration issues, at this time. Save the page to your own device for future reference. NOTE: take a peek at the right side of this graph to find the yield swings of the past week, and for the current yields for the last business day.
For the WEEK/YTD, NAV price changes, December 9 - December 13, 2024
***** This week (Friday), FZDXX, MM yield continues to move with Fed funds/repo/SOFR rates; and ended the week at 4.44% yield (Unchanged for the week). Fidelity's MM's continue to maintain decent yields, as is presumed with other vendors similar MM's. Theoretically, a new yield bottom is in place, until the next FED action. SO, one is still obtaining a decent MM yield. MOST MM's found a .00% basis change in yield for the week. MM's yields were unchanged, for the week.................
--- AGG = -1.42% / +2.04% (I-Shares Core bond), a benchmark, (AAA-BBB holdings)
--- MINT = +.07% / +5.68% (PIMCO Enhanced short maturity, AAA-BBB rated)
--- SHY = -.17% / +3.70 % (UST 1-3 yr bills)
--- IEI = -.84% / +2.09% (UST 3-7 yr notes/bonds)
--- IEF = -1.66% / +.36% (UST 7-10 yr bonds)
--- TIP = -.96% / +2.67% (UST Tips, 3-10 yrs duration, some 20+ yr duration)
--- VTIP = -.12% / +4.89% (Vanguard Short-Term Infl-Prot Secs ETF)
--- STPZ = -.25% / +4.53% (UST, short duration TIPs bonds, PIMCO)
--- LTPZ = -3.25% / -2.12% (UST, long duration TIPs bonds, PIMCO)
--- TLT = -4.49% / -5.46% (I Shares 20+ Yr UST Bond
--- EDV = -6.41% / -9.45% (UST Vanguard extended duration bonds)
--- ZROZ = -7.33% / -12.09% (UST., AAA, long duration zero coupon bonds, PIMCO
--- TBT = +9.59% / +20.30% (ProShares UltraShort 20+ Year Treasury (about 23 holdings)
--- TMF = -12.62% / -29.52% (Direxion Daily 20+ Yr Trsy Bull 3X ETF (about a 2x version of EDV etf)
*** Additional important bond sectors, for reference:
--- BAGIX = -1.31% / +2.68% Baird Aggregate Bond Fund (active managed, plain vanilla, high quality bond fund)
--- USFR = +.10% / +5.19% (WisdomTree Floating Rate Treasury)
--- LQD = -1.79% / +2.26% (I Shares IG, corp. bonds)
--- MBB = -1.54% / +1.89% (I-Shares Mortgage Backed Bonds)
--- BKLN = +.14% / +8.10% (Invesco Senior Loan, Corp. rated BB & lower)
--- HYG = -.61% / +8.44 % (I Shares High Yield bonds, proxy ETF)
--- HYD = -1.23%/+4.96% (VanEck HY Muni)
--- MUB = -1.20% /+1.68% (I Shares, National Muni Bond)
--- EMB = -1.47%/+7.15% (I Shares, USD, Emerging Markets Bond)
--- CWB = -.95% / +14.05% (SPDR Bloomberg Convertible Securities)
--- PFF = -1.35% / +8.92% (I Shares, Preferred & Income Securities)
--- FZDXX = 4.44% yield (7 day), Fidelity Premium MM fund
*** FZDXX yield was .11%, April,2022. (For reference to current date)
Comments and corrections, please.
Remain curious,
Catch

msf, here is the key statement from my Original Thread Post regarding CDs that are maturing:
"I am wrestling with renewing at the 4.3% rate, with almost no stress, or jumping back into the more active investing options. Anyone else in a similar situation?
If you are a CD investor, with current CDs that are maturing, I would be interested in your response regarding your personal investing decision, about reinvesting the maturity back into CDs, or shifting to a different kind of investment.

In one sense I'm not in a similar situation. I've been taking advantage of the inverted yield curve we've had for a few years and so I do not have bonds or CDs maturing soon. OTOH, I'm in a similar situation because I have this short term cash that has been giving me better returns but is no longer doing so.
The return to a non-inverted yield curve was due to short term rates dropping faster than long term rates, not because long term rates rose. See M* graph here of curves for 2020 (ZIRP), Sept 2023 (highest, inverted), June 2024 (similar shape with a bit lower yield), and Sept 2024 (flat-ish, 2/3% lower, greater drop at short end)
https://www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/news/255673/how-to-position-your-bond-portfolio-as-short-term-yields-fall.aspx
That piece was written three months ago and M* was suggesting finally going longer (i.e. intermediate as opposed to short). I stayed short - too much uncertainty and now with "promised" tariffs, migrant expulsions (affecting labor costs), etc., rising inflation (and rising interest rates) seem far from improbable. Just the other day I heard that it will be hard to bring down food prices. Quelle surprise.
That Sept. M* piece was written almost exactly at a minimum in 10 year Treasury rates: 3.63% on Sept 16th, currently 4.32%. A purchase of a multi-year CD or Treasury bond in Sept would have locked in a lower rate than one should be able to get now.
https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/TextView?type=daily_treasury_yield_curve&field_tdr_date_value=2024
Cash (1-2 month maturity) is still looking good and I see no reason to gamble before Feb 2025 on the direction of rate movements.
I've given my thoughts before on places to keep cash short term. If you can get into a low cost Treasury MMF (Treas only for high income tax states), they are yielding near or more than prime MMFs (and more after-tax). Those are typically $1M min: SUTXX (4.43% SEC yield, 4.53% APY), FSIXX (4.44% SEC yield, 4.54% APY) w/$1 min at Merrill Edge. Going out a bit longer is RPHIX. Slightly longer still are AAA CLOs like PAAA (pure AAA) and JAAA (smidgen of AAs, longer history).
JAAA acquitted itself respectfully in 2022, dropping 2.33% from Jan 1 before recovering. In comparison, floating rate ETFs like FLRN and FLOT dropped 1.34% and 1.65% respectively. They all were positive for the year, while MINT bottomed out at -2.16% from Jan 1 and lost a percent on the year.

I’ll go out on a limb and predict HSGFX (even with its new name) will continue its 15-year track record of losing money for investors.

On that note, how does one get away with being a permabear in a market that traditionally advances the vast majority of the time?! I'm not sure whether his existence is a greater testimony to his own ineptitude, or to the folly of the people who place their faith in him?! It seems akin to putting your money in a bottle and burying it in the backyard!

It’s amazing that someone of his intelligence could do so poorly over 15 years. I’m a bit of a bear myself. But there are alternatives to going “all-in” on equities. Think long / short funds, hedged equities, high yield & floating rate bonds, convertibles, multi-asset funds. Cash earned little over that period, but with compounding you’d still be quite a bit ahead of HSGFX. I’d think short-term bonds should generate positive returns (in excess of cash) with very minimal downside risk going forward now that rates have risen from abysmal lows.

Japan Govt debt may be 150% of GDP but what counts is how much of it is owned by the Japanese, especially its own central bank.
I thought the following was interesting:
“OTHER VOICES. Jenny JOHNSON, President & CEO of Franklin Templeton. AI hype will come to an end and a period of pessimism will follow. Such up and down cycles are normal for new technologies. Early and fast adopters may not be the eventual leaders. The profitless AI capex has to be digested. Look for AI beneficiaries in enterprise software, data analytics, customer service, finance, healthcare, collaborative work, picks and shovels (chipmakers, cloud hosts, data centers).”
How did Franklin growth or value funds perform during 2023 and 2024, the current AI boom period. Just checking if her comments were colored by the performance of her funds.
I used to think business leaders are intellectually honest (I know I was naive). The latest one that killed my optimism about that breed is Howard Lutnick. He had his strategists parade for two years telling us how the economy is going to be bad and that the stock market was about to crash / correct. It turned out he was a Trump bum licker and massively politically biased. I feel sorry for all the opportunity cost he caused for investors who listened to him and his minions who of course will benefit either way.

If you ever felt Howard Lutnick’s qualifications were deficient to become Commerce Sec, you were missing this piece of info -
https://www.ft.com/content/73ef7b34-3969-4466-993e-0d1d24ef434a

I just got done grading my 25 graduate capstone papers, coincidentally .... ergo, scotch awaits!
(And good call on infrastructure investing; it's been a large part of my portfolio for years.)

@Crash, no kidding!

Whenever and wherever I can do it, I use fiction. After attempting, several years ago, to log-into Facebook from Canada, I was locked out--- presumably because I did it from Canada. Nothing else had changed. So, I created a new profile. But the Zuck's worthless, stinking, putrid bots saw and connected the dots.You're allowed only one profile.
The solution? An ENTIRELY fictional profile and account. Name = Stick Merflotchky. And he lives in Beirut. I simply notified my contacts and gradually got them onboard. And the ZUCK doesn't seem to mind at all. So much for ACTUAL security. Jayzuz.

I’ve been forgetting who I am ever since I turned 75. Maybe I’ll take a look.
Thanks for the heads-up Yogi. I don’t post or read financial discussion boards anywhere else. Something similar happened at Amazon years ago where real names became attached to the product reviews. By going into profile settings it was possible to re-set things and revert back to the user names.

Bump up.
Any takers here for KSS, currently priced at $14 and yielding 14% dividend?

90% payout ratio and unsteady track of divs in recent years .... not for me.

Deep value investor is a different breed, most of us here do not belong to. With those metrics it could be attractive if it had a Moat but in the space it is in and high interest rates, it is probably sleep walking into a graveyard.
If you guys remember, a couple of years ago, there was a take private offer at $55 a KSS share and the Board thumbed its nose at the bidder. There are a lot of Boards in the US that belong in North Korea.

I don't recall that, just offering a quick-take on the question. (I don't play in the retail space beyond consumer staples, sorry)

Bump up.
Any takers here for KSS, currently priced at $14 and yielding 14% dividend?

90% payout ratio and unsteady track of divs in recent years .... not for me.

Deep value investor is a different breed, most of us here do not belong to. With those metrics it could be attractive if it had a Moat but in the space it is in and high interest rates, it is probably sleep walking into a graveyard.
If you guys remember, a couple of years ago, there was a take private offer at $55 a KSS share and the Board thumbed its nose at the bidder. There are a lot of Boards in the US that belong in North Korea.

Bump up.
Any takers here for KSS, currently priced at $14 and yielding 14% dividend?

90% payout ratio and unsteady track of divs in recent years .... not for me.

I have been questioning M* stock price for a while based on its business practices (or the lack thereof) but the faithful here have been making excuses for M* (just as they did for years for Vanguard). So, I suspect M* popularity will not be dented by the latest incident.
Thanks for the heads up though.

While neither CVS or Walgreens is doing a good job, the people in our CVS here are a lot friendlier and functional.
Glad my pharmacist friend sold out to one of them years ago

Interesting re Israeli AI firm. I guess the IDF wasn't using them Oct 7th?
I am always bemused bu the multiple attempts over the years to replace MDs and their diagnoses.
AI may very well be able to read X rays and EKGs better than humans, but if I had a dime for every time "something" about they way a patient looked or the tome of their voice prompted me to ask the question that made the diagnosis I would be very rich.
Patients want human beings taking care of them, not a machine. AI may eventually stop disasters with poorly trained RNNPs ( like the one after an online course and 500 hours of preceptor-ship sent a patient with a blood sugar of 600 home to die per Bloomberg's report) but that will not solve the issues in medicine today- too much corporate profit.
Will only make them worse

@FD1000 - everything you say makes sense, but the sheer volume of data that is capable of being managed by companies (of all sorts) is increasing exponentially. And, I have to imagine that in short order the types of data that do much of the heavy lifting in forecasting and prediction (i.e., account for 98% of the variance) will be settled upon. So, gaining access to that last 1.5-2% isn't going to move the needle much for many investors. Or maybe imperfect data can be overcome with a super-rich model (as Bayesian maven Gelman says "Big Data Need Big Model").
Now, I guess the counterpoint would be that if JPM, DE Shaw, GS, and kindred competitors spend gazillions of dollars shaving 1/1000000th of a nanosecond off a trade execution time, they might find a way to convert that 1.5% information edge into some real money. I don't know.
I guess I can just see a point where there are fewer meaningful asymmetries to leverage. I think Charly Munger or Tweedy Browne (or etc.) said at one point that you used to have pour through pages of out of date trade journals to get a sense of companies' profitabilities and obligations, but now that can be sifted through readily by computers and databases.
So, again, while I was never all-in on indexing, I'm guessing that this spells the end for large chunks of the biz, with only a few super brains-in-beakers types of firms like Shaw or Guggenheim or etc. I don't see how First Eagle or Harris Associates or Wellington or FPA or Osterweis or etc. last another five years.

The theory is that if AI figures out that NFLX is a great company, it will generate buys for many people.
Since the stock market movements are random, AI will not guess them properly.
As someone who worked in IT over 35 years. We used to say garbage in, garbage out. That means you got to feed it the right data.
What is the right data? That is what everybody looks for. Companies with the best analysts are still looking for it.
Final found it and why it's mostly unknown. (https://blog.grainstonelee.com/insight/who-is-final-israel)

I must confess my first reaction when that UNH insurance CEO was killed last week was recalling the trauma that company had inflicted on me 20 years ago and feeling some of sense of justice.
In hind sight, I should have bought that company stock 20 years ago (instead of being resentful of their actions) because anyone that has figured out to operate like them was going to make a lot of money and some of those crumbs are going to accrue to the shareholders.
Over the next few years, we should talk about all the companies that screw consumers and the public with impunity so we can figure out which companies to invest in. And there will be plenty.
As to Nvidia, I live a few minutes from that company, I know how the company operates. They all are playing the "catch me if you can" game. Meta is a gangster in that respect.