“About a week ago, I spent a few hours at my local Chevy dealer buying out the lease on my 2018 Bolt, with brand new LG batteries—the old ones were recalled because they risked bursting into flames. While working on the paperwork in the eerily quiet dealership, the salesman told me there were cars that had been sitting in the service department for weeks waiting for the arrival of parts—computer chips, in particular. He said sales at the dealership had dropped by about 90% from prepan-demic levels, and most of the sales staff had been laid off...”
“Meanwhile, Toyota Motor (TM) recently cut its vehicle production forecast for 2022 by 500,000 units, citing both uncertainty related to Covid-19 and the ongoing chip shortage. The bottom line? The case for owning chip fab stocks … is very compelling.”
From: “Feeling Better About the Chip Shortage?” - by Eric Savitz
Barron’s (print edition) February 14, 2022
Fascinating that the problem has persisted so many months. I’m always amazed when I take my 2018 Honda Accord back to the once thriving dealership for routine service and see the showroom and lots devoid of autos - completely barren.

“The top-performing growth fund since the end of 2019 is $7.6 billion Baron Partners (BPTRX). The fund gained 149% in 2020—just a hair behind ARK Innovation's 157%—and an additional 31% in 2021, while ARK lost 23%. This year, the Baron fund has also held up better than the ARK ETF, as growth stocks have tumbled. Investors should be cautious about the Baron fund, however: Most of its recent gains came from just one stock, Tesla (TSLA), which accounts for 50% of its portfolio. The fund bought Tesla shares between 2014 and 2016, and instead of selling to keep its weighting in check as the stock rose exponentially, the fund let it run.”
(I guess it depends on your definition of “fund”.)
Excerpted from Barron’s (print edition) February 14, 2022

I was searching for something like @davfor’s chart last evening. Finally dawned on me this morning that the free Bloomberg ipad app lists YTD performance of many markets - domestic and international. Stuff like that helps me get my head around where we’ve been. Those aren’t particularly large drops for those of us who lived through 2008 or the one-day drop in the Dow of around 25% in 1987.
I’ve been thinking a lot that the “go to” areas of the U.S. market represented by S&P, NASDAQ etc. might well be overvalued but that there may be pockets of good value in some foreign markets and individual stocks here at home. Just a guess. No particular expertise.

-17% discount...
https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/xnas/ssb/quote
-34% discount...
https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/xnys/ebr/quote
This page might prove to be handy. i chose EGYPT on a lark. (EGX 30)
https://www.egx.com.eg/en/Indices.aspx

I was searching for something like @davfor’s chart last evening. Finally dawned on me this morning that the free Bloomberg ipad app lists YTD performance of many markets - domestic and international. Stuff like that helps me get my head around where we’ve been. Those aren’t particularly large drops for those of us who lived through 2008 or the one-day drop in the Dow of around 25% in 1987.
I’ve been thinking a lot that the “go to” areas of the U.S. market represented by S&P, NASDAQ etc. might well be overvalued but that there may be pockets of good value in some foreign markets and individual stocks here at home. Just a guess. No particular expertise.

Current YTD status. Another leg down? January low retest coming? Something else?
(similar charts are now buried in another thread but I am putting this in a new thread).
Dynamic link (may have to use YTD) https://stockcharts.com/h-perf/ui?s=$SPX&compare=$COMPQ,$INDU,$TRAN,IWM&id=p74767152289

Still wading through this lengthy feature piece. Good timing - the Barron’s cover story coinciding with the 2022 Super Bowl. Sources tell Barron’s that $7.6 Billion will be wagered on the game this year - an increase of 78% over last year. The increase is largely a result of the spread of online sports betting (and every other form of wagering) across the country as more and more states legalize it. Biggest players are DraftKings (DKNG), MGM Resorts (MGM), Flutter’s FanDuel (PDYPY) and Caesars Entertainment (CZR). Penn Gaming and Ballys are lesser players.
The article is a curious mix of statistics and psychology. It delves into the mind of gamblers as explained by psychiatrists. It cites a an addiction counselor telling of people in the U.S. betting on a tennis match somewhere in Eastern Europe in the wee-morning hours here - not because they cared about tennis, but because they needed the dopamine “fix” gained from having money on the line. But the article strongly makes a case that Americans are addicted to gambling in many different forms, citing trading in crypto, fungible tokens and stocks as other parts of the overall equation. And it hits hard at the cost to society.
There’s a lot said about Robinhood and how it has used targeted “cues” to spark risk taking by customers. Some of this has been toned down in the face of public criticism. The SEC is expected soon to unveil regulations to better prevent abuse - especially of inexperienced traders. One thing mentioned was the “herd mentality” of investors. So, here’s a parting quotation from the article on that point. Food for thought:
“About 35% of the stock bought by Robinhood users are concentrated in 10 companies, compared with 24% by retail investors overall, according to a forthcoming study in the Journal of Finance. Investors tend to congregate in stock “herding events” ….. The results don't look encouraging. Robinhood traders lose an average of 4.3% during each herding episode. After adjusting for market returns, losses hit 5.5%. Robinhood declined to comment to Barron's …”

For most people, K-1 in IRAs don't matter. But for some, it may - if there is large UBI in K-1 Box 20 (over $1,000); and then the IRA sponsor will prepare Form 990 and will bill you a few hundred bucks for its preparation and filing.
https://finance.zacks.com/report-k1-ira-account-7692.html
https://www.fool.com/knowledge-center/tax-effects-of-k-1s-issued-by-etfs-in-iras.aspx#:~:text=K-1s are tax forms,deductible expenses to their investors.
https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/retirement/discussion/does-schedule-k-1-income-held-in-an-ira-need-to-be-shown-in-tax-filing/00/150684

“Too bad they only have a 1 to 5 scale, and no negative answers.”
Sounds like a negative 5 rating. Wondering if VG employs the same “customer satisfaction” team as TRP?
Just a quick “Thanks” to those members who steered me to Fido in mid 2021. (The other highly recommended brokerage was Schwab.)

Feb 12th, 2022 Episode:

Well, just to F/U. To fix issue we called Vanguard, got a rep within 5 min, but she couldn't fix it so sent us to Transfers department, waited on hold for 20 min. They had to call somebody else to remove hold on account, then transferred us to broker who finally sold the money market.
All told it took 35 to 45 minutes.
Then they finally answered my email
" Thank you for taking the time to contact us and please accept our apologies
for the delay in responding to your email. Recently, we have experienced a
high volume of requests, which has prevented us from responding to your
inquiry in as timely a manner as you have come to expect. Your patience is
greatly appreciated.
I apologize for any inconvenience you have experienced. We understand that
you have already been in contact with a Vanguard representative on February
11, 2022. If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to
call us
Vanguard strives to provide you with exceptional service. Your feedback is
important to us, and I have forwarded your comments to our management team.
We hope you will continue to share your thoughts on how we're doing and how
we can serve you better.
We look forward to restoring your confidence in Vanguard.
Have a great day.
Please rate your satisfaction regarding the service you received today, by
copying and pasting this web address into your browser:
https://pages.e-vanguard.com/Retail/Secure_Message_Survey/
Too bad they only have a 1 to 5 scale, and no negative answers

scaremongering vs public investment, round 381 (PK; with the internal links, if it opens for you:
https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?campaign_id=116&emc=edit_pk_20220211&instance_id=52851&nl=paul-krugman&productCode=PK&regi_id=22268089&segment_id=82386&te=1&uri=nyt://newsletter/9e7bf527-28b4-5fb5-b5b2-7ba39b7d9954)
otherwise:
A few days ago, Tressie McMillan Cottom published an insightful article in The Times about the power of “folk economics” — which she defined as “the very human impulse to describe complex economic processes in lay terms.” Her subject was the widespread enthusiasm for cryptocurrency, but her article sent me down memory lane, recalling the role folk economics has played in past policy debates.
Just to be clear, the “folk” who hold plausible-sounding but wrongheaded views of the economy needn’t be members of the working class. They can be, and often are, members of the elite: plutocrats, powerful politicians and influential pundits. In fact, elite embrace of folk economics was a large part of what went wrong in the global response to the 2008 financial crisis. And it’s starting to have a destructive effect now.
So, memories: When the 2008 financial crisis struck, economists, believe it or not, had an intellectual framework ready to go, pretty much custom-made for that situation — because it was devised in the 1930s during the Great Depression. The “IS-LM model” was introduced by the British economist John Hicks in 1937 as an attempt to encapsulate the insights of John Maynard Keynes, who had published “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” the previous year. There’s endless argument about whether Hicks was true to Keynes’s vision — which is irrelevant for my discussion now — because Hicks is what economists brought to the table in 2008.
According to IS-LM (which stands for investment-savings, liquidity-money), public policy normally has two tools it can use to fight an economic slump. Loosely speaking, the Fed can print more money to drive interest rates down, or the Treasury can engage in deficit spending to pump up demand. After a financial crisis, however, the economy gets so depressed that monetary policy hits a limit; interest rates can’t go below zero. So, large-scale deficit spending is the appropriate and necessary response.
But folk economics sees deficits as irresponsible and dangerous; if anything, many people have the instinctive feeling that governments should cut back in hard times, not spend more. And this instinct had a big, adverse effect on policy. True, the Obama administration did respond to the slump with fiscal stimulus, but it was underpowered in part because of unwarranted deficit fears. (This isn’t hindsight, and I was tearing my hair out at the time.) And by 2010, influential opinion — the opinion of what I used to call Very Serious People — had shifted around to the view that debt, not mass unemployment, was the most important problem facing the United States and other wealthy nations.
This wasn’t what conventional economics said, and there was no hint that investors were losing faith in U.S. debt. But deficit scaremongering came to dominate political and media discussions, and governments turned to austerity policies that slowed recovery from the Great Recession.
Did economists unanimously oppose austerity? Hey, have economists ever unanimously agreed on anything? (There’s less disagreement within the profession than legend has it, but still.) Indeed, a handful of prominent economists managed to come up with arguments that seemed to support the folk theory that deficits are always bad — an episode that I always think of when I see demands for new economic thinking. You see, during the last crisis the new ideas that actually influenced policy did indeed go against conventional economics — but in ways that supported, rather than challenged, the prejudices of the powerful.
Two papers in particular had a malign influence. One, by Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna, asserted that cutting spending in a depressed economy was actually expansionary, because it would increase confidence. The other, by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, declared that government debt had big, negative effects on growth when it crossed a critical threshold, around 90 percent of gross domestic product.
Both papers were widely criticized by other economists as soon as they were circulated, and in fairly short order their empirical claims were pretty much demolished by other researchers. But their arguments were eagerly adopted by influential people who liked their message, and a funny thing happened to the discourse in the media: To a large extent, these speculative (and wrong) arguments for austerity were both accepted as fact and presented as the consensus of the economics profession. Back in 2013, I cited a Washington Post editorial that declared “economists” believed that terrible things happen when debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P., when in fact this was very much not what the rest of us were saying.
And I’ve been hearing echoes of that misrepresentation in some current debates, as people advocating new economic ideas — or at least what they claim are new ideas — assert that conventional economic thinking was responsible for austerity policies after 2008. Um, no: Fiscal austerity was exactly what conventional economics told us not to do in a depressed economy, and it was only the peddlers of unorthodox economics who gave austerity policies intellectual cover.
Which brings us to our current moment. This time around, fiscal stimulus wasn’t underpowered, and there’s definitely a case to be made that excessive deficit spending in 2021 was a factor in rising inflation (although we can argue about how big a factor, since inflation is also up a lot in countries that didn’t engage in much stimulus). But now what?
As I said, the IS-LM model tells us that policymakers have two tools for managing the overall level of demand: fiscal and monetary policy. When you’re trying to boost a deeply depressed economy, monetary policy becomes unavailable, because you can’t push interest rates below zero. But if you’re trying to cool off an overheated economy, monetary policy is available: Interest rates can’t go down, but they can go up.
And because changing monetary policy is easy, conventional analysis says that monetary tightening is the way to go. Indeed, the Fed has made it clear that it intends to do just that. Getting the pace and size of rate hikes right will be tricky, but conceptually it isn’t hard.
But the folk economics position — where by “folk,” I mainly mean Senator Joe Manchin — is that excessive government spending caused inflation, so now we have to call off any new spending, even if it’s more or less paid for with new revenue.
Well, that’s not what conventional economics says; on the contrary, the standard model says that the Fed can handle this while we deal with other priorities.
And while conventional economics isn’t always right, anyone attacking it now should ask themselves whether they’re doing so in a constructive way. In particular, I’m seeing a lot of denigration of monetary policy from people who don’t seem to realize that they are, de facto, giving aid and comfort to politicians who don’t want to invest in America’s children and the fight against climate change.

Fido 401k/403b/457 operations (NetBenefits site nb.fidelity.com) are distinct from Fido Brokerage (taxable a/c, IRAs, etc; Fidelity.com).

I use RQI a CEF for a real estate fund. After rising about 50% last year it is down 10.5% thus far this year.

What they say isn’t necessarily what they do.
As if gold / miners needed any more reason to slither lower. Gold’s only off $4 - but p/m miners off 2.50% at 3 PM.

CCJ (uranium) at fair value, down -1.67% on the day, 10 Feb, '22.

@davidrmoran. +50

QREARX - TIAA Real Estate Account VA is not really an interval-fund. It does have once/quarter withdrawal restriction but ANY amount, including 100%, can be withdrawn. QREARX pays a Liquidity-fee to TIAA and in case of heavy redemptions, TIAA is obliged to support QREARX (and it did to the tune of $1.2 billion in 2009-10). Unlike listed real-estate equity funds (VNQ, XLRE, etc), QREARX is mostly directly-owned properties and has low leverage/mortgage.
Interval-funds typically have restriction that only up to 5% may be withdrawn in quarterly window.
https://www.tiaa.org/public/investment-performance/investment/profile?ticker=41091375
https://markets.ft.com/data/funds/tearsheet/summary?s=QREARX

@carew388, from Stockcharts (chart scale is 10x), 10-yr yield range today was 1.927-2.050%, close was 2.031% at 3:00 PM (also Yahoo Finance, Treasury). CNBC is showing 2.05% at 6:30 PM (as trading continues).
https://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=$TNX&p=D&b=5&g=0&id=p39544969842
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/^TNX?p=^TNX
https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/TextView?type=daily_treasury_yield_curve&field_tdr_date_value_month=202202
https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/US10Y

My CNBC shortcut shows 2.035%-is that wrong?

Honeywell has been jacking up prices on their N95 masks lately.

Dan Price, CEO and founder of credit card processing company Gravity Payments:
Coca-Cola: there's nothing we can do, we have to raise prices.
Also Coca-Cola: our profit is up 65% in a year, we spent $68 billion on dividends / stock buybacks in a decade, laid off 12% of staff in the pandemic and CEO pay went up 70% in 2 years to $18.7M.
Granularity, and possible decreasing rate:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf