BobC, you wrote that the DOL rules do not apply to ordinary IRAs.
"DOL rule & regs. Remember they apply to 401k rollovers, not regular IRAs and personal accounts. "
That was just plain wrong. BICE may not apply to some vanilla IRAs, but that's not what the regs are about. The regs are about holding advisors of ERISA and IRA accounts to a fiduciary standard.
In fact, BICE is, as the 'E' states, a set of exemptions to the fiduciary standard. So if BICE doesn't apply to vanilla IRAs, that means that those IRAs are held to an even higher standard, i.e. one without exemptions.
"A number of attorneys will tell you that moving 401ks to level-fee accounts does not remove the BICE form ..."
Even ML agrees with that. BICE is required for moving 401ks, but only for moving the accounts and not not for maintaining the level-fee accounts once established. From the ThinkAdvisor article I cited:

Merrill says that it will not use the Best Interest Contract exemption “to service or support ongoing IRA brokerage account activity.” However, “when appropriate, we will use this exemption to recommend enrollments in our Investment Advisory Program from a retirement client’s IRA brokerage accounts, or rollovers from ERISA 401(k) plans.”

The original DOL proposal would have done away with commission-based accounts. If the big boys want everyone in wrap accounts anyway, and the big boys wrote all the rules, how did we get a final version that restored commissions?

When the DOL initially floated this proposal in 2010, it stated that fiduciaries could not be paid on commission. Since then, however, it has bowed to pressure and admitted commission-based schemes as long as the broker signs an agreement stating that the advice is given in the customer’s best interest.

http://ibd.morningstar.com/article/article.asp?id=718083&CN=brf295,http://ibd.morningstar.com/archive/archive.asp?inputs=days=14;frmtId=12, brf295
As far as level of detail goes, on the one hand, the regulations are not short; on the other they don't spell everything out to the penny (e.g. what constitutes reasonable compensation). Should the regs be even longer and more detailed, or shorter and potentially subject to more litigation?
I'll stick with Voltaire on this one - the perfect is the enemy of the good. Things will sort themselves out over time. Having a fiduciary rule is better than not having one.
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/215866-le-mieux-est-l-ennemi-du-bien-the-perfect-is-the

FYI: These ignored dividend ETFs could give your portfolio some big-time income.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.kiplinger.com/article/investing/T022-C000-S015-3-dividend-etfs-you-completely-overlooked.html?rid=SYN-yahoo&rpageid=15565&yptr=yahoo

FYI: Treasuries dropped, pushing benchmark 10-year note yields to a four-month high, as investors bet along with Pacific Investment Management Co. that the prospects have grown for higher interest rates.
Pimco says the Federal Reserve may raise its benchmark two or three times by the end of 2017. Stronger economic growth and inflation would drive the central bank to act, Pimco said in a Twitter post Monday. The company, which manages the world’s biggest actively run bond fund and is based in Newport Beach, California, made the posting as rising oil prices added to speculation U.S. inflation will accelerate.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-11/pimco-sees-two-to-three-hikes-by-end-of-2017-as-treasuries-fall

FYI: (This is a follow-up article)
Capital Group recently made its entire American Funds open-end lineup available commission-free on Fidelity and Schwab's brokerage platforms, providing greater access to one of the industry's flagship firms. Investors who have avoided the lineup may want to reconsider it. Indeed, the firm's competitive advantages run deep, especially in equities. Below is a select overview of the firm and lineup. It elucidates American Funds' key competitive advantages and areas for improvement.
Regards,
Ted
http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=773741

No confusion on my part. The b/d community, especially the second-tier companies like State Farm, found their bread and butter in 401k rollovers. The big BDs like ML have essentially dropped clients with small-value accounts already. IRA or 401k or other qualified plan, they won't deal with the average investor. The impact for most BDs is the rollover, not IRAs in general. The DOL intent is one thing, but it is no accident that their effect is pretty small on the big guys, but potentially very hard on the smaller BDs. Why else would the MLs have said they could live with the new regs. They have pretty much already adjusted their business lines, or could go that route without disrupting their bottom line too much.
ERISA regs may have said that 401k plan advisors had to act as fiduciaries, but we all know many 401k plan investment options have been ludicrous at best, with all sorts of hidden fees, trail commissions, and other goodies that benefit the BDs and the reps. As we already know, many investment company 401k plans have options that are only their own funds or mostly just their funds. So the existing ERISA regs have been ignored for a long time. But that's off topic.
A number of attorneys will tell you that moving 401ks to level-fee accounts does not remove the BICE form, that it will still be required to prove the three standards I mentioned in my previous post. The big question is what is "reasonable compensation". Of course that is not defined and is thus open to a range of interpretations.
The smaller guys, many of which have no "advised" or "fee" brokerage accounts to begin with and do not have the infrastructure to go that route, are the ones to take the brunt of new regs. Again, I do not believe this was entirely unintentional. They simply do not have the bucks to pay lobbyists anywhere close to the big boys. So their influence on the new regs was in many cases next to nothing.
Keep in mind the regs are packed into more than 1,000 pages (only our wonderful federal government could do this), and of course there is no coordination with the SEC/FINRA/State regs, and there is no enforcement of the new rules, except for anticipated future lawsuits. This is all a long way from over, as the many federal agencies fight over who will regulate whom in the advisory business.
Your comment on ML keeping commissions on non-qualified accounts raises another issue, and begs the question: "If commissions are not fiduciary in nature for retirement accounts, how are they fiduciary in nature for other accounts?" Obviously they are not, but investors are expected to swallow that camel since non-disclosure will remain part of that process. In the meantime, ML and other big wirehouses are forcing their reps to jettison "smaller" clients so they can move more and more accounts to "fee" accounts.
Like our friend Vintage, I am more cynical as I age, and I am cynical about this whole DOL thing. To think for one moment there were no politics involved is silly. While the result of the regs is having some positive results (like State Farm's decision), I have no doubt that money still talks in Washington, and folks like ML and other biggies will see a rather small impact on their business. They will keep shedding skins and re-naming what they do.

I think you're confusing a rule about giving advice on what to do with 401k money (i.e. how or whether to roll it over), with the general fiduciary rules that DOL has promulgated. 401k plan advisors already had to be fiduciaries under ERISA. The broader impact of the DOL rules was not just to extend fiduciary duties to rollover advice but to IRAs in general.
Here's a clear column on the rollover rule:
http://www.planadviser.com/Magazines/2016/May-June/Rollovers-Under-the-Fiduciary-Rule/
What the DOL says about the advice that's covered by their rule:
"Covered investment advice is defined as a recommendation to a plan, plan fiduciary, plan participant and beneficiary or IRA owner for a fee or other compensation ..."
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-activities/resource-center/fact-sheets/dol-final-rule-to-address-conflicts-of-interest
This is why ML is keeping commissions on taxable accounts but is backing away from commissions on all types of IRAs.
A little more writing from the same ERISA lawyer who wrote that column above, this time on why ML is making its change:

[He] said there are several likely reasons Merrill decided to drop new advised brokerage accounts. "It is easier to comply with the new [DOL fiduciary] rules through level fee advisory services; if BICE isn't used, the prospect of class-action lawsuits is diminished. As I understand it, they don't currently accept small clients into brokerage accounts with individual advisors, and [Merrill] likely believes that larger clients are amenable to level fee accounts." Further, Merrill "believes that their clients will be well served by these arrangements."

http://www.thinkadvisor.com/2016/10/07/dol-fiduciary-rule-forces-merrill-to-drop-commissi?page=2

It's not that a lot of advisors are getting out of the business. The fact is that their broker-dealers are restructuring their business lines and are choosing to move away from the rep-sold fund and annuity business. For example, State Farm recently told their agents/reps that they would no longer be allowed to sell annuities, mutual funds and other investments. For many agents/reps, this was a big chunk of their annual income, right or wrong.
There have been and will be other big and small firms that will do the same, since they have known all along what they were forcing their agents/reps to sell were not in clients' best interests. Their billboards touting "Call me about your 401k rollover" were just teasers to get unsuspecting folks to move their dollars to a expensive, commission fund with front and ongoing payouts to reps, or to an even worse crappy annuity. The companies knew this all along, so the DOL rule & accompanying regs made the end to their self-serving business line come sooner than it would have otherwise.
Most of these firms say they can no longer afford to "service" small accounts. But there was never any "service" involved anyway. The end of trail commissions is a bright spot and means one less way the commission folks will keep screwing investors.
We have always acted as fiduciaries for our clients. No commissions in our investment advisory business. We have no insurance licenses. We were one of the first RIA firms to use retainer fees, which now account for much of our business. The new DOL rule and regs will have little impact on us. We may need to use the BICE form when we roll over a client 401k when we were not already including it in our advisory services. The form is essentially a rollover analysis form that requires the advisor to meet three standards: 1) Prudent Advice, 2) Reasonable Compensation, 3) Truthful and Forthcoming Disclosure.
No question that the Broker/Dealer companies' restructuring is because they know none of these three requirements can be met with the way their agents/reps now work. It will be most interesting to see how a few firms in Central Ohio that rely almost exclusively on annuity sales will revamp their marketing, somehow justify their sales practices when it comes to the BICE form. A number of them spend huge dollars on media advertising, of course never mentioning the "A" word. Time will indeed tell.
I will admit that I am surprised by the speed with which some of the change has occurred. Whether more firms will decide to go the State Farm route is the real test of the DOL rule & regs. Remember they apply to 401k rollovers, not regular IRAs and personal accounts.

@AndyJ, I got the load info from the RiverNorth prospectus, p.37.

From the language - "as a percentage of offering price" - that's for the ipo. After the ipo, a buyer buys shares from other investors, through the middleman of an exchange, just like a stock with the normal commission, with the price set by investor demand, not by the offering price. There's no mechanism for collecting a load and sending it to the fund sponsors after the ipo. Here's the M* thread where this is discussed. It's a bit confusing the way expenses are reported in the prospectus.

@Sven The e-mail notice I received is for the OSTIX teleconference on the 11th as well as for the OSTFX and OSTVX webinar on the 26th--- "Replays will be available approximately a week after the discussions," it states.
@AndyJ I may be able to tune in for awhile. The fund is back up to 22.6% cash (fact sheet has been updated), so they are expecting something to happen fairly soon; however, those guys keep their cards pretty close to the vest, so-to-speak, so I'm not anticipating any great revelations about strategy from Carl K. in tomorrow's tele.

@Sven Speaking of OSTIX, Carl Kaufman will be doing a 3rd qtr. teleconference tomorrow. Tune in here, if you have the time to spare:
https://secure.confertel.net/tsRegister.asp?course=6191432

@msf I'm still interested in hearing about favorites of the members of this forum in the F-1class of American Funds, but since I'm a fan of 2030 funds and you mentioned PIMCO, I'll make another comment:
I've noticed that PIMCO RealPath 2030 fund has performed quite well over the past year (although it has performed poorly over the past 3 and 5 year periods). I'm certainly not going to make a purchase decision based upon 1 year performance, but can anyone help me understand what components of its portfolio have made it perform so well over the past year's market conditions?

@Bee, why don't you just carry 2 HSA accounts. Open up a cash account with your bank or credit union for what you think you will use per year and keep the rest invested. I think you can do that though not 100% sure. I did have 2 accounts with 2 different banks after I changed jobs.

Funny you should mention the target date funds. Prof. Snowball was quoted in the WSJ a month ago criticizing these funds for adding charges on top of the underlying fee expenses. "Extra premiums are 'generally a sign of greed,' says David Snowball ..."
See: http://www.wsj.com/articles/when-target-fund-fees-are-off-target-1473127500
What he missed was that the AF target date funds are built on top of the cheapest share class of funds (R-6, which even most institutions can't get). The extra premiums in the target funds are "other expenses" - the cost of their extra paperwork and administration. Then the F-1 shares add 0.25% to pay Fidelity and Schwab to offer them without commission. (I'd rather pay the brokerage commission, but that's another matter).
In contrast, Vanguard uses Investor class shares instead of Admiral or Institutional class shares underneath (thus reaping a similar incremental fee to cover administrative expenses). Fidelity has it both ways. With its actively managed target funds it plays Vanguard's game of hiding the target fund costs by using a more expensive share class for the underlying funds. With its index-based target funds it adds on the administrative costs explicitly, just as AF does. A little honesty there, at least.
Then you have PIMCO, which adds a management fee of at least 1/2% on top of the underlying funds fees in its Real Path 20xx target funds. Here's the prospectus. On top of that, on top of the 12b-1 fee that it adds to all but its institutional class, it has the audacity to add another 0.25% to its class D management fees, to hide the extra it's paying Fidelity and Schwab to offer the shares NTF, and maybe make a little more profit. Just what Prof. Snowball was talking about.
More than anything else, it's fees that soured me early on PIMCO; I've never understood why PIMCO, a load fund family, gets a pass.

Looking at a 5 year chart visually tells a cautionary story as well:
A 72% 1 year investment gain in GDXJ...
merely breaks even for a 3 year investment in GDXJ...
and is little consolation to a 67% loss to a 5 year investment in GDXJ:

FYI: Gold has gone gangbusters this year, rising with jitters about everything from a weak global economy to the possibility of a President Trump.
After gold's best first-half of a year since 1980, gold-related funds are piled atop the leaderboard for returns. The average fund that invests in stocks of gold miners has returned more than 70 percent in 2016, for example. Such glittering performance has drawn even more investors, and nearly $21 billion has poured into funds that buy either gold bars or the stocks of mining companies in the year to date through August, according to Morningstar. In 2015 investors pulled $2 billion out of those same funds.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.bigstory.ap.org/article/5f021dd9651a459b9faeae1b26aa89ed/after-huge-gains-even-gold-fund-managers-advise-caution

I took a look at the American Funds Class F-1 offerings on the Fidelity platform. Nothing seems remarkable, except for their Target Date offerings.

We have been working with clients for more than 30 years and have seen a boatload of changes in the fund industry. As one poster noted, advisors have been able to use F-1 shares for many years, but individual investors could not. But the fact is that fee-only advisors have been the ones using this option, not the commission folks. It is always frustrating for us to see a new client come in with their account statements that show 4-6 American Funds, with a ton of overlap, thinking they are diversified. What was their "advisor" thinking? Pretty obvious, seems to me. Also know that for years, American Funds were "top shelf" options in many commission-based brokerages, meaning the rep earned a higher percentage of the gross commission if she/he pushed those products to clients. Not sure if this still happens, but the fund companies paid the broker-dealers to get on that top-shelf list. While American Funds, by and large, have been an ok group, their numerous large cap US funds are pretty-much defacto index funds when you compare size, number of holdings, Beta, STD, and other measures. And they fared about the same as the S&P 500 in the 2007-08 meltdown. There are certainly much worse load fund families out there.

The party's over.

Unfortunate but true. Time to sit back and wait for another 2013-like bargain.

I pay $180 odd right now for FIOS phone, cable and internet. In Feb I'm up for renewal and my bill will go up $60. Have a decision to make.
Charging $300 is too high. If that happens, will give up my landline and TV and then pay whatever I need to for internet.

Maybe I've had one too many tonight, but I can't make $180 and $60 come to $300, no matter how many times I add them together.
---

@VF, call and ask for retention packages and incentives. Tell them you are gonna bail, absolutely. They will come up with something, believe me.

Yes - That worked with DTV for us once. They substantially lowered our monthly rate for a year. Suspect it would work for VF. Solves the problem for a while - perhaps not a long term solution.

For an allocation fund whose performance has hugged the return of the S&P 500 for the past 10 years, go for the Bruce Fund (BRUFX). It's by far my biggest MF holding.

Don't you wish Bruce Fund offered a cash position? I have my H.S.A with Bruce and would like to park some of my money in a cash position instead of having to redeem shares when I need to pay for health related expenses.
I do love the Spartan website. Old School. I have automated my contributions by using the bill pay services offered through my bank's checking account and I have learned to tempered my enthusiasm for redemptions since the US mail is the only method available for receiving withdrawals.
I'm hoping all of these "old school hurdles" are too much trouble for the "above average high tech" investor to except and it remains the fund less traveled.