Dug this Full Story up this morning while working on my 2021 budget numbers.
Reconciling the end-of-year numbers (cash on hand vs remaining liabilities) is always a nightmare. But after doing all the number crunching, I’m ending 2020 with a $6 (six-dollar) surplus. Yikes! Pretty darn lucky. It’s usually off by more. :)
25 or more years ago I learned how to budget-out for a year in advance. Began keeping written records on 8 X 11” sheets of loose-leaf paper and have been true to the methodology. A cover-page tabulates the year’s projected income from various sources along with the year’s budgeted expenses.. These need to balance. Much is on auto-pilot. But about a dozen separate pages are used for tracking the major anticipated outlays (travel, home repair, new computers, etc.). A contingency fund is also built-in for unanticipated expenses. Without getting too specific, the approach builds in a generous sum of “pocket money” every month so that there’s no need to record smaller purchases like motor fuel, groceries, incidentals.
A written approach like this has to be considered a dianosaur by today’s standards. But “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Curious what approaches others use (including the “Hail Mary” plan) in budgeting expenses?

Related News...time to invest? I'm thinking not just yet, though if Exxon maintain it's dividend payment these energy stocks may become the place investors "reach for yield" (9%-ish right now).
Exxon Faces Historic Write down After Energy Markets Implode

Hi @BenWP
We played the MM game for about 1 year in the mid-80's. At the time, NY state had usury law limits of 12% for a personal loan/line of credit. We processed such a loan and invested the money in a MM account in Michigan. We didn't make a pile of money, but did make "free" money from the borrow rate and investment rate difference.......even after taxes on the income.
After this time frame, more or less; is also when credit card companies moved their operations to the Dakota's, etc. states where the charge/fee rates were not so restricted.
Side note: gonna be in your town today. Wishing circumstances (Covid) were different for a coffee visit, too.
Take care of you and yours,
Catch

@hank: I seem to recall in the mid-80's that 14-15% interest rates on savings were offered at local Ann Arbor banks. I know we took advantage of them. OTOH, mortgage rates soared to 20+%, so who came out ahead in the Volker era?

@wxman123: can you point to any period in the history of our planet during which "...cars, planes, or electricity..." were present and when there was no rise in the temperature of the earth?

Low interest rates are an unmitigated disaster for retirees. It is indeed causing a reach for yield that will probably not end well. I think like all cycles this will change, probably when few are looking. Now would be a good time. Here's to hoping for a 10 year above 1%.

We know as a scientific fact that the temperature of the earth has changed drastically in both directions before humans had any impact at all. Since the 1800s the temperature of the earth has risen about 2 degrees. Even assuming that all of that increase was driven by humans, by no means an absolute fact, what is the supposed indisputable rationale for moving heaven and earth to make sure we don't have further fractional increases over decades when we can't control natural processes that we know have affected climate through the centuries, and will continue to do so? Easy to slam fossil fuel but your lives would be entirely different and more difficult without them. Hard to imagine no cars, planes or electricity, but to hear many today it would be worth it to improve the lives of sea otters, not that I have anything against sea otters.

As of 11/30/2020, my "Retirement Portfolio" has total value of $1,113,533, and a YTD total return of 11.35%:
ARBIX----- $215,747----- 19.4%
FGDFX------ 122,431----- 11.0
PIMIX------- 217,673----- 19.5
TSIIX------- 222,628----- 20.0
VLAIX------ 335,054------ 30.1
TOTAL-- $1,113,533---- 100.0%
Fred

+2.
Valuations, PE, PE10, inverted yield, the economy, deficit, "experts" predictions and even earnings do not have a high correlation to what stocks may do for months and sometimes years to come.

FEXPX started out in 1994 as Fidelity Export Fund, focused on companies deriving at least 10% of their revenue from exported goods and services. Aside from driving the fund toward larger companies, I'm not sure what effect this constraint had. Apparently too much, as in 1997, Fidelity broadened its charter to include multinationals.
I haven't followed the fund for a long time, but it seems to have evolved into another me-too LCV. In 2018, its top 10 holdings (31%) were all value (9 companies) or blend (one company), in 2019 its top 10 holdings (47%) were all value (9 companies) or blend (one company). Same for its top 10 holdings (51%) in early 2020.
Pay no attention to the fact that its current portfolio looks like a conventional LCG fund. The fund changed managers on July 1, likely to serve as a caretaker and migrate the portfolio into growth. The merger into FFIDX, a large cap growth fund, doesn't seem fair to FEXPX's investors. Fidelity still lists FEXPX as a Fidelity Pick, LCV.
FDFFX was originally marketed in 1983 as Fidelity Freedom Fund, a go-anywhere fund (like Magellan) designed specifically for tax-sheltered investments. Upon checking, I see that for a couple of months in late 1982 it was even called Fidelity Tax-Qualified Equity Fund before it was offered to the public. In this tax sense it was somewhat like MQIFX. It seems to have come full circle, now being merged into FMAGX.

https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2020/11/30/fidelity-moves-to-merge-3-funds-as-assets-hit-3-5t/
Funds affected:
Fidelity Independence Fund
Fidelity Export and Multinational Fund
Fidelity Emerging Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA) Fund

PRGTX - T Rowe Price Global Technology, It was closed in 2017, it reopened this year.

Notes from the interview:
On the equity side... trading the gains in QQQ (Thank Q, Thank Q, Thank Q) into under valued allocations of Small Caps, Emerging Markets, and commodities.
On the Bond side... no longer a hedge for equity risk. 10 year treasury is at 0.7% . A 60/40 portfolio may successfully return 1- 3% over the next 10 years (Grantham has felt this way for the last 10 years). Retirees don't want a potential 50% equity side draw down.
Gold and commodities have upside potential of 10-12 % increase due to inflation pressure as a result of a secular weak dollar and price increases in resources (industrial output).
Be Bullish
- China Stocks & Asia Satellite Countries
- US Small Cap
- Commodities
- A weak dollar makes the rest of the world's markets strong with more stimulus on the way which may also be good for silver and gold.
- A Global approach to equities exposure might look like (25% US / 75% Foreign)

Stock valuations are at an all time high while bonds are at an all time low...where do we go from here and how will today's valuations impact your portfolio allocations going forward.
The Portfolio Puzzle of Our Lifetime

Koch Industries spends tons of money to buy the minds of people like wxman123. Obviously, successfully.

@wxman123

Climate change is real. Causation debatable

Follows the Fox News rationalization perfectly. For decades Fox and by proxy the fossil fuel industry, the views of which Fox follows to the letter, publicly denied climate change was happening even though internally the industry's own scientists knew otherwise. Now that the evidence the change is happening is irrefutable they try a different tactic of obfuscation. "We don't know the cause," except the evidence for that is irrefutable too to any climate scientist who isn't a paid industry shill or a nut. The cause is us, and curbing emissions matters.

I'd stick with ARKW and ARKG.

Sorry, wxman, but as a retired and somewhat conservative investor, ARKW's standard deviation of 29 and ARKG's of 36 are not exactly in my comfort zone. But, thanks anyway.
Good luck,
Fred

I'd at least hold off awhile with this new fund. It's not clear how it is managed and ISTM you are comparing its performance with the wrong benchmark.
Fidelity's prospectuses are typically vague, but this one more than usual. This is a fund of funds, but the prospectus doesn't make clear who is responsible for the asset allocations or even say anything about how they're done. I'll contrast it with the prospectus for FMRHX, another Fidelity fund of actively managed funds.
Investment strategies.
FMRHX: "The Adviser, under normal market conditions, will use an active asset allocation strategy to increase or decrease asset class exposures relative to the neutral asset allocations [previously specified] by up to 10%..."
FGDFX: silent. The only info I could find was in the SAI, where it says that "The fund may not purchase the securities of any issuer if, as a result, more than 25% of the fund's total assets would be invested in the securities of companies whose principal business activities are in the same industry." This doesn't really help understand the allocation among the underlying funds.
Investment Risks. Similar verbiage for both funds: "The fund is subject to risks resulting from the Adviser's asset allocation decisions." What decisions? By whom?
That gets us to the managers who are supposedly responsible for the asset allocation. It looks like Fidelity just threw the same eight managers at all the disruptor funds. Completely opaque as to who is steering which ship.
Is the ship being steered at all, or is it on autopilot? I looked at the latest monthly holding filing. That's a legal document, so it has to tell you what the fund is holding directly. That's different from Fidelity's sheet listing the securities it holds indirectly via the underlying funds.
The number of shares of the underlying funds are very similar. Given that the fund with the lowest value has the highest number of shares and so on down, the figures suggest that Fidelity is simply shooting for an even allocation (20%/fund) and periodically rebalancing. No asset allocation management, at least so far. This is a reason to wait - to see whether the fund really is on autopilot, or if it will change once it has more AUM.
As to the underlying holdings... Aside from the finance fund which is off in its own world, there's significant overlap among the underlying funds. Disregarding MasterCard (MA) and Capital One (COF) (which are in the finance fund), all of the other holdings in the top 15 are held by 2-3 of the underlying funds. Not unexpected, but it does call into question how much diversification you're getting.
Which brings us to the classification of this fund. I suspect M* classified it as LC Blend because it has to put new funds somewhere, and Fidelity didn't give any indication of how it would do asset allocation.
The underlying technology fund is 75% LCG. Communications is 53% LCG. Automation is 46% LCG. Medicine is slightly more LC blend (33%) than LCG (26%), but when you add in its MCG (23%) and SCG (4%), it's still a majority growth fund. Only Finance isn't a growth fund. But it's not the value fund one might expect, with only 22% invested in value, less than the 30% it has in growth stocks.
The fund as a whole is 45% LCG. Remember this is with a fairly neutral mix (finance currently constitutes 19.6% of the portfolio). So it seems fair to consider this a LCG fund, and those are the funds one might compare this with. Alternatively, one might compare it with some LCG global funds. This fund is 70/30 domestic/foreign. About 40% of the funds I could find with roughly this mix are world large stock (per M*).

BST or BSTZ or other CEFs might work as well. Also keep an eye on mutual fund expenses (loads, 12(b)-1s, annual expense ratios) ... not sure some of those listed are worth what they charge, even if they look kind of interesting.

Thanks @bee I’m locked-out of this one as I read Bloomberg several times daily (for market data) and it’s all too easy to exceed their cap on free access to stories. But, it’s an intriguing question nonetheless. Sure I remember them.
In around 1975-80 with double-digest inflation soaring and bank rates to savers paltry, average savers learned they could get extraordinarily high rates of return with MM funds. My first was from Deleware Investments - which no longer exists. 15-20% interest rates on short term savings in theses vehicles were prevalent and came with the “promise” (vs “guarantee”) of safety due to their $1 NAV. I even opened an account in one for my aging parents and gifted it to them. But, being children of the Great Depression, they quickly cashed it out and deposited the $$ in a local bank savings account - not trusting anyone from “out of town” to safeguard their money. (I could be wrong on this point ... but I think back than there were limits / controls set by government on the rates banks could pay savers.)
Low prevailing rates today plus tighter restrictions on how they invest have pretty much wrecked these once popular savings vehicles. There are repercussions still to be fully realized IMHO.
- Investors today are “reaching for yield” through less secure and more exotic cash substitutes.
- Investors are taking greater risks than they otherwise would in the equity arena.
- This has helped fuel a bubble in certain asset classes. Which ones is a matter of conjecture depending greatly on whom you ask and what their time horizon is.
Finally, early money market funds were to an extent precursors to the now widely diverse mutual fund offerings. To a degree, they helped break down public distrust / reticence towards riskier forms of investing (ie equity funds, precious metals, selling puts).