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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.
  • Will there 2nd wave..?
    Hello
    Will Dows 1000 points down today at closing?
    First covid19 wave may never ended imho [according to many medical statisticians]
    possible massive dive today and next few days. maybe more bloodbaths on Dows Street
    Stay hunkered down/ safe
  • Schwab institutional class funds
    @little5bee You are correct. I work for an investment consulting firm & in my personal account under our umbrella, I am able to but Inst class shares, RIA only funds (like interval funds), and even currently closed funds so long as at least 1 account under our huge master account holds the closed fund, usually all with $1 minimum.
  • Hussman's Finally Right - HSGFX
    he still has $1,000,000,000 ???
    The only manger I know who was worse is Henry Van der Eb who ran the Mathers fund. He nailed Black Monday and then sat in cash forever after

    I nominate Charles Steadman for the dubious honor of being the worst fund manager.
    "In the 30 years before Charles Steadman's death in 1997, the average mutual fund was up more than 20-fold. Three of the four Steadman funds were down; all four of his funds - including his lone 'winner' - landed among the 10 worst-performing funds over that three-decade period, according to Lipper Inc."
    Link
  • Bullish investors pull $105bn from US money market funds in four weeks
    https://www.google.com/search?q=Bullish+investors+pull+$105bn+from+US+money+market+funds+in+four+weeks&oq=Bullish+investors+pull+$105bn+from+US+money+market+funds+in+four+weeks&aqs=chrome..69i57.2263j0j7&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
    https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/74b413b4-a7c2-4488-a669-e6de4a0133b5
    Bullish investors pull $105bn from US money market funds in four weeks
    Investors and companies have started to redeploy the record amounts of cash they stashed in ultra-safe money market funds at the height of the Covid-19 turmoil, eager not to miss out on a rapid recovery in riskier assets.
    Bull market continues?
  • President Trump is great for your 401(k): strategist
    trump +115
    biden -130
    recently according to vegas
    Clinton was -700 trump +475 back in 2016
  • President Trump is great for your 401(k): strategist
    It is so sad to see a candidate like Biden with health issues. I wouldn't let him manage a small business with 10 employees. Why his family and friends don't tell him the truth?
    And then there is Trump, regardless of what you think he will be elected again even after Dems pull out all their stunts.
    The pendulum has to swing left and right :-)

    start a pool, place your large bet, money where mouth is and all that good stuff
  • Schwab institutional class funds
    I don't have an account with them but see a couple institutional class funds listed with $100,000 minimums that also say "institutional customers only" under availability (TRGLX for example). I spoke to a Schwab rep over the phone who said retail customers cannot buy these.
    Has anyone been able to buy into institutional class funds through a Schwab online brokerage account?
  • Hussman's Finally Right - HSGFX
    he still has $1,000,000,000 ???
    The only manger I know who was worse is Henry Van der Eb who ran the Mathers fund. He nailed Black Monday and then sat in cash forever after
  • President Trump is great for your 401(k): strategist
    It is so sad to see a candidate like Biden with health issues. I wouldn't let him manage a small business with 10 employees. Why his family and friends don't tell him the truth?
    And then there is Trump, regardless of what you think he will be elected again even after Dems pull out all their stunts.
    The pendulum has to swing left and right :-)

    Do you think that our next president will pick your great mayor of Atlanta as a running mate?
  • President Trump is great for your 401(k): strategist
    Hello
    sorry to be political. I think there is maybe a LARGE blue wave in Nov 2020 according to PBS/ABC CNN CNBC and MSNBC probably Biden wins 360 to 178 according to many polls/predictions today. Biden is leading by 10-12 points overall in all states and also tied in Az, GA, Tx. Huge lead in Mn + 17. Think Biden may have better healthcare and free for all, Ms Harris will oversee "undertable" it as VP. Biden has >60s% chance of winning US Election today.
    Stock may not do well though next year because Biden not very friendly toward Corporate Americans. If biden win I will buy more real physical gold, maybe another uprising and US may turn into ?? Marxist Environments and market crash maybe in late 2020 early 2021 because of 2nd wave covid and tanking enconomies..
    I will sit this election out. These crumps/idiots running are bad for us. Wish Pete, Andrew Yang or Bush Juniors were still running I would vote for them.
    Senate/House/Potus Democrats may not be good for US -No checks nor balance.
  • O’Shaughnessy Small Cap Value Fund to liquidate
    updated:
    https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1027596/000089418920004855/oshaughnessy497eliquidatio.htm
    497 1 oshaughnessy497eliquidatio.htm O'SHAUGHNESSY 497E
    O'Shaughnessy Small Cap Value Fund
    Class I: OFSIX
    Supplement dated June 15, 2020 to
    Prospectus dated November 28, 2019
    O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, LLC, the Advisor to the O’Shaughnessy Small Cap Value Fund (the “Fund”), has recommended, and the Board of Trustees of Advisors Series Trust has approved, the liquidation and termination of the Fund. This decision was made due to the unfavorable economies of operating a small fund with no realistic prospect for future growth.
    The liquidation is expected to occur after the close of business on July 27, 2020. Pending liquidation of the Fund, investors will continue to be able to reinvest dividends received in the Fund.
    Effective June 16, 2020, the Fund will no longer accept purchases of new shares. In addition, the Fund’s Advisor will no longer be actively investing the Fund’s assets in accordance with the Fund’s investment objective and policies and the Fund’s assets will be converted into cash and cash equivalents. As a result, as of June 16, 2020, the Fund will no longer be pursuing its stated investment objective. Shareholders of the Fund may redeem their investments as described in the Fund’s Prospectus. Accounts not redeemed by July 27, 2020 will automatically be closed and liquidating distributions, less any required tax withholdings, will be sent to the address of record.
    If you hold your shares in an IRA account directly with U.S. Bank N.A. you have 60 days from the date you receive your proceeds to reinvest your proceeds into another IRA account and maintain their tax-deferred status. You must notify the Fund or your financial advisor prior to July 22, 2020 of your intent to reinvest your IRA account to avoid withholding deductions from your proceeds.
    Please contact the Fund at 1-877-291-7827 or your financial advisor if you have questions or need assistance.
    Please retain this Supplement with the Prospectus.
  • President Trump is great for your 401(k): strategist
    It is so sad to see a candidate like Biden with health issues. I wouldn't let him manage a small business with 10 employees. Why his family and friends don't tell him the truth?
    And then there is Trump, regardless of what you think he will be elected again even after Dems pull out all their stunts.
    The pendulum has to swing left and right :-)
  • Hussman's Finally Right - HSGFX
    From wiki(link)
    John Peter Hussman (born 15 October 1962) is an American stock market analyst and hedge fund owner. From 1992 to 1998, Hussman was Professor of Economics and International Finance at the University of Michigan.[2][3] In 1998–2000, Hussman set up Hussman Strategic Advisors, a hedge fund which successfully anticipated the dot-com bubble.[4] Hussman also successfully anticipated the 2008–09 credit crisis[5], but has severely under performed since then.
    In September 2010, Hussman managed US$ 6.7 billion.[6][4] Since the post-2013 recovery, Hussman has remained bearish, asserting that central banking "quantitative easing" ("QE") has distorted markets and created a false recovery, and inflated asset prices, which had led to extremely poor investment performance.[6] As of 30 September 2019, Hussman's Strategic Growth fund had a 10-year average annual loss of -7.23% (-53% total loss), compared to a 13.24% average annual gain (+250% total gain) by its benchmark, the S&P 500. [7] By 2018, asset under management declined to USD 1 billion.[6][8]
  • Wirecard $2 billion Fraud and International Small Cap Funds - Wasatch, Artisan, etc.
    A related concern, one which we've discussed in other threads, is proxy voting. Many mutual fund companies say they are most effective via direct engagement as opposed to voting for shareholder initiatives. Their "engagement" apparently doesn't result in learning about the companies they invest in, or as you suggest even worse they let problems slide, deciding not to effect change or at least bail out.
    Some companies like Vanguard and Blackrock pretend to actively engage with companies:
    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/13/blackrock-vanguard-found-religion-on-climate-doubts-are-growing.html
    While others don't even put up a pretense. The manager of the aforementioned Oakmark International Small Cap instead quotes Milton Friedman:
    “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
    https://oakmark.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/09/17-0630_Oakmark_ThirdQuarterReport.pdf
    A reminder - much of what Enron did was within the rules of the game (mostly legal). "It often comes down to the premise that just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s ethical [emphasis in original]. Sure, the MTM [mark-to-market] accounting method is used in responsible, pragmatic ways daily, by all kinds of ethical companies, but it was also used by the likes of Enron to dupe millions of investors out of their life savings."
    https://bizfluent.com/info-7747847-enron-scandal-ethics.html
    Your scenarios of what the fund companies knew and when they knew it go from bad to worse. It seems there are no white hats in the industry. The best one can do is look for lighter shades of gray.
  • President Trump is great for your 401(k): strategist
    I’ve had friends (yes, still have a couple) who claim that not enough people own 401-Ks, IRAs, etc. to make a difference in voting. I think what they miss here is that those who own such investments tend to be better educated and wealthier folks and, hence, are more likely to show up and vote than the population at large.
    Some of that advantage, however, is being taken away by aggressive Secretary of States in the various states who are aggressively pushing voter participation. Ours has begun mailing out absentee voter applications (not ballots) to all registered / eligible voters weeks in advance of elections. But I think it’s wrong to discount the 401-K effect. People do tend to vote their pocketbook. Helps explain T’s fascination with equity levels to the point where he once publicly chastised Jay Powell because the DJI was dropping a few points while Powell was speaking!
  • Wirecard $2 billion Fraud and International Small Cap Funds - Wasatch, Artisan, etc.
    https://cnn.com/2020/06/23/tech/wirecard-ceo-markus-braun-arrested/index.html
    Wirecard (WCAGY) acknowledged on Monday that €1.9 billion ($2.1 billion) in cash included in financial statements — or roughly a quarter of its assets — probably never existed in the first place. The company withdrew its preliminary results for 2019, the first quarter of 2020 and its profit forecast for 2020.
    I can't tell you the number of times I've seen this company as a top holding at international small cap funds such as Wasatch's, Artisan's, Oakmark's and Grandeur Peaks. Although I don't think it's a top holding anymore, this CEO Braun has been in charge for many years and I wonder as with the Sequoia Fund/Valeant and Oakmark/Washington Mutual cases what it says about active management that such frauds go undetected for years. Active fund managers get paid a lot of money to ostensibly do deep research on companies. Yet when these scandals happen you usually don't hear boo about it from them, and I wonder if they either completely missed the fraud despite their deep research or, worse, kept quiet about it. Do managers/analysts report financials that look weird to authorities? And why do they so rarely say anything about the fraud after the fact? I'm not pointing at any particular manager. I'm saying this in general always makes me a little more skeptical about managers' abilities. It seems like this fraud may have been ongoing for years, just like it was in the other examples.
  • The Big U.S. Stock Indexes Are Telling Different Stories
    https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=7QPyXuGCHMGGsQXLy7WACg&q=The+Big+U.S.+Stock+Indexes+Are+Telling+Different+Stories&oq=The+Big+U.S.+Stock+Indexes+Are+Telling+Different+Stories&gs_lcp=ChFtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1ocBADMgUIIRCrAlDjEljjEmCRG2gAcAB4AIABjgKIAY4CkgEDMi0xmAEAoAECoAEBsAEA&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-hp
    Incognito
    The Big U.S. Stock Indexes Are Telling Different Stories from www.wsj.com
    4 hours ago · A surge in big technology stocks has helped the Nasdaq Composite rally 12% in 2020, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average of blue-chip stocks is down 8.8%. The benchmark S&P 500 is hovering in between them, off 3.5%. The Nasdaq's advantage over the Dow and S&P 500 is the biggest since 1983
    Seems market not hunkered down as expected
  • Hussman's Finally Right - HSGFX
    John’s been betting on economic and stock market collapses forever. We finally got the 30% bear market he’s been prophesying for about ten years and 20,000 Dow points. Unfortunately, it only lasted like two weeks and the market immediately rebounded. That’s got to be frustrating, waiting all that time to be right and then being right for a different reason and then it comes and goes in a blink anyway…
    something-to-hate-for-everyone/
    Hussman's Petition:
    house-committee-on-financial-services-senate-banking-committee-stop-the-federal-reserve-from-printing-money-to-buy-junk-bonds?
  • Learn About The Many Types Of Retirement Income Generators
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevevernon/2020/06/19/learn-about-the-many-types-of-retirement-income-generators/#3e69b1e48a52
    Learn About The Many Types Of Retirement Income Generators
    There are many types of retirement income generators (RIGs) that each produce different amounts of retirement income. My Retirement Income Scorecard compares the amounts of retirement income that are possible for 10 different RIGs, which is one consideration for choosing a RIG or combination of RIGs to build your retirement income portfolio.
    Social securities
    Fixed incomes products
    RMD from 401k
    Annuities
    Bond and bond funds
  • You are crazy to invest in bonds
    perhaps of interest; taken, though not verbatim, from email and docs making the rounds at GS
    Subject: Some assorted market stats and anecdotes about what has happened in the last months

    It has been a few months of records. They say a lot about the relationship between risk-taking by economic policies and financial conditions.
    1. 2020 has likely featured the sharpest -- but the shortest -- recession in US history (certainly since the 1850s for the US, and since WWII on a global scale).
    2. in turn, we’ve just seen the strongest rally out of a bear market since ... 1932.
    3. the US alone had conducted $2.3T of QE in the past three months (Treasuries + mortgages). For those keeping score at home, that’s an average of around $35B of bond buying per business day since mid-March.
    4. GIR expects zero interest rates in the US for several more years -- until the economy reaches 2% inflation and full employment -- which is perhaps not until 2025.
    5. largely thanks to fiscal support, GIR expects US disposable income to grow 4.0% in 2020.
    7. USTreasury planned to borrow $3T in Q2 alone; despite that supply glut, we’re just off the alltime low yields in US 2y notes and 5y notes.
    8. in that same general context, US 30yr mortgage rates are down to alltime lows .
    9. the past six weeks have seen the largest amount of global equity issuance on record, at $205B.
    10 and 11 are driven by the Fed purchases of corporate bonds:
    10. March saw record outflows from corporate bond funds (-$42B); we’re now witnessing record inflows to corporate bond funds (+$85B since the start of April).
    11. it’s not just that we’re witnessing record new issue in the credit markets, it’s that we’re also seeing record low corporate financing costs (e.g. AMZN raised $10B of capital at the lowest 3/5/7/10 and 40y yields ever).
    What is the rationale for buying 40y bonds now? Don't they want more flexibility? Don't they think that there is a high probability that underlying conditions will change well before 40 years?
    One possible explanation: as yields get lower, investors have to go out the yield curve (thus take more duration risk) in order to obtain higher yields (think of a pension fund that needs to generate a fixed return). This would be one example of the portfolio-rebalancing effect of QE. Also note that few investors ever hold bonds to maturity, and a 40y bond would "enjoy", because of its longer duration, a large price appreciation should interest rates fall further (of course the opposite is true if rates increase). Recall that, in 2018-19, the Austrian 100y bond doubled in price as yields declined from 2 percent to 1 percent.
    So this would be investors betting that interest rates will not increase from here and may decline further.
    12. March saw record outflows from equity mutual funds and ETFs; one can argue we’re now seeing legitimate signs of retail investor euphoria (e.g. a record # of account openings at US retail brokers).
    13. subject to interpretation: the market cap of MSFT is larger than the entire US HY market.