An old (2007) piece, and pretty basic, but still worthwhile for descriptions of different types of MMFs. (It does not get into government vs. prime funds, which is a more recent development.)
The 7 day yields of the Vanguard MMFs seem to bounce all over the place. For a few days they may look unbelievably good, and then they look like they're not worth it.
The Treasury MMF, if you can meet the $50K min, may be a better option for those in high tax states like Calif. and NY. That's especially true now that SaLT deductions are limited. It used to be that if you were in, say, a 10% state/local bracket, and a 25% fed, then your effective state tax rate was 7.5% (because you could deduct state income taxes). Now more people are feeling the full weight of their state income taxes. So the state tax-exempt nature of the Treasury fund makes it even more valuable now.
Another thing that's changed since the article was written is that the AMT exemption amount was raised so high that virtually no one is subject to AMT. Thus the fact that Vanguard's muni funds are not AMT-free isn't a concern any longer.

Agree with Charles. After 5 years if you are still down on original investment (I'm boing to ignore whether you doubled your money in S&P 500 in that same time), AND you still want to hold on to the fund, you have lost your marbles. You have as much probability of moving assets to another fund and do as good for next 5 years. ASSUMING original fund regardless of whether it starts performing does not shut its doors because investors are not forthcoming and may not return.
Let no one take your tax loss away from you in the original fund.
And there are no such things as journalists any more. That word should be stricken from the english languages. I wouldn't even call them reporters, who as the word suggests simply report what they say, and don't try to ANALyse things. There may be maybe 2 / 1000 who are journalists.

Hi, Mark.
I haven't used the tool, per se. I've poked around a bit, and have read it in light of two other recent RA pieces. At base, this is simple visualization of the principle, "if value matters, then here's what has to happen for things to be more or less 'normal' a decade from now." So, given the prices people are currently paying for US large caps, it would take a decade of essentially zero returns (0.5% real) with normal economic growth for us to end the decade at "normal." If you happen to believe that "it's really different this time because (tech, the cloud, bitcoin, the Fed, politics, passive dominance, China)," you're unlikely to find this at all useful.
The two pieces of theirs that I've been thinking about are an advisor presentation in which they graphed forward returns against current valuations. I'll try to post the graphics in our August issue. The short version: the relationship between valuations and returns are essentially zero over any 12 month period, nearly zero over any 36 month period, emergent over any 60 month period, and dauntingly like a straight line - say 90% plus - correlation over any 120 month period. In short, we can delude ourselves in the short-run that price doesn't matter but, in the long run, it very much matters.
The second piece, published today, looks at bubbles and anti-bubbles. They got a lot of press in 2018 for their original piece defining a bubble but the section of that paper defining anti-bubbles was essentially ignored.

An anti-bubble is an asset or asset class that requires implausibly pessimistic assumptions in order to fail to deliver a solid risk premium. In an anti-bubble, the marginal seller disregards valuation models, which are indicating the asset is undervalued.

Today's piece identified three egregious current bubbles - Tesla, bitcoin and many large tech stocks - and issued the dual recommendation to avoid them and to avoid market-cap weighted indexes that are driven by them. The S&P 500 is 25% tech, with Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Facebook alone accounting for 13% of the index. If the two shares of Alphabet stock (GOOG and GOOGL) were treated as one stock, then the top five stocks would all be tech and about comprise 16% of the index with an average unweighted P/E of 37.
But RA also identified two anti-bubbles: emerging markets and, for people willing to enter the market slowly over time, UK stocks. They conclude, "Value-oriented smart beta strategies in both the developed and emerging markets offer investors promising investing opportunities outside the many bubbles in today’s global markets."
For what that's worth,
David

Here's a clear, more in-depth explanation of leverage, especially as used by CEFs.
https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/investment-products/closed-end-funds/leverage
A couple of numbers in the original article caught my eye, as they were presented without explanation:
"According to the Investment Company Institute, the average leverage ratio for bond funds stood at 28% last year; for equity funds the leverage ratio was 22%."
What's an "average leverage ratio"? Is the numerator (what's being averaged) all leverage or just "stuctural", aka "1940 Act" leverage? Is the denominator (which funds are being counted) all funds or just the funds that actually use leverage?
I didn't find the ICI 2018 figures, but I did find the 2015 figures, which are similar. The ICI explains what exactly these averages represent. For 2015, "Among closed-end funds employing structural leverage, the average leverage ratio for bond funds was somewhat higher (27.3 percent) than that of equity funds (22.0 percent)."
https://www.ici.org/pdf/per22-02.pdf
However, as Fidelity notes "Leverage is leverage. Regardless of the source of the leverage, it has the same effects on a portfolio ... This is why transparency of a fund's true leverage is so important. ... Fund families have wide discretion in how they choose to actively report non-'40 Act leverage. Their websites may say a fund is unleveraged, when it actually has a lot of non-'40 Act leverage."
The original article gives a second figure: "Closed-end funds’ use of leverage can be relatively safe 'if the underlying assets are of high quality and have volatility of around 3% to 4%, commensurate with stable assets such as high-quality bonds,'"
What's volatility, and how does that relate to the safety of leverage? I'm guessing that the figure presented is standard deviation of a portfolio. The Bloomberg Barclays US Aggregate Bond Total Return Index is around 3 for various lengths of time (3 years to 15 years), per M*.
Is standard deviation a good way to measure safety of leverage? Here's an excerpt from a Schwab page from which one might infer that the low volatility of bonds is not necessarily comforting. (Consider my selection to represent confirmation bias, as it discusses what I regard as a significant risk of leverage - a flattening of the yield curve.)

Leveraged closed-end funds tend to benefit from a steep yield curve—that is, a large spread between short- and longer-term interest rates. By borrowing at lower short-term rates and investing at higher longer-term rates, the fund typically can generate higher income. ... [T]he spread has narrowed over the past few years.
Rising short-term interest rates can have a big impact on closed-end fund prices. In general, rising short-term rates will increase the cost of leverage for closed-end funds. If the yield curve flattens as rates rise, it can be a double whammy: The fund has to pay more to borrow, while the bonds in the fund may drop in value. If the spread between the cost of borrowing and the yield earned on the underlying bond investments narrows, some funds may not be able to generate as much income as in the past, leading to a cut in the income distribution.
When that happens, a fund’s price may fall, as investors may look elsewhere for income. In addition, leverage can increase the fund’s effective duration—that is, the sensitivity of its price to changes in interest rates. Consequently, closed-end funds can experience far greater price volatility than unleveraged funds.

https://www.schwab.com/resource-center/insights/content/closed-end-bond-funds-how-they-work-and-what-you-should-know-as-rates-rise
On the subject of risk, the original column talks about steady payment streams, but doesn't say anything about how CEFs do this or what the risk is: "the ability to distribute returns more equally throughout the year makes income more predictable and can help clients manage their taxes more efficiently."
The fund smooths out these "managed distributions" by estimating annual total return, including cap gains (both realized and unrealized) and paying that out monthly or quarterly. By distributing all return, the CEF hopes to maintain a steady price. Here's a page from Nuveen explaining how this works:
https://www.nuveen.com/understanding-managed-distributions
Nuveen notes that even if the estimates are accurate, part of the distributions may represent a return of capital (coming from the unrealized gains). Worse, if the fund overestimates total return, "some or all of the distribution represents return of capital that includes part of the shareholders’ principal."
As Fidelity notes, consistent use of this latter "destructive return of capital is a huge red flag, especially if the return of capital comprises the bulk of a distribution."
https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/investment-products/closed-end-funds/return-of-capital-part-one

Hi sir MIKEM
We don't have that much preferred in our portfolio
Few we have preferred or hy
Our preferred portfolio ~0.5 %total
(real estates pipelines biotech)
Duke Realty preferred
Mnk
Jnk
CipPrb
AllyPra
Glopra
Cnq
Maybe better get bonds or bonds fund... Best enjoy these vehicles after div dates... you have to watch 'em like hawks . They go up down Very quickly and loose money very quickly
Not buying this vehicle... I did bought dillard's bonds few days ago
254063AW0
http://cbonds.com/emissions/issue/54235

FYI: The next time somebody propounds the notion of efficient markets, do smile politely.
You may reasonably concede that all possible knowledge about the 500 biggest stocks is fully discounted in their prices, so passive ownership of that broad index beats active stock picking. But when it comes to bonds and bond funds, the exceptions are prevalent enough to dispute the efficient-market rule.
This is by way of introduction to two such examples. First, consider the T. Rowe Price High Yield fund (ticker: PRHYX), which has consistently out-returned the popular exchange-traded index fund that tracks the junk market, the iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (HYG), over almost every time period.
Now consider the New America High Income fund (HYB), which has consistently outperformed the T. Rowe Price open-end fund even though both share the same managers and much the same portfolio. The key difference between the two is the former is a closed-end fund, which means it has a fixed number of shares, while the latter is an open-end mutual fund, which means it expands and contracts the number of shares to accommodate investor purchases and redemptions.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.barrons.com/articles/t-rowe-price-junk-bond-closed-end-fund-51562119150?refsec=bonds
M* Snapshot PRHYX:
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/xnas/prhyx/quote.html
M* Snapshot HYB:
https://www.morningstar.com/cefs/xnys/hyb/quote.html

FYI: Given the thin margins in the retirement business, firm says it was justified in cutting deals with money managers to boost profits
Regards,
Ted
https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=X6IlXfPLMsu4tQbGr5XADw&q=Fidelity+says+it's+entitled+to+alleged+'secret+payments'+in+401(k)+plans&oq=Fidelity+says+it's+entitled+to+alleged+'secret+payments'+in+401(k)+plans&gs_l=psy-ab.3...3664.3664..5791...0.0..0.274.340.1j0j1......0....2j1..gws-wiz.....0.VxBR-Lln1ck

This is not the first time this fund has done this:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650149/000089418918006607/spt-equable_497e.htm
Equable Shares Small Cap Fund (Series 1)
(Class I EQSIX)
A Series of Series Portfolios Trust
December 3, 2018
Supplement to the Summary Prospectus, Prospectus and
Statement of Additional Information (“SAI”) dated May 30, 2018
Effective December 17, 2018, shares of the Equable Shares Small Cap Fund (Series 1) (the “Fund”) will be offered for purchase.
Effective as of the close of business on December 19, 2018, the Fund will be closed to all new purchases. The Fund will remain open after December 19, 2018 to automatic reinvestment of dividends and capital gains distributions, as described under the section entitled “Distribution of Fund Shares – Dividends, Distributions and their Taxation” in the Prospectus.
The decision and timing for future opening or closing of the Fund will be at the discretion of the Fund’s investment adviser, Teramo Advisors, LLC.
For investor inquiries about the Fund, please call the Fund at (888) 898-2024.
Please retain this Supplement with your Prospectus, Summary Prospectus and SAI for future reference.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650149/000089418918004304/spt-equable_497e.htm
497 1 spt-equable_497e.htm SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS
Equable Shares Small Cap Fund (Series 1)
(Class I EQSIX)
A Series of Series Portfolios Trust
August 10, 2018
Supplement to the Summary Prospectus, Prospectus and
Statement of Additional Information (“SAI”) dated May 30, 2018
Effective as of the close of business on August 16, 2018, the Equable Shares Small Cap Fund (Series 1) (the “Fund”) will be closed to all new purchases. The Fund will remain open to automatic reinvestment of dividends and capital gains distributions, as described under the section entitled “Distribution of Fund Shares – Dividends, Distributions and their Taxation” in the Prospectus.
The decision and timing for future opening or closing of the Fund will be at the discretion of the Fund’s investment adviser, Teramo Advisors, LLC.
For investor inquiries about the Fund, please call the Fund at (888) 898-2024.
Please retain this Supplement with your Prospectus, Summary Prospectus and SAI for future reference.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650149/000089418919004102/eqsixsupplement792019.htm
497 1 eqsixsupplement792019.htm 497
Filed pursuant to Rule 497(e)
Registration Nos. 333-206240; 811-23084
equablelogocolora04.jpg
Equable Shares Small Cap Fund
(Class I EQSIX)
A Series of Series Portfolios Trust
July 9, 2019
Supplement to the Summary Prospectus, Prospectus and
Statement of Additional Information (“SAI”) dated February 28, 2019
Effective July 15, 2019, shares of the Equable Shares Small Cap Fund (the “Fund”) will be offered for purchase.
Effective as of the close of business on July 17, 2019, the Fund will be closed to all new purchases. The Fund will remain open after July 17, 2019 to automatic reinvestment of dividends and capital gains distributions, as described under the section entitled “Distribution of Fund Shares – Dividends, Distributions and their Taxation” in the Prospectus.
Shares of the Fund are currently not available for new purchases and will remain closed until the above referenced date. The decision and timing for future opening or closing of the Fund will be at the discretion of the Fund’s investment adviser, Teramo Advisors, LLC.
For investor inquiries about the Fund, please call the Fund at (888) 898-2024.
Please retain this Supplement with your Prospectus, Summary Prospectus and SAI for future reference.

Agreed, the markets have risen nicely this year.
But the widely-quoted rise in the markets since January 1 forgets about the steep drop in December. So we're working off a low base.
If we include the downs and ups, the past 12 months total return for the S&P 500 has been about 10%.
Which is still good, just not in the gangbusters neighborhood.
David

- https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/50869/are-airlines-in-america-among-the-world-s-worst
- https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/47011/they-own-the-system-amazon-rewrites-book-industry-by-marching-into-publishing
- https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/50230/george-will-is-the-individual-obsolete
@Ted - Did you really read the above book by George Will?
Ex-Republican and Washington Post columnist George Will appeared on The View Friday to promote his book and do the only thing right-leaning commentators are invited on television to do: bash President Trump and promote the left. Will got right to that, comparing “Trump Republicans” to cockroaches that had infested the party.
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/kristine-marsh/2019/06/21/george-will-tells-view-trump-republicans-are-cockroaches

This is not your father's Wheaton. I did not realize that the town had fallen off the wagon (three decades ago!).
https://www.oneillinois.com/stories/2019/1/7/wheaton-best-place-to-live-in-illinois
"'That has been a boom,' Gresk said of finally breaking Prohibition, adding that Wheaton used to be considered 'a sleepy little town' where 'the joke was the sidewalks used to roll up at 5 o’clock.'”
They even started an Ale Fest earlier this decade:
http://www.triblocal.com/wheaton/2011/08/03/once-dry-wheaton-ready-for-weekend-ale-fest/index.html

FYI: Welcome to Wheaton, Ill., a town with a surprising connection to many of the most-important figures in the world of exchange-traded funds.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-chicago-suburb-became-a-center-of-etfs-11562638621?mod=md_mf_news

FYI: The stock market keeps rising, and fund investors keep turning away.
The average U.S.-stock fund rose 3.4% in the second quarter and is now up 17% so far in 2019, according to Thomson Reuters Lipper data. International-stock funds were up a similar amount for the quarter, pushing the year-to-date advance to 14%.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-stock-funds-are-up-17-so-far-in-2019-11562638500?mod=article_inline

If you continually monitor the M*, Lipper*, etc. charts and keep shifting money away from the poorer performing funds into the better performing ones in each “category” (as a good many do), than I’d say you are a “closet momentum player” - though probably unaware of it.

But allow me to attempt to explain. The fund manager who boosts returns by buying hot stocks (let’s assume “systematically”) is the real momentum player. He / she knows full well what they’re doing. The individual investor who moves money to that fund because it’s been “outperforming” its

peers is the unwitting victim of the momentum strategy - thus, a “closet momentum player”.

I'm skimming through a 2016 M* paper on the short term persistence of mutual fund performance. Like any responsible paper on the subject, it starts with Carhart's 1997 paper. " Carhart attributed this [short term persistence] effect to momentum, showing that recent outperformers happen to hold stocks with strong momentum on average, though they don’t necessarily follow a momentum strategy."
M* does its own data analysis, and reports thusly on momentum:

the positive and significant coefficient on the [momentum] factor [for large blend funds] suggests that the managers in the top quintile had greater exposure to stocks with positive momentum (or less exposure to stocks with negative momentum) than those in the bottom quintile during the holding periods. The adjusted R-squared indicates how well the model fit the data. In this case, the regression could explain 56% of the variance in the returns between the funds in the top and bottom quintiles. This means that the model explains a significant part of the story, but there is much it doesn’t capture.
[In plainer English, over half of the outperformance of hot large cap blend funds over the subsequent year is because they tend to hold more high momentum stocks. This effect doesn't last over longer periods.]
Overall, differences in momentum, rather than differences in skill, appear to explain return
persistence in the short term.

http://www.fwp.partners/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Performance-Persistence-Morningstar-2016.pdf
Chasing these hot funds thus appears to be chasing funds that happen to have high momentum stocks, though not necessarily chasing momentum funds.

Hi @Mark
I've monitored, but not invested in MTUM; and the below chart starts with 2018, as this will let you view the moves during the short market whack in early Feb. as well as the big down on Dec. 24, 2018. I included DSEEX as a pseudo momentum active fund.
ARGH. Chart will only set back to July at this time.
SPY MTUM DSEEX Jan 2018 to date
Take care,
Catch

@Edmond What I find ridiculous about arguments like the one you're making--basically that the elites are hypocrites about climate change--is that the earth's rapidly changing climate doesn't care one way or the other whether you're a liberal or conservative. So even if they're hypocrites, that still can mean it behooves everyone to try to reduce carbon emissions as best they can. Al Gore may fly around in a private jet and China may cheat on emission standards, and the climate still doesn't care one way or the other. It is an amoral force of nature that is getting worse for most life forms because of human behavior. Let's say someone told you cyanide was bad and then proceeded to take cyanide themselves. Somehow I don't think you would take the cyanide just because the person sounding the warning is a hypocrite. And the truth is everyone is a hypocrite to a certain degree. There's an old saying: Though my guru stumbles out of the tavern, still I will wash his feet. I assume many Catholics still believe abortion is wrong even though it was recently revealed priests were sexually abusing, impregnating and getting abortions for nuns:
https://nytimes.com/2019/02/05/world/europe/pope-nuns-sexual-abuse.html
Hypocrisy is everywhere in human endeavor. But science--the forces of nature--don't care. And what I find so hyprocritical or just plain lousy about the rightwing argument against reducing carbon emissions to reduce climate change is that they used to argue against the science itself. Almost no one who isn't a paid petrol industry shill does that anymore because the science is known to be rock solid and has existed in some fashion now for over a hundred years. Now that conservatives lost that battle against scientific facts, there is an attempt to behave like a child in the school yard saying "Well he started it or he does it too." Meanwhile coastal Florida will almost certainly disappear in our lifetime. Say goodbye to the Keys.

David and Mike,
Yeah, I'm looking to run this on different time periods to play around with it. I'm kind of curious if FPA is right or if it's just an anomaly. I'd also like to know how much a manager's top 5 (or whatever number) drives overall performance.

I hope the pay for this interview and these answers was maybe $50 or so. $40 perhaps.
I love the way investors, and journalists, think of all this like sports teams, or individual players, on a streak, in a slump, wait'll next year, how do they compare w the past?, lost their touch, on a roll, shooting better, slugging worse, etc etc.

@MikeM. I bought some PRPFX after the rest of you guys fled. Converted it to a Roth in January 2016. In the 3.5 years since the conversion it’s up 27.35%%. Not great - but not bad either for a fund so despised here. Represents 11.5% of invested assets. For contrast, I carry about 15% in cash and short-term stuff yielding very little.
Re: Doc Hussman - Yes. We’re both solidly in the “recovering” state now, having participated in the folly in our early years. So, it’s hard (for me anyway) not to look back and take an occasional jab at the humble fellow.