Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

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.
  • U.S. Wind and Solar Installations Are Smashing Records, but the Trend May Not Last
    @WABAC PNW is expanding it solar footprint. But, yes, Arizona regulators appear to be committed to centralized projects. Per M*'s writeup on PNW:
    They certainly used to spend enough money to elect the regulators they wanted.
    We shall see what the Arizona Corporate Commission looks like after this election.
    We get our power from SRP, which is "government owned."
  • M* Portf Mngr. still down
    Mostly showing all zeros at this moment (but total values are accurate). I can think of 101 worse things that might happen today.
  • Your Home is Not an Investment
    I was a professional student for most of the time, even into my 40s. That made the choice easy: no income. No house. The way I'm hard-wired, SIMPLICITY is a key priority. I lived in the family home for a few years after retirement. Mortgage was long ago paid. The crime (01108, I don't recommend it) drove me away sooner than we'd planned to leave. Lucky to have in-law cousins here. Mom (back East) is in a fancy stand-alone condo by a golf course. My step-father played. He's gone now, though. ...Great place, new. Open floor plan. But the condom (sic) assoc. monthly fees are absurd. ..... Anyone who BUYS in Hawaii these days is either stupid or foolish. EVERY politician running for election states that homelessness is a huge problem that must be addressed. AFFORDABLE housing is gone, just gone. That's true for renters, too. To buy a house here now would be to strap an albatross around your neck. Unless you're just filthy rich and don't care, and you can afford a waterfront home. On Oahu, lots are tiny. It's heaven, but it's crowded.
  • Politics and Investing
    The text seems to be from Ben Carlson, director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management, in an article in Fortune Magazine on October 10; also found, presumably reprinted, on Yahoo.
    When quoting from someone's original work it is only fair to at least give credit to the author.
  • Politics and Investing
    "The truth is politicians have far less control over the stock market than most people would like to believe. Policy outcomes often show up on a lag and come with unintended consequences. As we’ve seen this year, the economy and the stock market are not always on the same page. It might give you an illusion of control to know your party holds the nation’s highest office, but no one person is bigger than the stock market."
    "Regardless of who wins next month it’s important to keep politics out of your portfolio. Money decisions are already rife with emotions, biases, and blind spots. Bringing politics into this equation only amplifies those emotions and makes it nearly impossible to make rational clearheaded decisions."
    Link
  • U.S. Wind and Solar Installations Are Smashing Records, but the Trend May Not Last
    U.S. Wind and Solar Installations-Trend May Not Last-I doubt that. Trillion $ companies are trying to become carbon neutral in 15-20 years. They don't rely on subsidies. Electric cars for the masses (Million Mile Battery) & new kid on the block Hydrogen - will be another one to watch for.
  • Your Home is Not an Investment
    My wife has to have a dog. Hard to have those in an apartment building. So, we had to find flats that allowed a dog. Which usually meant dealing with family owner issues. And when things happened . . . Oh you need to move out, Aunt Sally passed away, my son is moving in, so on, and so forth. So we were moving about every 18 months. Which is a real pain in the neck in San Francisco.
    Which is the main reason we bought a house. That, and having kids. And wanting to paint it whatever we wanted to. Or mark their birthday heights on the door jam in the kitchen. So, in 1986 we lucked into the last three bedroom house in Marin county under 300K. It was in decent shape. So I cashed in some IRA's to raise enough to qualify for mortgage insurance.
    All in all, I don't know if we made a lot of money. We had somewhat more peace of mind. Fewer back aches from moving. Seldom had anything new in the first house, except a roof. Did spend a stupid amount of money getting the house ready for sale. Which probably provided more benefit to the realtor than it did to us.
    The sale of that house paid for our new house in Tempe. And new double pane windows, and a new heat pump, and a new kitchen, and a new bathroom. I am currently redoing the back "master bath". Or is it "en suite?" Need to save some of the leftovers for a new roof, and a new heat pump.
    This is a 1971 ranch, so nothing to get excited about. But no ship-lap. No barn doors. No open floor plan. No stupid signs reminding us how to live.
  • Making A Portfolio Election-Proof
    "During election season, a big portion of financial media news coverage shifts to presidential election outcomes.
    These election seasons tend to be good for media ratings and clicks, but to what extent do they matter for investors? Does accurately predicting the result of a presidential election generate outperformance? Can we say a lot about the direction of the economy depending on which political party is in charge? This article takes a look at those questions."
    Lyn Alden Schwartzer at SA
  • Your Home is Not an Investment
    https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices/inflation-adjusted-housing-prices/
    Advantages of Buying a House: (Number 1 is the most important)
    1. A house is like a forced savings plan for people who normally aren’t in the habit of saving or investing.
    2. It uses “leverage” i.e. other people’s money to get more than you could afford by yourself so when home prices do go up you benefit much more. House leverage is much greater than it used to be with Government programs allowing you to borrow 95% of the value of the house. So if you put 5% down and the house goes up 5% you have doubled your money. Where if you had to put 100% down you would have only made 5%.
    3. You can build “sweat equity” by improving the house through your own labor (untaxed).
    4. Since you are paying it off over time you are using “cheaper dollars” due to inflation to pay off the mortgage.
    5. Houses are real assets (not paper) so their value tends to keep up with inflation.

    Disadvantages of Buying a House:

    1. Incidental costs can add up- Taxes, Insurance, Maintenance, HOA fees, etc.
    2. Leverage can work against you when house prices go down as they did in 2008 the devastation is much worse than if you owned the house outright.
    3. In times of deflation, you are paying your mortgage with “more expensive dollars” and the value of your house in dollars may be going down.
    4. Houses are not “liquid” it may take time to sell if you need to move.
    5. You lose a significant chunk of value (10-20%) when you sell due to transaction costs i.e. Real Estate agent commissions, inspections, government agency fees etc.
    ============
    FD: the above is the main reason I never bought RE as an investment. All our investments are in the market. I studied and practiced RE (I was a real estate appraiser) and came to a conclusion it is not for me. Too many complications(liquidity, tenants, moving parts) compared to mutual funds.
  • Ready For a Melt UP? Bears, It's Checkmate!
    BS or not, I have been using T/A successfully for about 20 years. T/A is only one part of my system. I never held a losing fund too long and since retirement in 2018 I didn't lose more than 1% from any last top. T/A just help me to be a better consistent discipline trader.
  • Your Home is Not an Investment
    I am in the final stages of selling a home that I have lived in for almost 35 years. Purchase price was $67K. Hoping to close at $277K, but those numbers are not the whole story.
    Home improvements (landscaping, additions, remodels, and replacement of original components have cost close to $100K plus interest over those years. Recent costs (getting the home ready for sale) were close to $25K. Property taxes collected by my town over 35 years were close to $150K. Insurance costs close to $30K. Mortgage interest (financed and refinance the property) costs totaled $100K.
    Had I rented instead of owned, my housing costs (average $1.2K / month over 35 years) would have been about $500K. So maybe...just maybe... "owning" (the bank owed the home most of the 35 years) my property was a break even proposition financially.
    Had I put $10K into VFINX 35 years ago (a portion of the 20% down payment on the $67K sale price I had to come up with) that investment would be worth $436K. If I had invested in the entire 20% ($14,400) it would have grown to $628K.
    https://portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio#analysisResults
    Interesting.
    Here's a conversation on the topic (at the 5 minute mark):
    For most people, your house is your biggest asset and also your biggest liability. So it’s understandable to think about the financial implications of the most significant purchase you’re ever going to make. But a home is about more than what you buy it for and what you think it will be worth in ten years.


  • Ready For a Melt UP? Bears, It's Checkmate!
    @FD1000 - who said "All I did is presented Tom Bowley view."
    If you are doing that then you should enclose his words in quotation marks so others know that they are his words and not yours.
  • Observation - A tale of two markets (no links)
    Broadly speaking, value funds can be put into two different categories: absolute value and relative value. Absolute value funds look at individual stocks, estimate their intrinsic value (how much the company should be worth based on assets, projected earnings, etc.) and buys stocks of "undervalued" companies. Relative value funds look at individual stocks and rather than comparing them with an "absolute" sense of value, compare them to how the rest of the market is priced. They buy stocks of companies that are "relatively" cheap.
    DSENX differs in two ways. First, it looks at entire sectors, not individual stocks. More importantly, it compares a given sector with its own prior valuations. It could look at a sector that is usually in the ionosphere (very high growth), note that it is now "merely" in the stratosphere, and thus a good "value". It's a different way of trying to buy low, sell high - where "low" means low relative to past pricing of the sector, as opposed to low relative to the current price of the market.
    I wouldn't expect it to give one a lot of exposure to stocks that are cheap on an absolute basis (because it can buy high flying sectors), so in that sense it could satisfy your interest in not going all in on deep value. OTOH, I'm not sure how much it would lean toward value for the same reason. It's a slow motion market timing (sector rotation) fund that rotates based on a sector valuation standard. Might work in a market rotating toward value (in the traditional stock by stock sense), can't say. It could also rotate away from traditional value sectors as they appreciate (in a market move toward value).
    Also, keep in mind that this is effectively a leveraged fund. For every dollar you invest, you get $1 worth of exposure to the underlying index plus $1 worth of exposure to the bond market. Works well if both are going up (or even if the bond portion is fairly flat).
  • Observation - A tale of two markets (no links)
    Wouldn't VFINX or SPY be classified as a blend of Large Cap Value and Growth? Just own a blended fund and wait. A Russell 1000 index would cover an even larger number of both growth and value.
    Over the last 20 years QQQ (Growth) has played catched up to blended funds like SPY and VTI. The catch up has really happened over the last 10 years.
  • U.S. Wind and Solar Installations Are Smashing Records, but the Trend May Not Last
    @WABAC PNW is expanding it solar footprint. But, yes, Arizona regulators appear to be committed to centralized projects. Per M*'s writeup on PNW:
    Current rates are based on a 10% ROE, above the average return in recent base rate decisions in the United States, and include time-of-use rates that should allow APS to manage rooftop solar generation more efficiently. In 2017, the ACC modified the rate structure for new rooftop solar installations that ended a generous net metering rate structure in 2018. We expect this change, population growth, and the strong Phoenix economy, to result in annual electricity sales growth approaching 2% through the next decade.

  • U.S. Wind and Solar Installations Are Smashing Records, but the Trend May Not Last
    @Mark I was considering BEP, TERP, & HASI last fall. The depth and breadth of BEP interested me the most. (I also have an investment in BIPC (formerly BIP) and am comfortable with Brookfield.) But, BEP had rallied ~15% in the prior quarter and TERP had fallen ~15% (at least in part due to market reaction to a share offering). It just looked like a better entry point for TERP. And, in this case, it led me where I really wanted to wind up anyway. (Interesting note. BEPC is up 50% since it was created and BEP is "only" up 25% in that time per StockCharts. Is that simply the market's "no K-1" premium for that space?! Will it endure?)
  • Observation - A tale of two markets (no links)
    Brian Rogers was also the first manager of T. Rowe Price Value fund (TRVLX). He managed it for nearly a decade. Over that span, TRVLX returned a total of 154%, while PRFDX returned 121%. That's about a 2% difference per year. Even back then PRFDX had lost a bit of its shine. It was still outperforming its peers, but not its benchmark Russell 1000 Value.

    M* comparison chart

    (I'm still waiting for some life out of value, but hedging my bets.)
  • MMIN ETF insured muni fund
    I admit to being skeptical of monoline muni bond insurers after their 2008 collapse. Keep that in mind when reading my comments.
    The basic function of insurance is to spread risk. So long as one can expect defaults to be isolated cases and not the result of some systemic problem, insurance works well. (Insurers are financially stressed when there are a lot of hurricanes, fires, or a market implosion.)
    To protect against the, say, 1 in 100 chance that a bond defaults, each bond shaves a little off its yield to pay for insurance to cover that 1 bond in 100. Diversification does something similar. If you own 100 uninsured bonds, and one fails, you'll have lost 1%, just as if each uninsured bond had paid 1% to the insurer to be covered.
    The ability of a fund to diversify away individual bond risk seems to reduce the value of insurance to a fund holder, as contrasted with its value to an underdiversified individual bond investor.
    I also wonder about the low penetration (around 6%) of insurance in the muni bond market. Before 2008, penetration was well over half. Funds that are not required to buy insured munis are still free to do so. Yet they typically buy A/BBB bonds. Either because they don't find enough investors like you looking for that extra protection, or because they don't feel the reduced risk is worth the cost of the insurance.
    Since you're interested in high quality (AA) bonds, you might also consider TEPFX. Over virtually the life of MMIN (since Oct 23, 2017), it has returned a cumulative 7.21% vs. 7.93% for MMIN (using M*'s new performance graphs, not linkable).
    But it has done so with lower volatility, e.g. TEPFX had a drawdown of 6.4% vs. MMIN drawdown of 13.9% from March 9 through March 20). Figures computed from Yahoo Finance tables. That's due in part to TEPFX's shorter effective duration of 3.14 years vs. MMIN's 6.19 years (both per M*).
    TEPFX's portfolio has a weighted average credit rating of AA, the same as MMIN. It's got around 40% AAA rated and 40% AA rated. In contrast, MMIN has virtually no AAA rated bonds (muni insurers are only rated AA and it wouldn't make sense for a natural AAA bond to buy lower grade insurance). Though a huge 90% of MMIN's bonds are rated AA (since they're almost all insured).
    Finally, despite the shorter duration, TEPFX's SEC yield is higher, 1.39% vs. 1.22%, both figures as of Sept. 30th. I haven't yet looked into how TEPFX manages that trick.
  • Observation - A tale of two markets (no links)
    "Smarter people" suggest that......
    Value stocks outperformed growth for half a year after every presidential election since 1980, according to research by Larry McDonald and his team at the Bear Traps Report.
    image
    New administrations often pass a lot of spending bills that rev up the economy. Value stocks typically outperform when growth picks up. One reason is that when there’s more growth around, investors no longer pay up for what was once a narrower swath of growth plays.
    https://marketwatch.com/story/value-stocks-are-poised-to-crush-growth-stocks-after-the-presidential-election-2020-10-09
  • Observation - A tale of two markets (no links)
    It’s amazing how wide the gap is this year between value and growth. Once upon a time Price’s Equity Income fund PRFDX was their flagship equity offering. It’s one of their oldest funds. For many years it was headed by the very capable Brian Rogers, something of a media celebrity in his day. The fund holds a lot of income producing companies and tilts toward value. It’s off a whopping 12.4% YTD. and has stumbled badly for years now. By contrast, Vanguard’s S&P index fund, VFINX is ahead YTD by 9.11% YTD. That’s a gap of about 21% YTD between the two funds. Even crazier, Price’s Blue Chip TRBCX is up 29.3% this year for a YTD difference of more than 40% between the two funds. Absolutely amazing.
    I think this all means something important for us to consider, but I’m not sure what. Smarter people than me can chime in. I got my numbers from Lipper and believe them to be accurate. If you own Price’s diversified income fund, RPSIX, and are wondering why it’s only ahead by 1% YTD, look no further than PRFDX which it holds at generally around a 12% weighting (but it varies).
    Disclaimer - I do not own any of the 3 mentioned equity funds and haven’t for at least 5 years. I do, however, own RPSIX.