It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This is to meet a 50% requirement: add together all holdings with weights over 5%, and they must total under 50% of the fund's assets. But this requirement is found in the Internal Revenue Code, not in an SEC fund diversification rule.A special rebalancing, which is part of Nasdaq 100's methodology to maintain compliance with a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rule on fund diversification ...
The special rebalancing may be conducted at any time if the aggregate weight of companies, each having more than 4.5% weight in the index, tops 48%
https://www.sec.gov/files/staff-report-threshold-limits-diversified-funds.pdfIn addition to the diversification test under section 5 of the [1940 Investment Company] Act, many investment companies also seek to satisfy the Internal Revenue Code’s (“the Code”) diversification test to qualify as a regulated investment company (“RIC”).
...Funds generally elect to be treated as RICs under section 851 of the [Internal Revenue] Code in order to take advantage of pass-through tax treatment.
Unless Henny Penny has her day, BHB will be a long-term holding. The purchase was a consolidation, but not by much: I eliminated just two tiny ETF positions that were doing less than nothing for me. HYDB and SCHP. I exited them both after a tiny loss. So, after a few months of keeping tabs on them, I dumped them and threw the proceeds into BHB. .......So, that's 2 line-items eliminated. Consolidating.100 shares more of BHB just bought.
Any particular reason? Are you averaging down? Sorry, I don’t follow this particular stock.
Personally, I’m down to just 2 stocks - both small speculative mid-cap plays. Prefer managed funds for the most part. Less risk.I’ve been consolidating all year. More committed today to a static hands-off approach and less to f*** around with stuff. Down from 18-20 holdings a year ago to 14 today - counting the core money market. I think it was the big sell-off in 2022 that prompted me to pick up a lot of different things that were temporarily depressed and do some gambling on individual stocks. Gets crazy. (And, I’d prefer not to re-live that year.)
As a retired and conservative investor, and as long as the Fed keeps raising interest rates, I am staying in risk-free MM's and CD's. In the future, I might be looking at bond OEF's like CBLDX, RCTIX and TSIIX, for example.
But, in the meantime, I see no urgency to invest in bond funds, and since I don't need a lot more money, I prefer to err on the side of caution.
Fred
Hey Fred, how far out are you going with your CD selections?
Comment: B of A must be trying to catch up with Wells Fargo in the "screw the customer" department.Bank of America, the nation's second largest bank, has been ordered to pay more than $100 million to customers for double charging insufficient fund fees, withholding reward bonuses and opening accounts without customers' knowledge or permission. The bank is also on the hook for an additional $150 million in penalties for the same violations.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced Tuesday that an investigation found that Bank of America harmed hundreds of thousands of customers across multiple product lines over a period of several years through a series of illegal practices. As a result, Bank of America was ordered to pay over $100 million to customers and another $90 million in penalties. A separate $60 million fine has been ordered by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for violating laws around overdraft fees.
CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a news release that Bank of America's double-dipping on fees, opening accounts without customer consent and withholding rewards "are illegal and undermine customer trust," practices he said the CFPB will put an end to across the banking system.
Bank of America's "double-dipping scheme"
According to the CFPB, Bank of America utilized a "double-dipping scheme" to "harvest junk fees" from customers. It did so by charging people $35 whenever they didn't have enough funds available, but repeatedly charged customers for the same transaction, which the CFPB said generated "substantial additional revenue".
Chopra told NPR Business Correspondent David Gura, "Building a business model by double dipping on fees is simply not legal, and that's why we've sanctioned Bank of America and ordered them to pay back the customers they cheated."
The OCC said it found that the bank charged "tens of millions of dollars" in fees in resubmitted transactions, in violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prevents financial institutions from using unfair or deceptive acts and practices.
"Overdraft programs should help, not harm, consumers," Acting Comptroller of the Currency Michael J. Hsu said in a news release. "Today's action demonstrates the OCC's commitment to protecting consumers and promoting fairness and trust in banking. We expect banks to conduct their activities in compliance with all applicable laws and standards, and when they don't, we will act accordingly."
Bank of America Senior Vice President of Media Relations Naomi R. Patton told NPR that the bank voluntarily reduced overdraft fees and eliminated "all non-sufficient fund fees" in the first half of 2022. She said the changes have resulted in a drop in revenue from these fees of over 90%. The bank also dropped the overdraft fee from $35 to $10 in May 2022.
Withholding credit card cash and point rewards
The CFPB said Bank of America targeted potential-customers by offering special cash and point rewards if they signed up for a credit card, a common signing bonus used by competing credit card companies. However, according to the CFPB, Bank of America illegally withheld those bonuses from tens of thousands of customers.
Chopra said Bank of America has been ordered to follow through on those promises.
"We know in the U.S. many people are really closely scrutinizing which credit card they sign up for based on rewards, whether it's cash, bonuses at enrollment, or airline points, or other proprietary point systems," Chopra said. "The fact that Bank of America advertised these signup bonuses and then did a bait and switch completely undermines the the fair market and consumer choice."
Bank of America employees opened accounts without consumers' knowledge
As far back as at least 2012, Bank of America employees illegally applied for and enrolled consumers for credit cards without their knowledge or permission to reach sales-based incentive goals and evaluation criteria, according to the CFPB. Employees illegally signed up customers by using or obtaining consumers' credit reports and completed applications without their permission, which resulted in unjust fees and negative impacts to customers' credit scores.
"That's essentially taking over someone's identity and exploiting it financially, and it's totally improper," Chopra told NPR. "It's totally inexcusable. So, whether it is happening to just a handful to thousands or to millions, we find this extremely serious."
Bank of America is a repeat offender
This isn't the first time the bank has been penalized for conducting illegal practices. Bank of America shelled out $727 million to the CFPB in 2014 for illegally deceiving roughly 1.4 million customers through deceptive marketing products. The bank was also ordered to pay a $20 million civil money penalty for charging 1.9 million consumers for a credit monitoring and credit reporting services they never received, according to the CFPB.
The bank was also slapped with two other penalties in 2022 totaling $235 million: a $10 million civil penalty for unlawfully processing out-of-state garnishments--removing customer funds for debts--against customer bank accounts; a $225 million fine for automatically and unlawfully freezing customer accounts with a fraud detection program during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Bank of America is a repeat offender. Being a household name that has been punished before didn't stop it from allegedly cheating customers out of tens of millions of dollars in fees and credit card rewards and opening up accounts without their authorization," U.S. Public Interest Research Groups Consumer Campaign Director Mike Litt said in a statement Tuesday. "The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's strong enforcement action shows why it makes a difference to have a federal agency monitoring the financial marketplace day in and day out."
Hey Fred, how far out are you going with your CD selections?As a retired and conservative investor, and as long as the Fed keeps raising interest rates, I am staying in risk-free MM's and CD's. In the future, I might be looking at bond OEF's like CBLDX, RCTIX and TSIIX, for example.
But, in the meantime, I see no urgency to invest in bond funds, and since I don't need a lot more money, I prefer to err on the side of caution.
Fred
The intraday low for 1995 was hit on the second trading day, Jan 4, 1995 at 740.47. The intraday peak in 2000, as stated in the Wiki piece, was 5,132.52. According to my handy dandy calculator, that's 6.93 times 740.47, for a gain of 593%. That 400% figure isn't accurate even to a single digit.Between 1995 and 2000, the peak of the dot-com bubble, the Nasdaq Composite stock market index rose 400%
Remain curious,Dr. James Baker laid out the description of a speech understanding system called DRAGON in 1975.[5] In 1982 he and Dr. Janet M. Baker, his wife, founded Dragon Systems to release products centered around their voice recognition prototype.[6] He was President of the company and she was CEO.
DragonDictate was first released for DOS, and utilized hidden Markov models, a probabilistic method for temporal pattern recognition. At the time, the hardware was not powerful enough to address the problem of word segmentation, and DragonDictate was unable to determine the boundaries of words during continuous speech input. Users were forced to enunciate one word at a time, clearly separated by a small pause after each word. DragonDictate was based on a trigram model, and is known as a discrete utterance speech recognition engine.[7]
Dragon Systems released NaturallySpeaking 1.0 as their first continuous dictation product in 1997
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved.
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved. Powered by Vanilla
