I have another dumb question.. Did any one compare the performance of their private bonds vs stock portfolio over a long term 10 or 20 yrs period to see which is superior..
I (just like many investors ) blindly 'autopilot' and keep on buying private Corp bonds stocks without really calculate their true performances....

How does it matter? Millenials are stupid. Just like their parent's before them. The parents were also asked same question. And they also couldn't answer those questions. I am trying to recollect by what name they called the parents. I think it was something like, "Poor Customer".
Hey Mass Mutual why are your Life Insurance rates so high? Millenials are asking. Their parents too!
Here's another. With a simple interest of 0.03% on our bank accounts, how many years of interest compounded will it take to yield 10% return? Can you please ask this question to yourself? Millenials are busy trying to figure out how to pay off their student loans.

FYI: The US Dollar index is now up 7.4% since its 2018 closing low hit on February 15th. This morning we just wanted to provide a heads up that the Dollar is breaking above another key resistance level at 95. The index had couldn’t break through 95 last October/November, and it failed once again at 95 at the end of May. The break above resistance at 95 this morning clears out additional supply and provides room to run towards 97 in the near term.
Remember, dollar strength benefits companies that generate most or all of their revenues domestically, while it hurts large-cap companies that generate large portions of their sales outside of the US. This is a key reason why the small-cap space has been outperforming over the last few months — small-caps are much more “domestic” in nature versus large-cap, global behemoths.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.bespokepremium.com/think-big-blog/us-dollar-breaking-above-another-key-resistance-level/

FYI: Most millennials can’t answer simple financial questions correctly, according to a new nationwide survey. Only 17 percent of working Americans ages 25-40 could answer five basic financial literacy questions from Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. (MassMutual) Foundation’s FutureSmart Digital program correctly, according to the report. The questions were on topics including credit scores, compound interest and investing.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.fa-mag.com/news/millennials-lack-basic-financial-knowledge--massmutual-finds-39299.html?print

Hi @Sven
Yes.......emerging markets broadly have been negative since the market whack in late January; with average down of 10-12%. Some U.S. equity sectors continued positive to quasi flat.

The situation is escalating as investors are pulling money from EM ETFs that have over 30% exposure to China. See Ted's earlier post.
https://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/41758/investors-are-bailing-from-emerging-market-etfs#latest

More tariff finger pointing to China....
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/18/trump-says-he-has-asked-ustr-to-identify-200-billion-in-chinese-goods-for-additional-tariffs-at-10-percent-rate.html
Eventually, all of this tariff stuff is going to drive the equity technicals to a sell; as least for a time period.
NO/YES???
Real Time Futures Markets
...Which one(s) is going to bite your portfolio in the arse tomorrow???
Hey, at the very least; we may get a bit of inflation; perhaps that will be the trigger for slowed consumer spending in general. This kind of stuff will get a trend line going, eh?
As the saying goes; keep your powder dry.
Good Evening,
Catch

@johnN: Please look before you leap !
Regards,
Ted :)
https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/41707/bring-harvard-and-yale-investing-to-the-people#latest

Very busy at this house; but take a bit of time to catch this or that for the markets.
The tariff wars (pending or otherwise) are receiving the threats from other countries; as in, "okay, slam a tariff; we'll play the game" and await you "crying uncle".
So, we have Canada, Mexico, EU, India and China as the major announcers OF "tariffs to you", too.
SP-500, to use as a U.S. gauge, is so-so YTD; and one knows a lot of this gain is from the better performing sectors, tech., health, con. discretionary...............so, if these areas start to go to heck; well others suffer, too.
One finds the global today (June 18) not being very happy, not a trend yet, eh?
https://www.barchart.com/etfs-funds/etf-monitor?orderBy=percentChange&orderDir=desc
I'll provide a flash back from 10 years ago (June 16, 2008, Monday).
Our portfolio had its high value point on Oct. 31, 2007 (Halloween Day). International holdings had begun to become more erratic, but most U.S. equity was still fairly happy.
News, data and related going into the end of 2007, especially in Dec. 2007 kept my attention. We watched an erratic equity market for another 6 months; along with the news and data. December of 2007 had very large swings in daily equity.
On June 16, 2008, Monday; we sold 87% of our portfolio.
An existing bond fund holding was kept in place, PTTRX . The equity sells monies were moved into either "stable value" or money market, depending upon the choices at the time. During this period, both stable value and MM were yielding about 5% APR.
With a smile and a head shake I thought about the date this past weekend and being 10 years out from June, 2008.
Currently, we're 51% equity, 95% which is U.S.; all being in tech. and healthcare.
We'll be watching this week more so, as time allows.
Good fortune to all,
Catch

My bad, 401k in title; but not in article discussion. A duh?????
Original comment removed.

With the recent tax law changes, you have to be careful, especially if you're living in a high tax state.
Using the same yields as in the article, 2.88% Treasury and 2.52% for a national muni fund, the after tax yields can be close, and may not compensate for the additional risk of the single A rated Vanguard etf VTEB.
Take a single tax payer in California, with $60K taxable income. Because of the $10K SaLT limitation on deductions, this property owner can't deduct the state taxes on the muni bond fund.
After tax yield on Treasury: (1 - 22%) x 2.88% = 2.24%
After tax yield on muni fund: (1 - 9.3%) x 2.52% = 2.28%
Buying an individual in-state muni bond can get rid of the local tax, but it adds single security risk. Building a whole portfolio of individual munis can help with that, though that requires a substantial commitment and there's still single state risk.
All in all, there are several factors to consider. Even with current rates, the best choice may not be quite as obvious as the article suggests.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/2018/06/17/401-k-investors-why-invest-municipal-bonds/699920002/
As interest rates have risen in recent months and bond prices have fallen, fixed income investors have found few safe places to hide.

JG has said repeatedly, as have others, that the corporate debt explosion is looking like it could be the trigger for the next crisis + recession ... although the recession indicators he talks about are not signalling anything dramatic on the near horizon. (That of course doesn't rule out an intracyclical slowdown like, for example, in 2015, the kind of slowdown ECRI is projecting.)
The 6% T comment is the one comment he's made in quite a while that sounds more like an assertion without any real support rather than the usual well-documented insights in his webcasts. Really, to get an idea of what he's up to, someone would need to tune in to at least a couple of full webcasts.
His ego's pretty puffed up, yes, but the economic, financial, and investment insights are mostly close to the mark and overall useful. The 6% thing is a real outlier, IMHO.

Almost always, the brokerage/fund company will treat covered and non-covered shares as separate batches of funds - as though they were completely different funds. So we can consider the treatment of non-covered shares alone. Those are the shares that I think you're concerned with in your question.
The very short answer may be #2 below: you keep track of costs yourself. The broker/fund company doesn't report non-covered share costs to the IRS.
The rules really haven't changed for non-covered shares with the advent of covered shares. (Except that one can no longer use average cost, double category. Don't worry about that; it was very obscure.)
1) Once you sell any non-covered shares using average cost, you're stuck with average cost for all your non-covered shares. (The covered shares are handled as a separate batch, so they're not affected by this.)
2) It is your responsibility to keep track of each share's cost. Your monthly statement or trade confirmation has this information. Vanguard writes: "For noncovered shares, Vanguard only has average cost information, so you're responsible for your recordkeeping if you used another method."
3) If you don't tell the broker/fund which shares you're selling, you're automatically selling the oldest ones first. (This is true even if you're using average cost, it's just that all the shares, oldest or newest, are treated as though they cost the same.)
4) If you tell the broker/fund which shares you're selling when you sell the shares and they acknowledge your notification, then you can select different shares to sell. It only has to acknowledge which shares you're selling, not the cost you're using.
For example, say you've got one lot of 100 shares you bought on 1/2/2010 @$10, and another lot of 100 shares you bought on 1/2/2012 @$20. (You might also have some covered shares.)
If you tell the broker/fund to sell the shares bought on 1/2/2012, and the broker/fund acknowledges this (some will, some won't), then you've sold those shares with a total cost basis of $2,000 (100 x $20). You still have the 1/2/2010 shares to sell later.
One of the reasons why I prefer Fidelity is that their online system has accepted (and acknowledged) specific share identifications for many years. I also have shares at fund families where they refuse to acknowledge anything about non-covered shares. So then I'm stuck with the oldest shares being sold. I either use average cost or my own records for the actual cost of those oldest shares sold.

@msf, how do you deal with covered versus non-covered shares? Prior to 12/31/2012, the mutual fund companies may not provide cost basis for you to select specific lots to sell.

Seems my ears are burning.
ISTM that Fidelity has started using Danoff (and to a lesser extent Tillinghast) to pitch funds, much as it used to use Lynch.

Fidelity used to care (at least to some extent) about overloading Danoff.
Fidelity closed Contra in April 1998 so that Danoff could "continue to manage the fund effectively given his preference for mid-cap stocks" (Fidelity quote). Ain't that description a hoot? Contra's AUM at the time was 1/4 its current size ($32B vs. $128B).
Fidelity reopened it only toward the end of 2000, after the fund had recently dropped 9% and experienced major outflows. Fidelity stated that the reopening was "to achieve a neutral cash flow".
Fidelity pulled Danoff off of VIP Contrafund at the end of 2007
Fidelity again closed Contra in April 2006. It reopened the fund only toward the end of 2008, after it had dropped 40% over the previous 12 months. Fidelity stated that the reopening was because it had "not been able to generate sufficient levels of new sales to offset current and future redemptions ... [Fidelity hoped to] bring some equilibrium to cash flows [so that Danoff could] effectively direct [his] investment strateg[y]."
---
But that was then. These are the 2010s, when Fidelity is trying to staunch the outflow out of its actively managed AUM.
In 2012, Fidelity launched its Fidelity Series funds to improve its floundering Freedom Funds (funds of funds). At the time, M* wrote: "While it's still unclear how Danoff and Tillinghast's new strategies will be used in the Freedom Fund portfolios, they'll likely at least displace some of the struggling funds and ultimately bolster the series' underlying lineup."
Admittedly, FVWSX (and its clone, FAMGX) are small tasks for Danoff, currently with "just" $6.7B AUM and $1B AUM respectively. At $33M, it hardly seems worth mentioning the Fidelity Flex clone(?) created in 2017.
Fidelity started selling comingled pools to 401k plans, since employers were leaving "regular" mutual funds. So in 2014, Danoff was given Contrafund Commingled Pool to manage, now holding $23B.
Just last month, after a decade away from VIP Contrafund, Danoff was handed back this $20B fund to manage.
So why not sell the Danoff name in Canada as well? It's not as though Fidelity Canada didn't already have enough managers. Oh, wait.
https://www.fidelity.ca/fidca/en/products/pm/list
Thus, in 2017 Danoff got his first Canadian charge. Now comes this second one.
Compare this history with how Fidelity has treated Steve Wymer. His FDGRX fund was closed the same time as FCNTX in 2006, but never reopened. Like Danoff, he was taken off of his VIP fund, but he never had to go back to it. No Canadian funds for him either.
Fidelity puts one manager front of the public and lets the other quietly run the superior fund.
---
It used to be that New Insights was the preferred Danoff fund (assuming one could get in without the load), because it was smaller and supposedly more nimble. But it hasn't worked out so well - a three star fund with a performance rating of neutral (average). Danoff does not walk on water.
Before buying the sizzle, check what's on the grill. It might be prime, might not be. I don't know, but I'd do a little research first.

Another excellent interview with macro-man F. Trahan, this one on the playout of this business cycle. Cornerstone's basic story (somewhat similar to the one being told at ECRI): leading indicators have rolled over, pointing to a potential slowdown and a shift to risk-off sometime in 2019.
In the meantime, Cornerstone is telling clients to stick with the somewhat limited universe of equities that are still experiencing solid growth, with less attention than normal to valuation.
Lots of good detail in the piece ...

Here’s the full story which is much better than the reformed broker one:
https://bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-13/gundlach-sees-6-yield-in-3-years-anyone-else
I and almost every analyst think Gundlach’s wrong, but if he’s right there’d be no point owning either stocks or bonds in 2020. Both markets would tank. Meanwhile Japan despite all the austerity shills has survived with large deficits and ultra low rates for decades. In fact it was priming the pump even more that got that country’s equity market moving again in recent years. It’s true the tea party nuts may push back as Gundlach says, but how fast would they roll over if markets and their beloved portfolios started to tank as rates went higher? I think Gundlach is increasingly sounding more like one of them than viewing the situation with the appropriate level of detachment.

FYI: The Reason Most Quant Funds Fail:
Regards,
Ted
http://ritholtz.com/2018/06/quant-funds-fail/

I'd start to believe and settle for a nice ten year chart related to what the author is jabbering.
About 10 tickers on a nice chart would be nice, eh?
Oh, well; if one has been invested in large U.S. growth for 10, 5 or 3 years you're do'in okay.