Abby Joseph Cohen: Fixed Income Headed For Trouble @bee I see what you are saying but like I said, I can tell when/why stock going up and so my fund holding that stock going up. I can "see" the stocks it owns. I don't "see" the bond holdings in my funds to recognize how they they are moving. I can't chart them because I don't have a ticker. So I feel quite blind.
Basically, I want my bond management active, and I don't invest in bond index funds. Hopefully my manager knows what he is doing. And by the way, i take it back when I said I don't own any bond only funds. I do own JUCDX, but that's my only true bond fund.
The thing is I don't get the "diversification" through bonds and so I have never targeted a bond allocation for my portfolio. We keep debating whether stock market is a casino. In its present form I do believe it is. By the same notion, the bond market is also a casino. I therefore do not see the probability of me winning in one casino vs the next. I cannot figure out the odds of my winning in blackjack vs roulette either.
Analysis did not work for me regardless of bull/bear market or rising/falling interest rates. ANALysis on the other hand works every time. Hence my excessive skepticism about manager skill and celebrity worship. "Smart" Investor has to be the successful investor, which in my mind is anyone who makes money. There is no smart investor if he is producing negative returns. I mentioned in another thread I purchased PLMDX few months back. I don't know diddly about how it invests. I heard Robert Arnott on Consuelo Mack then used my ANALysis and it told me to buy. If not I wouldn't have.
When I say ANALysis it is charting, tea leaves, alignment of the planets, ...everything. Last
10 year someone can tell you he read tea leaves and that told him to be in the stock market. I'm exaggerating, but I hope you see my point. He can write a research paper to "prove" his ANALysis. Until it stops working. So When you Buy, not What you Buy. That's it. If you manage to catch the turn, then good. If you think you did, but are proven wrong you take your lumps immediately. This has served me well. I will leave the Analysis to someone else.
Abby Joseph Cohen: Fixed Income Headed For Trouble @VinetageFreak,
Supply and demand should work for bonds just like it is for stocks. So simply saying the inverse relationship exists is IMO not good enough. There needs to be substantial availability of higher yielding bonds of same maturity out there to meaningfully depress the prices of the lower yielding bonds.
Great point!
Some additional 'gurgitation.
An Individual 30-yr bonds doesn't act any differently in year 29 than they did in year
1. You still get your coupon...and, you eventually get your principal back (in year 30). A bond fund is a mix of 30-yr bonds which were bought at different times with a variety of yields and are blended together to provide a coupon at a relative share price. Its the movement of this bond fund share price comparison that is made with other blended bond fund that has some concerned. If rates drop, yesterdays 30-yr bond fund is more valuable in price (if you were to sell). If rates rise, yesterdays 30-yr bond fund is less valuable (again, if you sell).
If you don't sell and just live off the dividends (yesterday it was 4%...tomorrow it may move to 5%), irregardless to the bond fund's share price you have less concern about the direction of interest rates. I believe the typical fix income investor is spending down shares of their bond fund as well as spending the coupon. This may be what AJC is concerned about. If you never sell your bond shares the individual securities will eventually mature out of the 4% yields and it will be replaced with new, potentially higher yielding contracts. Selling shares is what 'fixes the price" and obviously you don't have control over other investor's selling. This could be at a loss compared to what the shares were first bought at.
This is the price of admission to get at the bond coupon in a bond fund. Price appreciation and coupon yield are what we have enjoyed for the last thirty years with bond funds. A Bond fund share price can rise and fall significantly even when interest rate move just a small amount.
I wonder if it might be easier to think of a bond fund like an annuity. If you invest in an immediate annuity you give up principal for a stream of income. Think of a 30 year bond fund or any other bond fund the same way. If you discipline yourself to only collect the coupon from the bond fund you have "an annuity" that will always have a cash value. The 'cash value" (share price) changes as a result of its comparative value to other bond funds (and their underlying coupon).
Also, if you reinvest your dividends you are nudging your cost basis lower (buying additional shares at lower share price) if that share price did indeed dropped.
Abby Joseph Cohen: Fixed Income Headed For Trouble Lets look at the one comment she made on fixed income investments:
A Goldman analysis of 10-year government bonds around the world shows ...
... that AJC knows very little about the breadth and depth of the fixed income market, if the only reference (and apparently the only category she thinks exists, if she's equating it to the entire FI market) is to intermediate-long sovereign debt.
Thanks, Bee, for reading & reporting. It might have been interesting reading, but I'm completely done with wasting time on these equity uber alles types pontificating on an asset class they're utterly ignorant about.
Abby Joseph Cohen: Fixed Income Headed For Trouble I have a question.
I do get the inverse relationship between bond prices and prevailing interest rates. This relationship should apply to every bond "category" as well. If long term interest rates are rising, long term bonds will fall. If short term interest rates are falling short term bonds will rise. So bonds of different durations may not move in the same direction, and it is not just about what is "best". If both short and long term bonds are falling in the face of both short and long term interest rates rising, saying short term bonds are better investment because they are falling less to me is a little ridiculous, because CASH is actually the best performer.
So my problem is this. Maturity, and more specifically how does it matter if I'm purchasing a 30-year bond, but it was issued 29 years back. What is difference between buying this bond which has 1 year left to mature vs buying a brand new 1-year bond? If the market is going to adjust the price of the 30-year bond for me discounted to the present, and if the 30 year bond yielded (say) 4%, vs the 1-year bond which yields (say) 1%, could I still not buy the 30 year long term bond and come out ahead? Only in this case I might be doing that through a Long-Term bond fund, but I'm told I'm not supposed to not do that right now because interest rates can only go up from here.
That's why I can never bring myself to invest in bond funds and rely on balanced funds for my bond exposure. Even bond index funds have to turn over their portfolios. So really effective maturity and effective duration of the portfolio I think should matter and hence M* provides that information (some times). However, I've always had trouble co-relating that information with actual performance of the fund. Because those two numbers can keep changing even for index funds.
For the stock index fund which is market weighted I can visualize in my head when it goes up and when it goes down. For bond funds I can't.
Finally, revisiting the inverse relationship between price and interest rate. If we issue $100M worth of bonds of given duration in the market yielding (say) 4%, and very soon later (just to diminish effect to outstanding maturity) issue just $1M worth of bonds of same duration but yielding 10%, because of lack of availability of quantity of higher yielding bond, I don't see how prices of the $100M bonds can fall meaningfully. Supply and demand should work for bonds just like it is for stocks. So simply saying the inverse relationship exists is IMO not good enough. There needs to be substantial availability of higher yielding bonds of same maturity out there to meaningfully depress the prices of the lower yielding bonds.
I often mention I use ANALysis for my investing. THIS is the reason. If I use Analysis, then I buy MCI WorldCom instead of Verizon in the late 90s. If I used ANALysis I would have bought Verizon.
Thanks for reading (if you did).
Abby Joseph Cohen: Fixed Income Headed For Trouble Lets look at the one comment she made on fixed income investments:
A Goldman analysis of 10-year government bonds around the world shows there’s not one bond where the firm thinks yields are as high as they should be, Cohen said. “This is problematic. We think that yields can and should go higher. They are already so low it’s not going to impact the economy per se, but we do worry about the portfolio impacts. When yields go up, prices go down.”
A
10-yr government bond is a
10 year contract that is an agreement to pay a coupon (interest...however high of low) for the duration of the contract (in this case
10 years). If you hold the bond to maturity in your portfolio you get your full investment back plus interest. Price only goes down relative to newly contracted bonds if you sell when terms are better (rates have risen). Price goes up if newly contracted bonds are written when there is downward pressure on rates (which has happened many times recently). Bond price can also be impacted by "flight to safety" when there is a shock in the equity market. these bond funds spike in price due to a lack of availability of these bond shares (everyone wants them...no one is selling).
What to do? She doesn't offer any strategies, but there a few.
In a rising rate environment ladder individual bonds (just as you would ladder CDs). Another strategy in a rising rate environment would be to shorten your duration. Also keep in mind that with rising rate often comes Inflation...remember TIPS...they may play a bigger role as rates rise and trigger higher inflation.
Aren't Bond manager's capable of navigating these changes? I can understand that an un-managed Bond Index fund will have periods of adjustment (price loss), if investors are selling these investments into rising rates, but even these funds will evolve their holdings into the prevailing rates over longer time frames. Cash or a ST Bond fund may serve as an additional strategy for those who need income in
1-3 year time frames. Holding IT Bond funds for longer periods will help the IT bond fund adjust over 3-7 years to these higher rates. Investors have to think more about how to divide up the bond funds: ST, IT and LT. This would be similar to laddering cash in CDs.
Couple of Articles:
Evaluate the risk of owning bond mutual funds versus individual bonds in a rising interest rate environment:money.usnews.com/money/blogs/the-smarter-mutual-fund-investor/2014/07/31/the-perils-of-bond-funds-in-a-rising-interest-rate-environmentBest Bond Funds For Rising Interest Rates:https://thebalance.com/best-bond-funds-for-rising-interest-rates-2466827
Vanguard's Irritating Perch On Moral High Ground @Sven. I really think Balanced, Target funds is all the "robo" advising that's needed. I'm frankly not sure why we need "robo" advisors. Sounds like marketing gimmick to me. Targeted toward investors who feel they are doing something more substantial than investing in a balanced/target date fund. If one feels the need to do something more "active" I don't see why that cannot be done individually.
I'm trying to imagine situation where investor answers questions and robot comes out with answer, you should be invested 9.4% in Asia out of which
1.6% should be in India. I don't get it.
Matthews View on Asia's Importance We used to invest with Matthews who have done well for us. More recently we invest with Andrew Foster's Seafarer fund exclusively. His long term record including those from Matthews Asian Growth & Income is excellent, particularly during market downturn.
I also have a smattering of SFGIX but I don't consider it an Asia fund. Unless I'm mistaken one of the reasons Foster struck out on his own was so that he could "diversify" out of Asia if he wanted to. You can see from his fund he has done exactly that. Also, look at his "developed" vs "developing" split. Not exactly all "emerging".
Anyways, for me investment in SFGIX is investment in the manager first and foremost. Just like it is for Matthews funds. I'm trusting their expertise. I'm assuming manager risk more than market risk. If I want to literally overweight Asia, I would buy index fund and assume market risk. If I had Vanguard Pacific Index or something in my 40
1ks, I would allocate to it.
Switch It Up This Year: Buy In May, Till November Stay FYI: "Sell in May and go away" is perhaps the oldest saw on Wall Street, but it appears there's no shortage of U.S. mutual funds doing exactly that this year.
After all, the S&P 500 .SPX has delivered a total return, including reinvested dividends, of
10.8 percent over the last six months, essentially capturing all of the average rolling
12-month total return on the index since
1990, so why not cash in?
Regards,
Ted
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-stocks-weekahead-idUSKBN18M2DW
Abby Joseph Cohen: Fixed Income Headed For Trouble Reminds me of "Trouble in River City" from a favorite musical. I think the warnings about trouble in fixed income have been running now for almost as long as The Music Man.
A kid born when these "warnings" first began must be about ready to enter college today. If the fixed income was invested in longer dated bonds or high yield bonds the parents probably did well in saving for college. Equities however likely out-performed fixed-income over the past 15 years (but turned many stomachs during the '07-'09 time-frame).
I like Abby Cohen a lot. A regular on Rukeyser's old show. But if you're not aware, Abby is a perma-bull. Can't ever recall her being negative on equities. FWIW
Josh Brown: What We’re Telling Clients About European Stocks
What funds are you using for international exposure? Thanks.
Like I said whatever is available in my retirement accounts. I only do such ANALysis in my tax deferred accounts. My core is Vanguard 500 Index which happens to be in all my 40
1ks and I add international exposure at the border based on quality of fund available to me.
In one 40
1k have Europacific growth. In another I have a smattering of PASDX and MALOX. At TRP I am using some TRRLX. At Scottrade I bought more OAKGX and OAKIX. I also bought more MACSX and MAPIX.
Not sure that helps. Basically I'm not married to any fund or manager who run traditional funds. In my taxable accounts, I just look once every quarter and decide where to send money. This I do to manage asset allocation. In my 40
1ks I'm not really doing asset allocation. You can say I'm doing trading. I have models I run that tell me how much to be invested in the markets. 0% -
100%
Alphabet And Amazon Bring Back Ghosts Of 1,000s Past @VFYes, my largest equity MF, CFIMX, owns a large slug of AMZN and GOOG! ...and Davis were once "value" investors!
I made comment on Weitz on another thread, likening him to Miller. Sorry, but I think Davis and Co might fit the same mould. Managers, you should stick with your style. People should decide if they want to invest and stay invested in you. Your style needs to stick. Hussman sucks but he is consistent.
It is very important for me for my managers to have courage of their convictions. Changing definition of "value" to market your fund is sheer hypocrisy. Amazon has a profit margin of less than 2%. Biggest hypocrite, M* has fair value estimate of $
1050. WTF? Compare with Walmart's numbers. COBYX owns Walmart. Another consistent fund PVFIX. So are CGMFX and FAIRX. They are investing exactly how they say they will and what I expect.
CFIMX has no business owning Amazon. FCNTX is supposed to be contrarian. HTF is Amazon contrarian? I don't get why people don't just buy QQQ if they want to play high flying growth stocks. Or buy Profunds Leveraged fund.
FAAFX -- has the Great Pumpkin arrived? I've said this before, and I'll say this again.
1) When you buy vs What you buy
2) do not reinvest dividends (especially in the Dweebners and the Dorkiwitzs)
I'm in both CGMFX and FAIRX playing with the houses money. I have the luxury to just wait and see if they turn around or go bankrupt.
No such luck with Hussman though. Because I didn't follow my 1-2 mantra when I bought it back first in 2001. I thought if anything this was the fund to DCA into, and so I did. Now I'm selling little every year. Might sell out completely this year. Funds managed by 1-2 people need 1-2 mantra.
PVFIX, I'm considering adding now after so many years of just holding.
COBYX, I did not time perfectly but not doing too badly. Not sending new money though.
