Just got a note from Fairholme to indicate distribution estimates are available at the link below:
www.fairholmefunds.com/press-releases/
With distributions for FAIRX at a range of $11.55-$12.35 per share, I will be saying goodbye to Bruce within my taxable account. Looks to be 34% + if my math is correct.
press

Here's my response to RSIVX, In My Schwab I R A
Was a $5000.minimum @ Schwab now $100 (see Ted's post here;" Schwab Slashes Minimums On OneSource NTF Mutual Funds"http://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/comment/71575/#Comment_71575)
PTIAX Buy $100.00 Reinvest Dividends and Capital Gains
Trade Date 11/23/2015
http://www.ptiafunds.com/images/website/documents/fund-documents/ptiax_factsheet.pdf
Another "steady eddie" monthly payer to look @
SCLDX
http://scoutinv.com/resources/documents/literature/factsheet/low-duration-bond-fund-factsheet.pdf?c=1448065575921

FYI: Bill Gross turned to derivatives to make a big bet on emerging-market debt after taking the helm of a Janus Capital Group Inc. fund more than a year ago. One thing he didn’t let stop him: regulatory guidelines that lay out how much fund managers should use them.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-20/gross-doesn-t-let-sec-guidelines-stand-in-way-of-big-bond-bets

@little5bee

The less tinkering I do, the better...the "set-it-and-forget-it" approach appeals to me. I just wonder what the criteria are for selling one sector and buying another...hopefully, at the top!

Have you investigated lazy portfolios? The concept of rebalancing implies not picking at a top, but taking a bit of profit as a position becomes overweighted (sell high), yet "lets its profits run" on the remaining position. The profit taken is then invested in lower performing position as in "buy low". Some links:
marketwatch.com/lazyportfolio
Bogleheads Lazy Portfolios

No, Vanguard does that all the time with outside firms. For example, Vanguard Primecap, VPMCX, paid PRIMECAP Management Company 0.20% last year. From the fund prospectus:

For the fiscal year ended September 30, 2014, the advisory fee represented an effective annual rate of 0.20% of the Fund’s average net assets.

In contrast, Primecap Odyssey funds (e.g. POGRX) paid PRIMECAP Management Company 0.55% last year. From its prospectus:

For the fiscal year ended October 31, 2014, the Advisor received advisory fees of 0.55% of the average daily net assets of each Fund.

Vanguard may strike a hard bargain, but PRIMECAP Management Company still made money on that deal, and paid taxes on it.
Unlike PRIMECAP Management, the Vanguard Group did not negotiate with the funds. It did not seek a profit, but colluded with the funds to provide services at cost. Had Vanguard Group charged the funds a low but profitable fee, the net profits would have gone back to the fund investors anyway (since the funds own the Vanguard Group and thus get all of the profits). Vanguard short circuited this by having the Vanguard Group not get a profit, so there was no profit to return.
Sounds like a distinction without a difference, until you look at one word I inserted: "net". The "net" profits that the Vanguard Group would have made were the gross profits less taxes. If the transaction were booked differently (as profit making, and profits returned to investors), there would have been taxes owed.
So the only effective difference between the way Vanguard set up its fees and the way it "should have" (i.e. via arms length negotiations as it did with PRIMECAP), is that it would have owed taxes. The structure looks like a tax dodge.
As John Bogle has said, Vanguard is a mutual mutual fund company, analogous to mutual insurance companies. These are companies owned by their policy holders. They charge annual premiums, and whatever profits they make (by charging more than cost) are returned to their policy holders. My question is: how are these profits taxed? It seems that Vanguard should be treated the same way. (I don't know the answer to my question, but it seems to go to the crux of the matter).

FYI: Vanguard Group Inc. has reached an agreement to pay several million dollars in back taxes in Texas, the first known payout related to a whistle-blower’s accusation that the world’s biggest mutual-fund company underpaid its taxes by tens of billions of dollars.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-20/vanguard-facing-whistle-blower-cases-agrees-to-pay-texas-taxes

FYI:
Regards,
Ted
November 19, 2015
Dear WEALTHTRACK Subscriber,
At various times in our history the financial industry, Wall Street in particular, has been demonized as a monstrous machine of avarice and greed. This caricature typically occurs during and after market busts. As we have discovered in recent manias in internet stocks, housing prices and emerging markets, few complain when prices are going up. It is only in the pain of the fall that the old suspicions, distrust and political and public uproar re-emerge.
Following the market crash of 1929 social commentator and humorist Will Rogers wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times: “Sure must be a great consolation to the poor people who lost their stock in the last crash to know that it has fallen in the hands of Mr. Rockefeller, who will take care of it and see that it has a good home and never be allowed to wander around unprotected again.” Rogers went on to say: “There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war or famine, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”
Great nineteenth century humorist, satirist and author, Mark Twain wrote of investing: “October: this is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.”
In the aftermath of the last financial crisis there are many Americans who agree with both gentlemen’s sentiments, which is one of the reasons this week’s guest, Jason Zweig wrote his latest book The Devil’s Financial Dictionary.
The book is modeled after the original The Devil’s Dictionary which was published in 1906 and authored by Ambrose Bierce, a then wildly popular satirist and contemporary of Mark Twain.
Zweig, a highly respected financial journalist doesn’t’ usually do satire. He writes “The Intelligent Investor” column for The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several serious books including Your Money and Your Brain and is the editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor .
Thank heavens Zweig has expanded his writing repertoire. The Devil’s Financial Dictionary is both educational and entertaining, with definitions like: “Synergy, n. Often, the only thing one company gets when it buys another”, and “Rumor, n. The Wall Street equivalent of a fact”. On this week’s WEALTHTRACK, we discuss his inspiration for the book and how a better understanding of Wall Street can help us become more successful investors.
In addition, we have an EXTRA interview with Zweig available exclusively on our website. If you are unable to join us for the show on television, you can watch it on our website, WealthTrack.com, or by subscribing to our YouTube Channel. As always, we welcome your feedback on everything we do, and hope you connect with us online, or via Facebook or Twitter.
Thank you for watching. Have a great weekend and a very Happy Thanksgiving!
We have so much to be thankful for living in this great country.
Best Regards,
Consuelo
Jason Zweig New Book: "The Devil's Financial Dictonary"
http://www.amazon.com/Devils-Financial-Dictionary-Jason-Zweig/dp/1610396995/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1448017270&sr=8-1&keywords=jason+zweig&pebp=1448017286176&perid=1VW4ZZ1W68VH4YTJF2DY

"I thought the purpose for MFOers investing in RPHYX was as a substitute for cash. It has performed well in that regard."
I agree. It's taken a hit recently, but if it stabilizes, it's still OK in my book. If it continues to maintain a slow but steady loss of NAV, that's another story altogether. Not losing any sleep, but I am watching.
Edit/Add: The above quote is from Junkster's original post, apparently now deleted. How on earth is it "agitation" to simply discuss all aspects of any particular question? Have we gotten so timid that we prefer an artificial silence to acquisition of knowledge? Good grief!!

Hi, guys.
Sorry about the delayed announcement. I'm away at a professional conference doing stuff on behalf of the college and haven't been able to get near a computer.
This morning we announced the opening of the MFO Premium site (It's the site that a bunch of board members have had access to for the last few months). The note that went out to all of the folks on our mailing list is pasted below. Here's the story: we've been working for a year or so on ways to keep MFO free, open and vibrant. We're mostly getting by each month on $500-600 from Amazon and two or three contributions. That keeps the lights on but not much more. While Accipiter, Charles, Chip and Ed have been incredibly generous in donating their time and expertise, I didn't think that I could sustain MFO for years on hundreds a month. We took two steps to change that. First, we became a non-profit. Second, we designed MFO Premium as both a useful tool and an incentive to encourage folks to contribute. It's mostly Charles's fund screeners and a Works-in-Progress feature where I'm sharing some of the stuff that won't be ready for the cover essay for months (I write slowly).
Our first goal for the site is to cover the cost of the data we've licensed from Lipper; $1,000 a month, which is really a very good price for such stuff. If we're able to raise that much, we'll begin using the surplus to strengthen MFO's ability to help folks. That might mean actually being able to pay folks for stuff they've written or to pay programmers to help with the next redesign of the monthly essay. It's kind of a mess now: a single scrolling essay that runs to 30-40 pages in Word. We're trying to customize a template that will make it look more like a magazine which, we think, will make it much easier to read and navigate. But getting that right requires fairly high level skills and experience. Eventually finding ways to help small, smart fund managers thrive would also be good for us all.
As I note below, we are taking nothing away from MFO. Nothing's getting moved behind a paywall. Period. We're a non-profit with a mission. I'm mostly trying to find a way to keep pursuing that mission.
As ever,
David
---
We are pleased to announce the launch of MFO Premium. We're offering it as a gesture of thanks to folks who have supported MFO in the past and an incentive for those who have been promising themselves to support us but haven't quite gotten there. You can gain a year's access for a tax-deductible contribution of at least $100; if there are firms that would like multiple log-ins, we'd happily talk through a package.
MFO Premium has been in development for more than a year. Its genesis lies in the tools that Charles, Ed and I rely on as we're trying to make sense of a fund's track record. We realized early on that the traditional reporting time frames (YTD, 1-, 3-, 5- and 10-year periods) were meaningless at best and seriously misleading at worst since they capture arbitrary periods unrelated to the rhythms of the market. As a result, we made a screener that allowed us to look at performance in up cycles, down cycles and across full cycles. We also concluded that most services have simple-minded risk measurements; while reporting standard deviation and beta are nice, they represent a small and troubled toolkit since they simplify risk down to short-term volatility. As a result, we made a screener that provides six or eight different lens (from maximum drawdown in each measurement period to recovery times, Ulcer indexes and a simple "risk group" snapshot) through which to judge what you're getting into.
Along the way we added a tool for side-by-side comparisons of individual funds, side-by-side comparisons with ETFs, previews of our works in progress, sample screener runs and a small discussion area you can use if something is goofed up.
We think it has three special characteristics:
1. It's interesting: so far as we can tell, most of this content is not available in the tools available to "normal" folks and it's stuff we've found useful.
2. It's evolving: our current suite of tools is slated to expand as we add more functions that we, personally, have needed or wanted.
3. It's responsive: we're trying to make our tools as useful as possible. If you can show us something that would make the site better and if it's within our capabilities, we'll likely do it.
To be clear: we are taking nothing away from MFO's regular site. Not now, not ever. Nothing's moving behind a paywall. We're a non-profit and, more particularly, a non-profit that has a long-standing, principled dedication to helping people make sense of their options. If anything, the success of MFO Premium will allow us to expand and strengthen the offerings on our free site. Right now we operate on little more than $1,000/month, which is exactly what our recently-signed data licensing agreement with Lipper is going to cost. We're hopeful that premium memberships - at $100, tax deductible, a year for individuals - will allow us to cover the cost of the data feed. If we're able to raise more than that, we'd like to be able to offer some compensation for the folks who write for the Observer and expand our efforts to help guide and support independent managers and boutique firms.
In response to a frequently asked question, we've kept track of all of the folks who've already contributed to the Observer this year. You're not getting left behind but it may take a couple weeks for us to catch up with you.
That's about it. We think that the site is useful, the contribution target is modest and the benefits are substantial. We hope you agree and agree to join MFO Premium.
On behalf of Charles, Chip, Ed and all the folks who make MFO work,

I was sufficiently impressed by David Sherman to commit a large percentage of my bond portfolio to RSIIX about 21 months ago. Since then, after reinvesting distributions, my investment in RSIIX is down by over 2.25 percent. This loss did not particularly bother me until after the recent disclosed credit mistakes. Although all managers are entitled to mistakes, these were errors which apparently, with a modicum of due diligence, could have been avoided. I expected and am paying for extraordinarily prudent security selection, and feel like I am not getting what I bargained for. Unfortunately, now I am watching this thing daily like a hawk, hoping for a some evidence of stabilization or a rebound. It's a crazy way to approach investing. On a day like today, when there is a 32 basis point loss when other high yield funds did well, I wonder if this reflects another mark-to-market situation or another permanent loss due to poor credit selection. I wish I had as much faith in the manager now as when I bought the fund. Can anyone give me comfort that the manager's long term record (which is undisclosed) and current portfolio positioning makes it likely that the performance of the fund will turn around soon? I am losing patience and close to closing out my position.

Sorry, this is no way to live. Either exit, or stop monitoring it. Just my 2 cents. I have chosen to not monitor it. I will look at it quarterly only.

I was sufficiently impressed by David Sherman to commit a large percentage of my bond portfolio to RSIIX about 21 months ago. Since then, after reinvesting distributions, my investment in RSIIX is down by over 2.25 percent. This loss did not particularly bother me until after the recent disclosed credit mistakes. Although all managers are entitled to mistakes, these were errors which apparently, with a modicum of due diligence, could have been avoided. I expected and am paying for extraordinarily prudent security selection, and feel like I am not getting what I bargained for. Unfortunately, now I am watching this thing daily like a hawk, hoping for a some evidence of stabilization or a rebound. It's a crazy way to approach investing. On a day like today, when there is a 32 basis point loss when other high yield funds did well, I wonder if this reflects another mark-to-market situation or another permanent loss due to poor credit selection. I wish I had as much faith in the manager now as when I bought the fund. Can anyone give me comfort that the manager's long term record (which is undisclosed) and current portfolio positioning makes it likely that the performance of the fund will turn around soon? I am losing patience and close to closing out my position.

Optimistic News:
"... the handset business continues to be a wildcard for BBRY. The company has already stabilized, integrated mobile security businesses are already growing, valuation is already good, growth rates are already quantifiable, significant short interest is already there and may need to cover, and the PRIV was just released.
The PRIV cannot be a negative, that's already been built in, but it can be a huge positive. I am not sure if it will come, but if there is even a slight hint that the PRIV is being received well on a global basis BBRY is going to spike even more than it has over the past week or so.
In my opinion, BlackBerry is back. Investors should take notice."
marketwatch.com/story/blackberry-is-back-but-do-investors-know-it-2015-11-12?siteid=yhoof2
POAGX, POGRX, VPMCX, VHCOX all are BBRY's largest mutual fund owners.

"Wow, they phone-called you. How desperate are they for votes???"
Last weekend we were at our place up on the Russian River, north of SF. The phone there is still listed in my father's name (not the same as mine) as it has been since the 1950's. My wife, not being aware of the Matthews situation, answered what she thought was a cold-call from someone selling "an Asia fund", who asked for me by name. That number, while listed in the phone directory under my father's name, has NEVER been given out to any financial or commercial interest, and in fact is rather closely kept information.
If Matthews was the caller, they must have hired some database outfit to call every Northern California listing with my surname.
We have also received two mailings, and multiple emailings at our San Francisco residence. But no phone calls, possibly because the SF number is unlisted.
Sure does sound as if someone is pretty desperate.

Recent MFO fund profile here: James Balanced Golden Rainbow Fund, August 2015.

Hi ron.
The legacy version of Risk Profile above can be obtained by entering a single symbol here. Return ranking is provided for all evaluation periods (1, 3, 5, 10, and 20 years), as applicable. But the metrics, like STDEV, are just for the oldest of these. There is a nice comparison, however, with various reference funds across same eval period as the age group of requested fun (entered symbol).
The outputs above are from MFO Premium, which I believe David will announce very shortly.

@little5bee
I think this is a trading vehicle designed with the intention it be used as an investment vehicle. [see Professor Dave's opinion about this, expressed well in the September Commentary http://www.mutualfundobserver.com/2015/09/september-1-2015/ ] That's a bad recipe, IMO fraught with peril. Pardon (or enjoy) the imagery, but I think someday, paraphrasing former US Attorneys General and convicted felon John Mitchell, somebody's gonna get their titties caught in the wringer.

@little5bee: I'm negative on fund-of-funds, with an .94% expense ratio. I'd rather own a biotech fund, such as FBTCX, a general healthcare fund, like PRHSX, QQQ, in the tech space, and XLY and XLP
Regards,
Ted
M* Snapshot FV
:http://www.morningstar.com/etfs/xnas/fv/quote.html

thoughts on this ETF?
http://www.investmentnews.com/article/20151023/FREE/151029943/advisers-flocking-to-an-etf-that-costs-more-than-a-mutual-fund?issuedate=20151118&sid=ETFREPORT&utm_source=ETF-20151118&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=investmentnews&utm_term=text

Osterweis OSTFX, as of 9/30, had Valeant Pharma @4.3%, yet it is not on M*s list. Hmmm. Well, checking their site, I see they've posted a 10/30 holdings list, and whaddayaknow---- no Valeant, poof, all gone. (also completely gone from OSTVX) O.K., not gonna wait around for the next shoe to drop. Investors will be paying a price for the excision; yr-end CG est. were released today, and OSTFX= $5.14 LTCG [obviously, just a chunk of this is Valeant, other harvesting took place elsewhere during the yr]

It continues, just as Professor Dave speculated it would.

On September 22, 2015, the Board of Trustees of Forward Funds (the “Trust”), including all of the Trustees who are not “interested persons” of the Trust (as that term is defined in the Investment Company Act of 1940, as amended), approved the liquidation of the Forward Tactical Enhanced Fund (the “Fund”), a series of the Trust.

My my, such specificity! I wonder why it was felt such additional wording was necessary.