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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.
  • IOFIX/IOFAX marketing materials/prospectus
    Hi @FD1000: I too in the past have been addressed in ways that were rather brash by some that are still present (and posting) on the board.
    Years back, I was called out to start posting my spiffs, as I made them, since I was reporting good profits. With this, I am now happy to report that I am up better than 23% on my last block of buys and only have one position buy that is not yet to green light from the recent market swoon.
    There are some on the board that have recently lost a good sum of money in their fund selections (one fund especially) and, with this, I have detected their testy expressions within their post. Rather than letting this run me off I decided to get tough skin and remain. Hopefully, you will as well.
    Thanks again for your updates on fixed income funds. It is much appreciated.
    My best to you.
    Old_Skeet
  • New TSP Funds Coming July 1
    https://www.fedsmith.com/2020/06/02/new-tsp-funds-coming-july-1/
    New TSP Funds Coming July 1
    L2020 will closes and monies will be rolled into income Lincome funds...also new L fund 2060 and 2065 are introduced
    L 2065
    L 2060
    L 2055
    L 2050
    L 2045
    L 2040
    L 2035
    L 2030
    L 2025
    L Income
    Do other firms gave 2065 TDFs
  • CORronavirus Roundtable - The Closed-End Funds Opportunity Persists
    https://www.google.com/amp/s/seekingalpha.com/amp/article/4351221-coronavirus-roundtable-closed-end-funds-opportunity-persists
    Roundtable - The Closed-End Funds Opportunity Persists
    Jun. 1, 2020 7:00 AMExchange Listed Funds Trust - Saba Closed-End Funds ETF (CEFS)ADX, DMO, EHI
    Summary
    We gather a panel of authors to discuss closed-end funds and their set-up heading into June.
    While distributions have been cut in some places, other areas have held up nicely.
    Combined with still wider discounts to NAVs, nimble investors may find opportunities.
    Pdi
    Adx
    Will add these to watch lists
    Regards
  • June 1st Commentary is up.

    The Jensen Quality Growth funds are really attractive -- but on principle I refuse to hold a fund that charges 12(b)-1 fees.
  • We’re in a new paradigm for stocks, this analyst argues. Get ready for permanently higher valuations
    @royal4 We still have bread, but currently no circuses to pacify the masses. Without sports and/or work, all of the hormones of the angry young men--of every race, color and creed--explode in violent ways. Occassionally, when there aren't enough work and sports to go around and societies suffer from excess capacity, the leaders start a good war to deal with all the angry young men without jobs. Then all of the angry young men end up in body bags instead of rioting and the older generation wave their little flags at parades and call the angry young men heroes instead of thugs for inflicting violence on foreigners. That hasn't happened--yet.

    Stylistically, shades of Ernest Hemingway - whether intended or not. A Farewell to Arms is rife with testimony to the futility and senselessness of war, in particular the perversion of once
    sacrosanct words to obscure reality.
    “‘We won’t talk about losing. There is enough talk about losing. What has been done this summer cannot have been done in vain.’ I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. … Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or allow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”
    https://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2017/12/hemingway-on-war-i-was-always-embarrassed-by-the-words-sacred-glorious-and-sacrifice/
  • IOFIX/IOFAX marketing materials/prospectus
    Every post you make FD is all about you. "I saw this. I did that. Every one else is dumb for missing it." The point is the likelihood of anyone 'investing" in this fund, not trading, would not have seen a 40% drop in 2 days on the horizon.
    Yes, totally BS. And what is the smiley face for?

    You are correct, I didn't know in advance how bad it could be but I expected it to be bad.
    Your reaction is typical, I see anger and disbelief when I tell you my thoughts and how I operate. The smiley is to let you know it's all expected.
    In this thread(
    link), I documented many trades that I have done since 2-28-2020. I made several similar posts on MFO too, see (here). Why no admit I made a great call.
    I'm pretty sure you will come back and request me to post every trade I make :-)
    My trading style has been established for years which helped me in the last 3 years since retirement in 2018. I will sell any bond fund that loses more than 1%, actually, I even sell earlier if other funds in the same category behave differently or I can find a better fund according to my goals.
    Here is the bottom line: while you claim it's all BS the facts show I sold all my portfolio to cash prior to the meltdown.
    You sound a little cocky, but I wouldn't worry too much. There's some sour grapes goin around lately. I got some crap for commenting on a post on someone bummed on staying in cash, not buying the dip, and furthermore, anticipating a second covid wave to justify in another thread. These things happen. We've all f-ed up. No big deal.
  • June 1st Commentary is up.
    Hi David,
    Regarding this about active mutual funds versus passive ETFs, I have a few quibbles:
    They have not been repeatedly defamed by self-interested marketers and lazy financial journalists looking for cheap stories. “80% of mutual funds failed to beat the market last year” is utterly fatuous – beating the market isn’t the goal, one year is an irrelevant time period, risk matters as much as returns, very nearly all passive products also trail the market – but has made it hard to approach investors, young, professional or otherwise. The term “skunked” comes to mind. The repackage offers a clean slate.
    While looking at a year's worth of performance versus the benchmark isn't very meaningful, it is actually over the long-term that active funds struggle the most to beat their benchmarks, and many financial articles have made that point. In fact, I think it is far more common to have an active fund beat a benchmark in the short-term, have an excellent year but struggle over the long-term as the cumulative hurdle effect of its fees gets harder and harder to overcome. Also, while there are many passive ETFs that don't match their benchmarks either, in the main categories like large cap, mid-cap and small-cap, they often do and sometimes even beat their benchmarks because of securities lending, or only lag a minuscule amount. Also, the long-term record of many funds versus their benchmarks doesn't necessarily improve when adjusted for risk. The SPIVA data on funds versus their benchmarks has risk-adjusted returns over the last fifteen years:
    https://us.spindices.com/resource-center/thought-leadership/spiva/
    92% of large-cap funds, 86% of mid-cap and 87% of small-cap funds have lagged their benchmarks on a risk-adjusted basis over the last 15 years. In fact, the one equity category where active managers had a fighting chance in this data were international small-caps where the benchmark won only 68% of the time over 15-years. Fixed income funds were better, but not by as much as one would hope
    Even gross of fees, active managers struggled:
    The risk-adjusted performance of active funds obviously improves on a gross-of-fees basis, but even then, outperformance is scarce. Only Real Estate (over the 5- and 15-year periods), Large-Cap Value (over the 15-year period), and Mid-Cap Growth funds (over the 5-year period) saw a majority of active managers outperform their benchmarks. Overall, most active domestic equity managers in most categories underperformed their benchmarks, even on a gross-of-fees basis.
    As in the U.S., the majority of international equity funds across all categories generated lower risk-adjusted returns than their benchmarks when using net-of-fees returns. On a gross-of-fees basis, only International Small-Cap funds outperformed on a risk-adjusted basis over the 10- and 15-year periods.
    When using net-of-fees risk-adjusted returns, the majority of actively managed fixed income funds in most categories underperformed over all three investment horizons. The exceptions were Government Long, Investment Grade Long, and Loan Participation funds (over the 5- and 10-year periods), as well as Investment Grade Short funds (over the 5-year period).
    However, unlike their equity counterparts, most fixed income funds outperformed their respective benchmarks gross of fees. This highlights the critical role of fees in fixed income fund performance. In general, more active fixed income managers underperformed over the long term (15 years) than over the intermediate term (5 years).
    On a net-of-fee basis, asset-weighted return/volatility ratios for active portfolios were higher than the corresponding equal-weighted ratios, indicating that larger firms have taken on better-compensated risk than smaller ones.

    One important saving grace I think is that SPIVA only considers risk as volatility and not downside capture or Sortino ratios. So that should be considered. All of that said, the threat from passive ETFs is most certainly real and should not be underestimated.
  • June 1st Commentary is up.
    I hope you like it.
    The more sophisticated among you (you possibly the folks who just have a ton of time on their hands) might find the KL Allocation site interesting. Their blog shares a lot of inter-asset analyses ("the spread between A and B implies C" sorts of stuff) that leads them to (a) be cautious about the current market and (b) conclude that bonds are a steadily withering option. They make a defense of gold (10% of holdings) as a steadier option going forward. I'm not qualified to assess the statistical arguments, but they seem provocative.
    While Ed is not a great fan of gold as a buy-and-hold investment, he does share the general assessment of bonds.
    The Jensen fund is one in a line of product extensions in the industry, where the good domestic fund in niche X is succeeded by the firm's global fund in the same niche. The argument, in general, is "we research every one of those international firms in depth already, since each of them poses a potential challenge to our domestic portfolio companies."
    The American Century fund will be interesting to watch, at least, because it's a good side-by-side test of the same discipline's performance in two public wrappers.
    I actually had two other pieces nearly ready, one on T Rowe Price Multi-Strategy and one on climate change and investing (an update). Sadly, one of my son's high school classmates, a passenger in a car too near a rolling protest, was killed Sunday night. While he more "knew of" than "knew" her, it was a sort of deeply disturbing event for the folks in his wide circle of cyber-linked friends and classmates. And the source of much talk and reflection here.
    David
  • New coronavirus losing potency, top Italian doctor says -- Reuters
    Here is a link to an article that reviews the initial report from Italy. A couple of takeaways:
    ...the clinical findings in Italy likely do not reflect any change in the virus itself. Zangrillo’s clinical observations are more likely a reflection of the fact that with the peak of the outbreak long past, there is less virus in circulation, and people may be less likely to be exposed to high doses of it. In addition, only severely sick people were likely to be tested early on, compared with the situation now when even those with mild symptoms are more likely to get swabbed, experts said.
    All viruses evolve over time, and many infectious-disease experts think the novel coronavirus will eventually become less lethal to human beings, joining four other coronaviruses in causing common colds. But there is no solid evidence so far that it has changed significantly in the five months since it was first recognized among patients in Wuhan, China. “The virus hasn’t lost function on the time scale of two months,” said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Irvine. “Loss of function is something I expect over a time scale of years.”
    https://msn.com/en-ca/news/world/experts-dispute-reports-that-coronavirus-is-becoming-less-lethal/ar-BB14TMhE
  • In BlackRock We Trust
    Keep your eye on Blackrock:
    The Federal Reserve began its historic purchases of corporate bonds exchange-traded funds, almost half of the Fed’s purchases went into BlackRock funds, according to ETFGI, an ETF research and consulting firm.
    The five largest purchases by the Fed, in order, were iShares iBoxx $ Investment Grade Corporate Bond ETF (LQD), Vanguard Intermediate-Term Corporate Bond Index Fund ETF Shares (VCIT), Vanguard Short-Term Corporate Bond Index Fund ETF Shares (VCSH), iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (HYG) and SPDR (JNK).
    The optics of the Fed’s purchases of iShares ETFs are controversial, given that BlackRock (ticker: BLK) is running the Fed’s three debt-buying programs. BlackRock has said it won’t charge management fees on the iShares ETFs it buys behalf of the Fed. A BlackRock spokesperson wasn’t immediately available to comment.
    BlackRock’s iShares has 38.1% of the exchange-traded product market; Vanguard has 26.5%, and State Street’s SPDR ETFs has 16.5%,
    blackrock-is-biggest-beneficiary-of-fed-purchases-of-corporate-bond-etfs
  • Hi Charles, June commentary clarification please.
    Hi @Charles
    You noted in your commentary: Under Chairman Janet Yellen and continued by Jerome Powell, the Fed tried to “normalize” rates by gradually increasing the so-called Discount Rate from near zero to 2.4% over a three-year period from January 2016 through December 2018. The 10-year rose above 3%. It did not last long.
    The average US Treasury fund drew down about 11% during this period with longer duration being hardest hit, as one would expect. Vanguard Extended Duration Treasury Index (VEDTX) was off 20.4% during this period. BlackRock iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT) off 15.2%. Its 7-10 year cousin (IEF) off 7.1%.
    1. I used the period you noted (Jan. 2016 - Dec. 31, 2018) for IEF, TLT and threw in ZROZ (a bit more volatile than TLT, but represents 30 year, AAA zero coupon bonds). For whatever reason, VEDTX wouldn't chart.
    2. Perhaps I've had either not enough or too much coffee; OR I don't understand your use of "drew down" vs total return. Secondly, is that I am suffering from cranial/rectal inversion; and thus, not aware of the status.
    --- VEDTX had the following total returns for the years being discussed (per M*): VEDTX , performance link at Vanguard.
    2016 = +1.53%
    2017 = + 13.52%
    2018 = -3.49%
    This CHART is for IEF, TLT and ZROZ. Total return is at the right edge of the chart for the 3 year period of Jan. 2016 - Dec. 31, 2018.
    Please alert me to any boo-boo's with statements or charts.
    Thank you.
    Catch
  • IOFIX/IOFAX marketing materials/prospectus
    Every post you make FD is all about you. "I saw this. I did that. Every one else is dumb for missing it." The point is the likelihood of anyone 'investing" in this fund, not trading, would not have seen a 40% drop in 2 days on the horizon.
    Yes, totally BS. And what is the smiley face for?
    You are correct, I didn't know in advance how bad it could be but I expected it to be bad.
    Your reaction is typical, I see anger and disbelief when I tell you my thoughts and how I operate. The smiley is to let you know it's all expected.
    In this thread(link), I documented many trades that I have done since 2-28-2020. I made several similar posts on MFO too, see (here). Why no admit I made a great call.
    I'm pretty sure you will come back and request me to post every trade I make :-)
    My trading style has been established for years which helped me in the last 3 years since retirement in 2018. I will sell any bond fund that loses more than 1%, actually, I even sell earlier if other funds in the same category behave differently or I can find a better fund according to my goals.
    Here is the bottom line: while you claim it's all BS the facts show I sold all my portfolio to cash prior to the meltdown.
  • AMIDEX35 Israel Fund to be liquidated
    Typo. The Timothy Plan fund in Israel is not TPIAX, but TPAIX. Israel Common Values Fund.
    Timothy Plan’s Israel Common Values fund invests solely in companies either domiciled or incorporated in the country of Israel. One of the only funds of its kind, Timothy Plan is proud to offer investors the opportunity to support the growing markets of a nation that maintains a common moral fabric of the United States.
    https://timothyplan.com/our-funds/summary-icv.php
    Except now it is a singleton fund. As to the moral fabric part, @Crash posted an interesting link on how Israel and the US are sharing common values.
    https://www.amnestyusa.org/with-whom-are-many-u-s-police-departments-training-with-a-chronic-human-rights-violator-israel/
  • New coronavirus losing potency, top Italian doctor says -- Reuters
    Cross immunity (immunity due to exposure to similar viruses in the past, e.g. certain variants of the common cold) is another theory that might explain what's happening in Italy and elsewhere. Spain has just had its first day without any COVID-19 deaths. This was not expected when they started easing their lockdowns
    Or it's just warm weather and we'll be royally screwed in the fall.
  • New coronavirus losing potency, top Italian doctor says -- Reuters
    Oh well, the WHO says no. And this guy used to be Berlusconi's personal doctor. Could be true, but it sounds like we shouldn't get our hopes too high yet.
  • BUY - SELL - PONDER - MAY 2020
    Yup you're right, @Crash . Check out yahoo finance , trailing returns vs benchmark for one year11+ % What is the saying? Measure twice cut once. I checked your link & one other & they show 26+% !! Yahoo may have a different time zone ?! I also did Yahoo closing adjusted price & that came out even higher % return.
    Stay Safe, Derf
  • IOFIX/IOFAX marketing materials/prospectus
    The basics are still the same: Know what you own, expect the worse(which is what I do) and past performance and volatility are not guaranteed.

    I call BS on that advice FD. None of what you said is usable. This was a fund with good consistent returns and a very low STD to boot. It would have been easier to interpret the risk if the funds literature would have been more accurate, especially on liquidity and possible fire-sale risk. The fund collapsed 45% before the dust could settle. 40% within 2 days. Trading limits on mutual funds that only allow trades after the market closes gives an investor 2 days as the quickest reaction time to unload. Most here aren't day traders so your advice on this fund is worthless.
    Sorry, but your infallible preaching is a bit nauseating.
    Well, several quotes from the past
    1) 2-28-2020-According to MFO databased when you search for Multi sector funds for 3 years + best martin ratio you get the following funds
    Fund performance ANFIX 5.3 IOFIX 10.6 SEMMX 5.1 BDKNX 5.7 ANGLX 4.2
    2) 2-29-2020-I'm taking my profit and watching. There is no way to be sure how IOFIX will do if markets go wild
    3) 3-3/2020-There is no guarantee of what will happen in the future. I think the worse was in 11/2018 when IOFIX lost more than 1% in one day.
    Over the years:
    I have watched IOFIX jumping 2-3 times annually 2-3% within days while others didn't.
    In 2008 MBS got crushed. ORNAX(HY Muni) fell over 40% and more than others.
    I can't remember the fund name but it was a bond fund in 2010-11 that I owned, sold before it crashed and you couldn't sell it for years.
    Look at the above, item 3, how can a fund make 10% annually which is double than most in its category. IOFIX is an exotic fund with illiquid bonds and its daily pricing is just a guesstimation. When something looks too good to be true, it usually is
    So, with the above in mind, I always watched IOFIX very carefully and was in/out over the years.
    Did I know it will crash over 40%? of course not, but I thought 20% was a possibility.
    As a trader, I also have specific guidelines. Prior to retirement, I would sell any bond fund that lost 3%, after retirement, it's just 1%.
    I also learned years ago while trading stocks that when markets get wild and you try to sell a stock with low volume, it can go down 30% in seconds while QQQ,SPY go down just several %.
    BTW, I also sold my other riskier fund which was NHMAX(HY MUNI), prior to the crash and it lost over 22%.
    If you still think the above is BS, then be it :-)
  • We’re in a new paradigm for stocks, this analyst argues. Get ready for permanently higher valuations
    With the election 5 months away and Trump's popularity sagging as always, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if Trump started a foreign war as a distraction from his continued onslaught on his own country. Forget about 100,000 + deaths from the coronavirus and the highest unemployment numbers since the depression, a foreign war would take over the headlines and rally his base and possibly undecided voters in his favor. Boy would Trump look presidential ...
    My betting money is on him finding a reason to attack Iran.