FYI: Are you interested in a fund with high turnover or high income payouts? Be careful where you hold it.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.forbes.com/sites/baldwin/2014/10/30/funds-with-killer-taxes/print/

FYI: History shows that the next six months may make investors money.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-halloween-treat-for-the-stock-market-2014-10-31/print

I worked in healthcare almost my whole life. Working in a hospital I could see which areas had the promise of great growth. Biotech has to be one of the leaders. It's amazing to see the advances in this area. Bio-pharma is a huge part of this. Big pharma is also big but not as much as bio. Diagnostic imaging is another good area. The scanners keep getting better and better. Because of this, areas like cardiac intervention and stroke intervention have been some of the fasting growing treatments. Cardiac catheterization has been growing in an effort to stop the heart attack while in progress. Most good hospitals developed a time frame from door to table as we called it. Anyone presenting themselves with chest pains would get initial treatment. Confirmation with testing would follow and then right to the cath lab. The hospital I worked in had two cath rooms at first. When I left they had 12.
Finally hearth are was late in the game to adopt technology but they are diving head first into it now. Medical records, patient charts and the processes of ordering tests and drugs are now computerized. Most hospitals have medicine cabinets that dispense doses of medicine instantly. Doctors can enter orders on a computer screen instead of writing which always needed second opinions as to what they wrote.
If there were ETFs that dealt with these three areas definitely, I would invest in them for the long term.

Jerry, this is an interesting point about the long term view. Maybe then one should try to find managers who also are long term thinkers. For example, in the long term OAKLX did great, and this year it did really well too. Now it is 42% in financials and 4% in health. Meanwhile Primecap managers are also long term thinkers, but POAGX is 31% in tech, 29% in health and 2% in financials. I do know that they have very different styles, but they are ready to wait a lot, and yet they make very different market calls. So puzzling...

A link to the Greenspan story mentioned by rjb112
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102136750
Very Interesting

Good points bee, fundalarm, scott.
I just posted this in another thread. Wonder if anyone has a comment:
How is anyone going to be a successful investor in gold?
Gold peaked at $875/ounce in January 1980. So there was a major run up till that point and people did extremely well.
Then it went down in value for 21 years, losing somewhere around 65% on a nominal basis, and probably lost around 90% if you take inflation into account.
Then it had a major run up from about 2001 thru 2012, peaking around $1900. Now it's back to $1200.
MFOers, How is anyone supposed to invest in this asset class successfully?
By the way, Alan Greenspan is now saying that it would be good to own gold now!

How is anyone going to be a successful investor in gold?
Gold peaked at $875/ounce in January 1980. So there was a major run up till that point and people did extremely well.
Then it went down in value for 21 years, losing somewhere around 65% on a nominal basis, and probably lost around 90% if you take inflation into account.
Then it had a major run up from about 2001 thru 2012, peaking around $1900. Now it's back to $1200.
MFOers, How is anyone supposed to invest in this asset class successfully?
By the way, Alan Greenspan is now saying that it would be good to own gold now!

fundalarm made a great point.
I'll also note that, in terms of physical silver/gold, CEF is now trading at a nearly 10% discount to NAV.

Oy vey. So much financial engineering. So much absurdity. If Fairholme and Lampert love Sears so much, take the thing private already and stop all the nonsense. Short sellers will be back because they know Christmas isn't going to be any better because there's no real interest in improving the underlying business whatsoever. And the bonds they're offering are unsecured? Gee, where can I sign up to get unsecured bonds from a retailer in bad shape?
So dismaying, can't just run a solid business today, have to engage in this sort of nonsense - which inevitably gets bigger and more utterly ridiculous the weaker the underlying business becomes.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2601325-as-the-sears-canada-rights-approach-zero-a-risk-emerges

VGPMX testing its 2008 low at today's close.
Article presents a half truth with this quote:
"The mining stocks benefit from leverage to the metal. As a result, a 2% allocation to precious-metals equities equates to a roughly 5% allocation to bullion"
Doesn't leverage also work in the opposing direction?
My quote would read something like:
"The mining stocks are equally harmed as benefited from leverage to the metal. A PM equity investor has had to endure roughly 2.5 times the volatility compared to bullion"
A $10K investment in VGPMX in 2004 would have grown to $36K by 2008, a 260% gain. Over that same four year period GLD rose to $21.7K or roughly 117%. (The authors claim) of PM equities exhibited beneficial leverage over this timeframe is true, but by 2009 VGPMX valuation fell from its $36k high to a low of $9K, a drop of about 75%. During that same time period GLD's valuation went from $21.7K to $15.8K, a drop of about 25%.
This same dynamic has repeated itself over the last 3.5 years where GLD dropped roughly 33% from its high in April of 2011 while VGPMX dropped close to 66%.
Leverage happens in both directions and often cuts fast and hard on the downside.

Westwood Funds
http://www.westwoodfunds.com/pdf/2014-distribution-estimates.pdf
Invesco Funds
https://www.invesco.com/static/us/investors/contentdetail?contentId=9a64a8c235512410VgnVCM100000c2f1bf0aRCRD
ICM Small Company Fund
https://www.icomd.com/downloads/141021_ICM_Small_Co_Portfolio_Est_Capital_Gain_Distribution.pdf

Visa now +10%, MA +8.6%.

FYI:
Regards,
Ted
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000325893&play=1

Taking a cursory glance at this fund's basic profile numbers on the M* quote page, I see several things:
(1) once again, M* has placed FAINX in the wrong category, an exercise that should be so straightforward in this case that it would be considered a simpler work problem on a Cave Man IQ test;

Call me Cro-Magnon, but I don't see the obvious misclassification as a Moderate Allocation fund. It seems neither does Lipper, who calls it a "Mixed-Asset Target Alloc Moderate Fund". (Lipper generally rates it higher than M* - 4's, except for tax efficiency (5) and cost (1, obviously).
This may help, it's Lipper's discussion of its categories, as well as how they align with M*'s:
http://www.lipperweb.com/docs/Research/Fiduciary/2009_02_Fund Classification Roadmap.pdf
(for completeness, here's M*'s descriptions of its categories: http://www.morningstar.com/InvGlossary/morningstar_category.aspx)
p. 13 describes Lipper's Mixed Asset target allocation funds. Table 2 shows how its mixed asset target allocation moderate funds line up with M*'s moderate allocation:

Asset Class	Lipper	M*	FAINX
Equity		40-60%	50-70%	71%
Fixed Inc/Cash	40-60%	30-50%	28%

M* doesn't look at instantaneous snapshots of a fund (because there can be transient fluctuations), rather a fund's portfolio over the past few reports (not sure how far the lookback period goes). For the fund's first three years, M* classified the fund as conservative allocation. I'm inferring from the fact that the very initial classification (before a portfolio was published) was moderate allocation, M* looked at the actual portfolio and said that it was more conservative than the prospectus suggested.
Over time, that has shifted. It might be trending toward aggressive allocation, but doesn't seem to have gotten there yet.
Maybe I need to check with a Neanderthal - though that could turn out to be a dead end.

"History has taught us that “trusting” Wall Street isn’t a good idea."
That's got my nomination for the best understatement of the 21st century!

The Myth of ETF Transparency:
http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.fpany.org/resource/resmgr/imported/The_Myth_Of_ETF_Transparency-ETFRFeb2011.pdf
A two page description of how ETFs really work (with portfolio composition files), how lack of transparency can matter even with index funds, etc.
A line I like: "[T]here’s something more important here: truth in advertising."
Many people buy the advertising - they've been told that ETFs are better because of X, Y, and Z, without knowing how much of X, Y, and Z is hype, and without understanding how (or if) those things (even if true) matter to them.
One more line from the article I cited: "History has taught us that “trusting” Wall Street isn’t a good idea."

Breakfast,Lunch not enough...
Fund manager quits ‘food truck’ business for second bite at PIMCO
http://citywireglobal.com/news/fund-manager-quits-food-truck-business-for-second-bite-at-pimco/a780890

There was an incident where Gross told him he could never understand what he was saying. He decided to go to start a food truck. Gross leaves Pimco. He no longer wants to do a food truck.
Timeline: http://dealbreaker.com/2014/10/guy-whose-quitting-pimco-totally-had-nothing-to-do-with-bill-gross-treating-him-like-crap-now-back-at-pimco/

For those interested, I just got word of the impending Akre call. It's trick-or-treat day here so I'll be dashing about prepping the house for that so I won't be able to listen in but I thought some of you might enjoy being there.
David
AKRE FOCUS FUND MANAGERS WILL HOLD INVESTOR CALL THIS THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30th
Middleburg, VA-based Akre Capital Management will hold a conference call with portfolio co-managers of the Akre Focus Fund (AKREX) tomorrow, October 30, at 4:00 pm EDT to update investors on the fund’s portfolio. After initial remarks, there will be a Q&A session with the investment team, including chief investment officer Chuck Akre, and partners Tom Saberhagen, John Neff and Chris Cerrone.
To join the conference call:
Dial In: (877) 509-7719
Conference ID: 98245829
To submit a question for the Q&A session in advance, please email your questions to [email protected] no later than 5:00 pm EST on Wednesday, October 29.
Additionally, the firm now has some new and interesting material available on the new web site about the investment process, the team’s thought process and some of the issues they focus on -- here is the link to that page -- http://www.akrecapital.com/our-thinking/

FYI: Gold prices slid toward 2014′s lows on Thursday in the wake of the Federal Reserve’s move to curtail its monthly bond-buying program.
Gold futures tumbled 1.9% to $1,201.90 a troy ounce recently, right near its psychologically significant $1,200 mark. Gold briefly dipped below that level earlier in October for the first time in 2014.
Regards,
Ted
http://blogs.barrons.com/focusonfunds/2014/10/30/gold-slumps-tests-1200-level/tab/print/
GLD’s Fall From Grace: http://awealthofcommonsense.com/shine-gld/
Gold=15 Barrels Of Oil: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2014-10-29/gold-equals-15-barrels-of-oil-in-bearish-sign-for-bullion.html

@mrc70:
- what's your age?
- have you done a look through (X-ray or similar) for the asset classes?
- does this portfolio serve as your retirement portfolio or you have other goals for the moneys?
below comments are very high level.
the single and most important decision in investing is asset allocation. it looks like you're around100% equities with some tiny and emerging ones to scale your average volatility to may be twice that of the S&P500. and you don't have any duration to offset it.
if you are in your 20s or 30s and are very risk tolerant, that might work, but judging by a selection of funds that are new and introduced here at MFO, you're subject to the groupthink and will be buying most of the stuff profiled/popular here and then getting rid of it should volatility rise on the downside (the upside is usually taken as granted).
i am not commenting on individual positions, because @my tender age of 45, i would never have 100% of my money in a portfolio like this. or, scratch that, with a guaranteed government or private pension, i might load on equities -- but that is not a choice in my lifetime.
best of luck.
PS there are of course other methods to wealth: to find AAPL or FB while these are still in the garage stage; bet all your chips on the tightly controlled momentum play (a la Junkster); etc.