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Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.
  • Funds that Hung in there today (Last day of February 2018).
    PRSNX up a penny, +0.09%. Everything else stunk up the place, except that PREMX was flat-even. Entire portfolio was down by -0.55%.
  • Elizabeth Warren Wants To Be Your New Mutual Fund Manager
    "And for comparison, something along the lines of 40,000 people are killed in the USA in automobile accidents. Where is that outrage?"
    Likely meant as a distraction, but it's instructive to compare auto safety and gun safety. History might teach us something.
    Autos are dangerous machines. Still, the auto industry opposed safety measures because it felt that this wouldn't sell cars. Gradually, several states instituted their own safety regulations, and in 1968 various federal regs went into effect, including requiring seatbelts in passenger cars.
    http://www.autonews.com/article/19960626/ANA/606260818/1964-brought-seat-belts-for-every-buyer
    How effective has this federally mandated safety measure been? Via the CDC:
    "Seat belts reduce serious crash-related injuries and deaths by about half.
    "Seat belts saved almost 14,000 lives in 2015."
    https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/seatbelts/facts.html
    Hard to know what a comparable reduction in gun injuries would be with safer guns:
    "Since the [Dickey Amendment] passed in 1996, the United States has spent about $240 million a year on traffic safety research, but there has been almost no publicly funded research on firearm injuries."
    https://www.dallasnews.com/news/news/2016/06/13/the-cdc-isnt-banned-from-studying-gun-violence-its-just-too-scared-to-do-its-job
  • Funds that Hung in there today (Last day of February 2018).
    Obviously a subject of scorn and ridicule with the rest of my portfolio, but please...amuse me.
    FSRPX UP!!! 0.15% -
    Top 25 actually looked pretty good for a down day (top 10 holding make up 71%...total of 44 holdings):
    image
  • Elizabeth Warren Wants To Be Your New Mutual Fund Manager
    @Maurice
    And is Sen Warren's solution of divesting the right one?
    Nowhere in Warren's letter to BlackRock did she recommend divestment. She is talking about engagement as one of the largest shareholders and owners of gun securities, which BlackRock's Fink claims he will do anyway. Also, there is a real question now from a corporate governance perspective whether manufacturing AR-15s and other assault rifles is good for gunmakers' businesses. There is increasing legal liability and potential permanent damage to their brand from making those specific kinds of weapons. So why not engage with the gun manufacturers? At least if you're going to attack her position, get it right before doing so.
  • Gary Cohn resigns, Will it be a happy eastern time zone equity morning? March 7
    Well, that sucked, eh? S&P +.5% about 11am, had a 1.5% swing to end down about 1%. Asia and Europe not too happy either. Need "care" from our healthcare which took a 1.5% kick in the mouth.
    Will take a peek and try again tonight before pillow time.....C.U. then.
  • Elizabeth Warren Wants To Be Your New Mutual Fund Manager
    Elizabeth Warren Wants To Be Your New Mutual Fund Manager
    We've lost sight of the original misdirection and sleight-of-hand that @Maurice employed in his original post. From his link, here's the appalling suggestion from Elizabeth Warren:
    "By leveraging the holdings that BlackRock manages in gunmakers like the American Outdoor Brands Corporation, which builds the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle that former student Nikolas Cruz used to kill 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, Fla., Fink can demonstrate his own commitment to the standard he set, the Massachusetts Democrat wrote in a letter."
    This sort of garbage is unfortunately completely normal for Maurice and his ilk. Let's simply distort Ms Warren's position beyond all reasonable recognition, and hope that nobody notices.
  • Six Magic-Potion Funds From Vanguard
    Reminds me of Motif investing; build your own, eh?
    https://www.motifinvesting.com/motifs#catalog=overview

    From the article: A low-vol fund gives you more of sleepy Microsoft (MSFT)
    >>> Things change, times change, managers change. Microsoft is not currently a sleepy company.
    Sample: growth to value and value to growth:
    ---Durant-Dort Carriage Company was a manufacturer of horse-drawn vehicles in Flint, Michigan. Founded in 1886, in 1900 it was US's largest carriage manufacturer.
    This very successful business made the partners rich men and it became the core on which William C Durant and J Dallas Dort began to build General Motors.
    Durant sold out of this business in 1914 and it finished carriage manufacture in 1917.
    >>>With the assumption of being able to purchase stock in the above, one may suspect those who poo-poo'd the demise of carriages and those who poo-poo'd rise of the motor car. Who and when someone may have bought or sold shares in either organization would have allowed them a more complete understanding of growth becoming value and value becoming growth scenarios, yes?
    Below chart is factor investing, too. Large cap value vs large cap growth, from 2 different vendors. Simple etf models, although I don't know about internal holdings changes over the years. In particular, since early 2016 value can not find as many friends.
    http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?JKE,JKF,IVW,IVE&p=6&O=011000
    I will guess that active individual investors are/were 50% inclined to be "factor or smart beta" investors before the terms became fashionable, eh? One makes personal investment choices for whatever reasons. One makes choices based upon many "factors" in their own world of risk and knowledge.
    A few possible factors might include:
    ---age
    ---financial status, being employed and young with a good wage and prudent personal financial habits; being near retirement or being retired with a comfortable financial position
    --- How hungry are you? = I'm young and hungry, I'm almost retired and don't want to lose what I've worked so hard to attain or I'm retired, and don't want to lose what I've attained, but still need to be invested in something reasonable. Among all of this at any age level is the aptitude/attitude involvement which may lead one to a more hands off approach of a plain joe/jane balanced fund style of investment or the Robo advisors.
    One sorts and searches for whatever investment style floats their boat of comfort.
    Factor or smart-beta investments offer more choices and hopefully not more confusion.
    In closing, I'll offer the below partial lyric as the "theme song" for the ever evolving world of etf choices. Build it and they may come, eh?
    Kinda like the simple lyric of this Dave Clark Five song (I Like It Like That) from the mid-60's:
    Come on (come on let me show you where it's at)
    Ah, come on (come on let me show you where it's at)
    Whoa!, come on (come on let me show you where it's at)
    I said the name of the place is I like it like that
    The music is all around us, all we have to do.....is listen.
    Take care,
    Catch
  • Elizabeth Warren Wants To Be Your New Mutual Fund Manager
    Here is an excerpt from the above-linked article in the Atlantic on the AR-15:
    As I opened the CT scan last week to read the next case, I was baffled. The history simply read “gunshot wound.” I have been a radiologist in one of the busiest trauma centers in the United States for 13 years, and have diagnosed thousands of handgun injuries to the brain, lung, liver, spleen, bowel, and other vital organs. I thought that I knew all that I needed to know about gunshot wounds, but the specific pattern of injury on my computer screen was one that I had seen only once before.
    In a typical handgun injury, which I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ such as the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, gray bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.
    I was looking at a CT scan of one of the mass-shooting victims from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, and was bleeding extensively. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?
    The reaction in the emergency room was the same. One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semiautomatic rifle that delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. Nothing was left to repair—and utterly, devastatingly, nothing could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal.
    A year ago, when a gunman opened fire at the Fort Lauderdale airport with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun, hitting 11 people in 90 seconds, I was also on call. It was not until I had diagnosed the third of the six victims who were transported to the trauma center that I realized something out of the ordinary must have happened. The gunshot wounds were the same low-velocity handgun injuries that I diagnose every day; only their rapid succession set them apart. And all six of the victims who arrived at the hospital that day survived.
    Routine handgun injuries leave entry and exit wounds and linear tracks through the victim’s body that are roughly the size of the bullet. If the bullet does not directly hit something crucial like the heart or the aorta, and the victim does not bleed to death before being transported to our care at the trauma center, chances are that we can save him. The bullets fired by an AR-15 are different: They travel at a higher velocity and are far more lethal than routine bullets fired from a handgun. The damage they cause is a function of the energy they impart as they pass through the body. A typical AR-15 bullet leaves the barrel traveling almost three times faster than—and imparting more than three times the energy of—a typical 9mm bullet from a handgun. An AR-15 rifle outfitted with a magazine with 50 rounds allows many more lethal bullets to be delivered quickly without reloading.
    I have seen a handful of AR-15 injuries in my career. Years ago I saw one from a man shot in the back by a SWAT team. The injury along the path of the bullet from an AR-15 is vastly different from a low-velocity handgun injury. The bullet from an AR-15 passes through the body like a cigarette boat traveling at maximum speed through a tiny canal. The tissue next to the bullet is elastic—moving away from the bullet like waves of water displaced by the boat—and then returns and settles back. This process is called cavitation; it leaves the displaced tissue damaged or killed. The high-velocity bullet causes a swath of tissue damage that extends several inches from its path. It does not have to actually hit an artery to damage it and cause catastrophic bleeding. Exit wounds can be the size of an orange.
    With an AR-15, the shooter does not have to be particularly accurate. The victim does not have to be unlucky. If a victim takes a direct hit to the liver from an AR-15, the damage is far graver than that of a simple handgun-shot injury. Handgun injuries to the liver are generally survivable unless the bullet hits the main blood supply to the liver. An AR-15 bullet wound to the middle of the liver would cause so much bleeding that the patient would likely never make it to the trauma center to receive our care.
  • Elizabeth Warren Wants To Be Your New Mutual Fund Manager
    I've refrained from jumping into this thread, but had a few minutes to kill this morning.
    Funds own what they own. I'm angry that Comcast jacks up my bills every year, but while I boycott them as a TV customer I won't dump the funds I own which include Comcast in their holdings.
    As to the underlying issue:
    First off, any political discussion that invokes ad hominem attacks on the subjects immediately goes into my 'ignore' category. (so i really should be ignoring this thread, and probably won't be adding much to the discussion after this.)
    Second, since I was a kid in the '80s, I been around and owned guns and know how to use them responsibly, and people all over do so as citizens and in defense of our nation (police or military.) Owning guns for recreation is fine -- but if you say you need an AR-15 for hog hunting: if you don't hit the beast by the second shot, you're not only NOT going to get him, but also scare off anything else in the vicinity.
    Nobody needs to pack a gun to go grocery shopping or pick up dry cleaning - or to sling an automatic rifle over their shoulder to show the world "look at me, I'm strong because I have a big ... gun" when going out to Friday dinner. And yes I have been in some very seedy parts of American cities and while perhaps feeling a tad on-edge at times, I never felt threatened.
    Good intentions by citizens do not make up for trained career law enforcement personnel. While it may work sometimes by luck, even cops have problems, and the risk of innocent bystanders getting hit is too high otherwise. While there are some successes in police active shooter responses, by contrast, NYPD, one of our best LEOs, reportedly only has a 34% accuracy in active shooter situations. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/empire-state-building-shooting-sparks-questions-about-nypd-shot-accuracy/) Plus some people think that a gun is the answer to any criminal act, misdemeanor, misunderstanding, or felony. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/08/woman-with-concealed-gun-permit-shoots-at-fleeing-shoplifter-could-face-charges/) Good intentions? Sure. But legal? Or helpful to reassure the non-NRA-believing public? Hardly.
    If the government wanted to come confiscate my guns or assume martial law as so many of the far-right nutters/preppers belive (including what the NRA spokespeople imply *can* happen), they're not going to show up with a posse or send a pair of goons to every house in the neighborhood -- they're going to roll tanks down my street and up my driveway, drone me from above, enage in cyber-something, or something else far outside my ability to control. So in 2018 I am not afraid of my government assuming physical martial law on me ... meaning, if I was afraid of that, I would not be joining the NRA defending its quaint second amendment ammosexual fetish but rather would be lobbying Congress to let me buy bazookas, armed drones, a fully stocked aircraft carrier, and/or trying to join the "Where's My Personal A-Bomb-To-Defend-Myself-From-Uncle-Sam Coalition" instead.
    And putting more guns in schools, or turning schools into fortified institutions resembling prisions? Don't even get me started on espousing my views on this idiotic reaction to the problem.
    Until elected officials realize that this isn't 1790, nothing's going to change. While this time may be different due to the sustained outreach, energy and mobilization of our youth and future voters, I'm sadly not holding my breath. And if businesses want to show their views on the issue, so be it.
    Okay, that went on longer than I thought. Off to work I go now.
  • Bucket #1
    If you are a retiree and think it is prudent to have 1-5 year piece of your investments in a rather safe place for annual or emergency needs, how are you positioning this money? Suggestions or opinions appreciated.
    I think a CD ladder is a good choice now. I've got a bunch sitting in MM but might switch it over to CDs. I'm still about three years from actual retirement.
  • Bucket #1
    Agree, all your eggs in one basket doesn't work for me.
    A Target date fund is as diversified a portfolio as you can get, likely more diversified than yours or mine. Not one basket at all. They are actually like holding 25 or so baskets (funds) with plenty of eggs (stocks or bonds) in each of those baskets. I do think your analogy is a misconception most people share though.
  • Gary Cohn resigns, Will it be a happy eastern time zone equity morning? March 7
    Yer funny. DJIA futures down -58 points at the moment, 11:20 p.m. Thankfully, my investing is not a sprint, but a marathon. Just added (through the mail) to PRIDX and PNM and SFGIX.
  • Gary Cohn resigns, Will it be a happy eastern time zone equity morning? March 7
    ---11:05 PM EST
    Asia related has at least the equity dry heaves. Perhaps just some bad food.
    Hopefully, no tummy aches when Europe awakens.
    Flu, equity flu; don't be need'in anymore flu at the time.
    I'm sure everything will be handled to the positive before I awaken in 7 hours.
    Evening time to slip away.....pillow.
  • Elizabeth Warren Wants To Be Your New Mutual Fund Manager
    First, I call horse pucky on this libertarian myth that corporations have always existed solely to make profits for shareholders and not for any other purpose such as the public good. There has been a notion of corporations existing for the public good embedded in the idea of a corporation in the U.S. from the beginning and that notion has only recently been perverted to existing solely for the purposes of making money:
    https://researchgate.net/publication/276883931_Corporate_Social_Responsibility_Practice_from_1800-1914_Past_Initiatives_and_Current_Debates
    https://law.georgetown.edu/academics/law-journals/gjlpp/upload/zs800112000115.PDF
    Second, when is enough enough regarding products that are truly harmful to the functioning of a society. How harmful? This harmful:
    https://theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-i-saw-treating-the-victims-from-parkland-should-change-the-debate-on-guns/553937/
    The founders wanted a functioning well trained militia in communities when they wrote the Second Amendment, not lone gunmen idiots with AR-15s in their basements.
  • Bucket #1
    ...4-5y worth. Taxable, alas.

    @davidrmoran, what do you mean by that? My 4 year bucket #1, MM and CDs, would remain tax deferred if that was what you referred to.
    My nearterm bucket, bonds and cash, is in rollover IRAs, and a brokerage account (with big losses in it, so no prob there); and when I take money from the former it is all taxable. (Same with the latter if I ever ever have capital gains again before I die, which looks unlikely.) Oh, and also a checking-savings account, of course.
    Not positive I am getting your query; sorry. Distracted with averting my eyes from the EWarren insulting.
  • Elizabeth Warren Wants To Be Your New Mutual Fund Manager
    I'm from Massachusetts, and have in the past contacted Warren's office about this and that. They're not very responsive, apart from a boilerplate reply. But I've lived in lots of places, and contacts with Congress in ALL those places produces the very same thing. Because actually paying attention to actual people is too much for Senators or Congressmen to handle. The women, too---YES.)
    NO ONE needs a frikking AR-15 or AK-40-frikking-7, either. Except perhaps Federal Agencies and law enforcement people. We have friends in AZ. We visited. Every day after work, he carried into the house (and locked away) what is likely a MILITARY version of an AR-15. (Are M-16s still used?) He works for Homeland Security.
    I'm in Springfield, too--- home of Smith & Wesson, which no doubt changed the name of its company and ticker due to bad press, because it manufactures guns. My understanding is that S & W makes GUNS, not rifles. Am I mistaken?
    I'd hate to live in a nanny state, but that's what we're becoming. Nevertheless, it makes sense to me that those we elect to enact policy ought not to leave their consciences in the car when they go to their offices. There is such a thing as right and wrong. Remember the Marlboro Man? No more. Why allow the PROMOTION of a thing that is so detrimental? Same with these assault rifles and clips that are designed so you don't even have to stop to re-load.
    Larry Fink was on tv one time, and I watched. Among a bunch of other Mighty Capitalists on a panel, when the topic came up, he asserted that he is a liberal Democrat. So Warren's letter will be given some attention, methinks.
    Investors are human first, before they invest. Seems to me, that's what we all have in common, and it ought to be our collective strongest bond with each other. Should investors put their consciences on "Hold" when they decide about investing choices? On the other hand, if someone has chosen to simply become a whore for Big Green Money, then there's not much you can tell them, eh?
  • Bucket #1
    ...4-5y worth. Taxable, alas.
    @davidrmoran, what do you mean by that? My 4 year bucket #1, MM and CDs, would remain tax deferred if that was what you referred to.