The issue I have with ZEOIX is it isn't on NTF transaction free platforms at brokers. My understanding is this is by design as the managers don't want hot money or to pay to be on those "free" platforms. The problem is this is a low returning cash-like/short-term bond investment. So if you're a retail investor who maybe puts in a few thousand, say $5,000, and end up paying a $50 transaction fee, well that's 1 percentage point of your return over the next year and ZEOIX might deliver 3% on a year, so you've lost one-third of your return. Then because it is cash-like, let's say the stock market dips or falls flat on its face, well you might want to move some of your money out of cash or ZEOIX to buy some stocks. Well, then you've lost another 1/3 of your return doing that with the transaction fee. It's lack of liquidity for a short-term bond fund at brokers is problematic. And even if you buy it directly from Zeo and don't pay a fee, well again, let's say you see an opportunity to buy stocks, do you have to call Zeo to liquidate, transfer that money to your broker to buy the stocks? To me the hassle seems not worth it for many investors. I think if the managers want to prevent hot money, they could employ a short-term redemption fee that makes investors hold for a few months but lets them trade freely once that period ends.

"wxman123">What would be the argument to choose this fund over Zeoix (better performance) or BBBMX (better and even safer)?
When I compare the 2 funds, RPHYX is less risky compared to ZEOIX. RPHYX has a portfolio credit rating of using BB rated corporate assets, compared to B rated for ZEOIX. RPHYX also reduces risk by holding a much higher percentage in cash (about 46%), compared to about 5% cash for ZEOIX. Also RPHYX does not require redemption fees compared to ZEOIX. When you look at performance charts, you see the lower volatility/standard deviation in RPHYX, and in the toughest downmarket for the 2 funds (2015/2016), RPHYX showed almost no dip, compared to a slight dip for ZEOIX. As a result of the 2 similar funds, you get a safer fund in RPHYX that performs more like a Money Market fund than RPHYX, but with ZEOIX you get more yield, with a bit more long term return, and a fund that stays largely invested in corporates. For an investor, who wants a fund more like cash, RPHYX is a bit more similar without redemption fees.

I've read elsewhere that $50K is a bare minimum for muni diversification, which would mean 10 bonds, not 20. Still not the same thing as picking up a couple of T-bills.
Munis, like Treasuries, have become more attractive for middle income couples, who may no longer be deducting state income taxes because of the $24K standard deduction and/or the the $10K cap on SaLT deductions.
While technically munis have had a negative correlation with the S&P 500 over the past decade (mentioned in M* article), it may be more accurate to say there's been no correlation at all, positive or negative. The coefficient of correlation was -0.02, making the R-squared 0.0004.
https://www.lordabbett.com/en/perspectives/marketview/municipal-bonds-look-beyond-tax-free-label.html

Gary1952">Who is buying ZEOIX and where? Schwab has a $49.95 transaction fee plus a 1% redemption fee. Seems restrictive for a $1500 min. purchase amount.
I looked at ZEOIX closely at the end of 2019/beginning of 2020, as a possible landing spot, for some RMD money I was depositing in my taxable account. From my perspective, it is a very good option as a cash alternative fund, with a very smooth and solid history of consistent performance. However, I opted to pass on it for now, as I do not like funds with redemption fees, and as you noted at Schwab you are also required to pay transaction fees. I decided to put that money into some existing non-traditional bonds I own, and continue keeping it on a watchlist for possible future investing.

Here is the link:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1494928/000139834420000731/fp0049672_497.htm
497 1 fp0049672_497.htm
RiverPark Funds Trust
RiverPark Short Term High Yield Fund
Institutional Class (RPHIX)
Retail Class (RPHYX)
Supplement dated January 14, 2020 to the Summary Prospectus, Prospectus and Statement of Additional Information (the “Disclosure Documents”) dated January 28, 2019.
This supplement provides new and additional information beyond that contained in the Disclosure Documents and should be read in conjunction with the Disclosure Documents.
IMPORTANT NOTICE ON PURCHASE OF FUND SHARES
Effective as of the close of business on January 15, 2020 (the “Re-Opening Date”), the RiverPark Short Term High Yield Fund (the “Fund”) will be publicly available for sale without limitation.
The Fund may from time to time, in its sole discretion, limit the types of investors permitted to open new accounts, limit new purchases or otherwise modify the above policy at any time on a case-by-case basis.
PLEASE RETAIN THIS SUPPLEMENT FOR FUTURE REFERENCE.

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BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager with nearly $7 trillion in investments, and this move will fundamentally shift its investing policy — and could reshape how corporate America does business and put pressure on other large money managers to follow suit."
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@Gary1952,
I was addressing your inquiry about ZEOIX above. Should have stated that in my first post.

Who is buying ZEOIX and where? Schwab has a $49.95 transaction fee plus a 1% redemption fee. Seems restrictive for a $1500 min. purchase amount.

• https://www.pionline.com/defined-contribution/research-shows-investing-decisions-made-based-order-options-are-listed

• https://www.planadviser.com/study-finds-alphabeticity-bias-401k-investing/
  

A white paper, “Alphabeticity Bias in 401(k) Investing,” finds that investors tend to select funds at the top of an alphabetically organized list of funds. Authored by academics at Saint Louis University, Seton Hall University and Kansas State University, as well as a researcher at the Ipsos Behavioral Science Center, the paper finds that people tend to select the first “acceptable” option.
“Thus, when a participant searches through her plan’s menu of investment options, she may be more likely to choose the funds appearing towards the beginning of the list,” the paper says. “Since 401(k) fund choices with early alphabet names appear at the beginning of the list, they will be chosen more often than later alphabet named funds. We find that the same fund appearing in multiple plans in the sample receives a significantly higher allocation when it is listed closer to the top of the plan menu.”
Paper Link at SSRN [free registration required]
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3295400

One of the things about buying good dividend paying stocks (or mutual funds) is that they have to have earnings inorder to keep paying dividends. With this, Old_Skeet has two sleeves of good dividend paying mutual funds. One consist mostly of domestic funds while to other has more of a global orientation including some exposure to emerging markets. These two sleeves combined make up 15% of Old_Skeet's overall portfolio.

https://www.morningstar.com/articles/961786/should-you-own-a-muni-fund
Should You Own a Muni Fund?
Unless you're in one of the highest tax brackets, the tax advantages might be smaller than you think.
Amy C. Arnott, CFA
Jan 15, 2020
Investors have been pouring money into municipal-bond funds. For the trailing one-year period ended November 2019, inflows into all municipal-bond fund categories totaled about $95 billion--the highest annual inflow since 2009. Taxable-bond funds still hold far more assets overall, but municipal-bond funds have been gaining ground, with nearly $850 billion in total assets as of Nov. 30, 2019. The appeal of these funds is largely based on their tax-advantaged status. In the wake of the 2018 tax law changes, fewer people can itemize deductions, which makes investment vehicles that help reduce taxable income more compelling
Another key question is whether to invest in individual bonds or in a diversified mutual fund. If you have a brokerage account, you can generally buy individual municipal bonds in increments as low as $5,000. But while transaction costs for trading municipal bonds have declined significantly, they're still relatively high. The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board estimates that the average spread between buy and sell prices was about 80 basis points for retail investors as of April 2018. These transaction costs would eat up much of the tax advantage of holding individual bonds unless your portfolio is large enough to buy bonds in larger increments. Even then, you'd probably need to buy at least 20 higher-quality bonds to help mitigate bond-specific risk. And because the municipal-bond market is notoriously opaque and illiquid (though less so than it used to be), you should also plan on holding any individual bonds until maturity.
We have been doing the later past 10 or 12 yrs, buying private muni and corp bonds
Could not have been happier
Just monitor the bonds carefully and looking at bond cusip/credit reports/ (see which funds/etf dump the bond) routinely to prevent any bankruptcy

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/13/this-was-the-best-strategy-for-picking-stocks-the-last-10-years.html
This was the best strategy for picking stocks the last 10 years
Picking stocks with high dividend yields was the best strategy for investors over the last decade, Bank of America said.
Low interest rates and steady economic growth made dividend stocks attractive, even the riskier ones with the highest yields.
The strategy would not have worked in 2019, when the S&P 500 outperformed high yielding stocks.
Wonder if this would work next 30 yrs...

My impression is that PIMCO generally uses derivatives to boost income as opposed to using them to mitigate risk. Likewise, it can be more aggressive with junk bonds.
Foreign exposure? PIMIX is weighted negative 30% in non-USD developed markets. It is also 14% long in emerging markets.
See excerpts below from the funds' prospectuses and fact sheets. They may be meaningful or may signify nothing. Reading these docs is like reading tea leaves. They can mean whatever you want to read into them. For your amusement to compare and contrast.
Objectives:
PIMIX: The Fund’s primary investment objective is to maximize current income.
Long-term capital appreciation is a secondary objective.
RPIEX: The fund seeks high current income.

Investment strategies:
PIMIX: The Fund seeks to achieve its investment objectives by investing under normal circumstances at least 65% of its total assets in a multi-sector portfolio of Fixed Income Instruments of varying maturities, which may be represented by forwards or derivatives...
RPIEX: The fund also uses [derivatives], primarily to manage interest rate exposure and limit the fund's overall volatility.
High yield (junk) bonds:
PIMIX: The Fund may invest up to 50% of its total assets in high yield securities rated below investment grade by [an NRSRO] or if unrated, as determined by PIMCO (except such 50% limitation shall not apply to the Fund’s investments in mortgage- and asset-backed securities). [Note that 77.6% of the fund is presently in securitized debt.]
RPIEX: The fund focuses mainly on holdings that are rated investment grade .... However, the fund may invest up to 30% in high yield bonds, also known as junk bonds, and other holdings (such as bank loans)
Fund home pages (with links to fact sheets, prospectuses, etc.)
PIMIX: https://www.pimco.com/en-us/investments/mutual-funds/income-fund/inst
RPIEX: https://www.troweprice.com/personal-investing/tools/fund-research/RPIEX

Mike, A lot of risk measures are related to the category, and it is sometimes difficult to compare between categories. The 4 funds above are more risky in the non-traditional bond oef category, approaching lower risk multisector bond oefs. For me personally, I use M* quite a bit to try to establish relative risk between funds, but there are imperfections and complexities. I usually start with how M* has established Risk, COSIX is rated as Average risk, and DFLEX, IISIX, and PFIUX are all rated by M* as having "Below Average" risk. I then look at Standard Deviation as another singular way at looking at volatility, which closely corSDponds to risk--so again COSIX has the highest SD at 2.45, followed by PFIUX at 1.56 SD, IISIX with a 1.52 SD, and DFLEX at 1.51 SD. I gave you information about the credit qualiity of assets in each bond in my post above, so you can look at how much Investment grade bonds are in each fund vs. junk rated bonds. I like to put all the funds on a performance graph and then look at their performance patterns, with particular emphasis on peak to trough drops in downmarkets. There are many other statistical measures of risk, including upside/downside capture ratios, Sharpe ratios, etc.
You have to remember that in the non-traditional bond oef category, the definition of this category notes the widespread use of more sophisticated investment techniques involving shorting, hedging, leveraging, and large host of measures that will vary from fund to fund, but they do impact performance. So, any simple way of determining risk is often not that simple--for the most part I depend heavily on SD, and M* risk categorization, but I look at a lot of other things to dig down deeper to form an opinion.
When you compare the 4 funds above, there are a number of other nontraditional bond oefs that I consider much less risky, including SEMMX which has a much lower SD. When you start looking at funds like ZEOIX, from the HY Bond category, it is even more tricky, but ZEOIX has a very low SD and its performance pattern, like SEMMX, is very smooth and upward, including almost no drops in performance in downmarkets. So, in my opinion, I would consider ZEOIX and SEMMX the least risky and very close in riskiness, and then a bigger step up to IISIX, followed by DFLEX, then PFIUX, and COSIX being the most risky. Some may argue with me on these rankings, if they stress some other characteristics more than those I emphasize.
I will eventually make another post about non-traditional bond oefs, that are as a group lower in risk, and close to the short term bond category as a cash alternative.

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For every $100,000 you invest in this group of funds, you could have created. Bond Fund (PEBIX) for a 4.5% yield plus gains from the bond prices."

@hank: I'm sorry to hear of you're problem, so to speak. Did you stand pat or move on ? You've caught my ear & I would like to hear more .
Have a good week, Derf

Thanks Derf! (I wasn’t asking for sympathy.) :) Oppenheimer never had more than 10% of my assets. What they offered were some niche funds others didn’t. Some were gems / other clunkers. But when you’re with a house for a quarter century you accumulate a deep understanding of their offerings and operation that’s difficult to replicate elsewhere. So I miss their operation, even though it wasn’t the sharpest gang on the block in all respects.
As far as “voting with one’s feet” - that’s all too easy to do in this day and age - often with just a few key strokes. And my fuse is as short (or shorter) than the next guy’s. To answer your question, I’m in the process of moving about one-third of my already small holdings at OPP/ Invesco to T. Rowe. What remains is mostly split between their miners’ fund (which has benefitted from gold’s uptick) and some cash. Also have a tad in an alternative fund there.
The issue of fund house closings / mergers might have significance to the broader mutual fund community. My own issues were mentioned merely to represent what that circumstance might entail and how it might affect others. If you were dumb enough to pay a front load for those A shares 25 years ago (I was), than perhaps the “sting” is felt a bit sharper.

This post is about Non-traditional Bond oefs, that resemble and perform in a manner, similar to multisector bond oefs.
"Morningstar Category: Nontraditional Bond
The Nontraditional Bond category contains funds that pursue strategies divergent in one or more ways from conventional practice in the broader bond-fund universe. Many funds in this group describe themselves as "absolute return" portfolios, which seek to avoid losses and produce returns uncorrelated with the overall bond market; they employ a variety of methods to achieve those aims. Another large subset are self-described "unconstrained" portfolios that have more flexibility to invest tactically across a wide swath of individual sectors, including high-yield and foreign debt, and typically with very large allocations. Funds in the latter group typically have broad freedom to manage interest-rate sensitivity, but attempt to tactically manage those exposures in order to minimize volatility. The category is also home to a subset of portfolios that attempt to minimize volatility by maintaining short or ultra-short duration portfolios, but explicitly court significant credit and foreign bond market risk in order to generate high returns. Funds within this category often will use credit default swaps and other fixed income derivatives to a significant level within their portfolios."
Attached are 4 Non-traditional bond oefs, that I believe are potential funds you might consider, as a Conservative Bond Oef investor, as lower risk alternatives to Multisector Bond oefs:
1. COSIX: One of the more risky Non-traditional Bond oefs with a SD of 2.45. Its assets are spread across 4 asset groups--Gov't (18.26%), Corp (28.55%), Securitized (28.39%), Cash (23.79%). Its Assets fall into the following investment grades--AAA (12.22%), AA(7.54%), A(8.89%), BBB(24.4%), BB(13.82%), Below B/NR(19.83%)
2. IISIX: One of the better total return options with a SD of 1.52. Its assets are--Govt(12.68%), Corp(20.58%), Securitized(53.14%), cash(13.62%). Its assets between investment grades are--AAA(21%), AA(5.16%), A(5.16%), BBB(21.5%), BB(16.85%), B(19.95%), Below B/NR(4.96%)
3. DFLEX is managed by the well known Gundlach with a SD of 1.51. Its assets are--Govt(14.71%), Corp(26.8%), Securitized(51.6%), cash(6.89%). Its assets between investment grades are--AAA(17.43), AA(3.6%), A(5.87%), BBB(21.01%), Below B/NR(26.5%)
4. PFIUX is from PIMCO with all of its stable of analysts with a SD of 1.56. Its assets are---Govt(24.89%), Corp(11%), Securitized(30.5%), cash(22.8%), other(10.28%). Its assets between investment grades are---AAA(79%), AA(6%), A(9%), BB(3%), Below B(3%)

“Benz: And one thing that we're continuing to see is just these massive inflows into very low-cost products” ....
“Kinnel: Yeah, that story has continued. It's really been running since the bear market of '08-'09 when a lot of people gave up on active management, and we've really seen that grow as, obviously, the ETF industry has grown alongside that because ETFs have drawn a lot of that passive flows. An interesting wrinkle this year is we saw passive fixed income and passive foreign equity start to gain some traction, too, not nearly as much, but generally, those have remained the domain of active”
Kinnel also comments on the Oppenheimer merger with Invesco. But he doesn’t seem as alarmed as I am. I hope no one here ever has the experience of seeing their B grade fund house where they’ve held Class A shares for nearly 25 years bought out and taken over by a larger C grade outfit (being generous here). Funds you’ve depended on for years disappear / are merged into the new owner’s funds. Even for those older funds that remain, management changes or is diluted. And the formerly excellent fund reports that kept you abreast of what your manager was thinking and doing (and enhanced your market perspective) are replaced by bland accouting statements lacking any narrative.

@hank I also remember doing a 15-year catch-up provision with my 403 b provider based on the following information and Link

To qualify for the 15-years of service catch-up (if the employer’s plan includes this provision) the employee must have 15 years of service with the same eligible 403(b) employer. The limit on elective deferrals to the participant’s 403(b) account may be increased by up to $3,000 in any taxable year (lifetime employer-by-employer limit of $15,000) if the employee has at least 15 years of service with the same employer in a:
public school system,hospital,home health service agency,health and welfare service agency,church, orconvention or association of churches.

https://irs.gov/retirement-plans/403b-plan-fix-it-guide-an-employee-making-a-15-years-of-service-catch-up-contribution-doesnt-have-the-required-15-years-of-full-time-service-with-the-same-employer

Thank you all for participating in yesterday's webinar.
Here is link to chart deck.
Here is link to video recording.
c
-----------------------------------------

This coming Wednesday, January 15th, we will host a webinar discussing latest features of the MFO Premium search tool site. Topics covered will include the new home page and user portal, the MultiSearch Portfolios tool, updated metrics for risk adverse investors, expense rating, expanded category averages, revised “Include Averages and Benchmarks” options, and finally allocation indices across ten decades.

There will be two sessions, one at 11 am Pacific time (2pm Eastern) and one at 2pm Pacific time (5pm Eastern). The webinar will be enabled by Zoom. Please use the following links to register for the morning session or afternoon session. Each will last nominally 1 hour, including questions.

Here are links to previous webinar charts and video recording.

Hope to you can join us again on the call. If you have any questions, happy to answer promptly via email ([email protected]) or scheduled call.