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October 2021 Flag
Anyone have a a favorite “buy and buy more” small cap fund?
Yes Fuller and Thaler Behavioral SC

Here's link to webinar material: Mid-Year Review Webinar Material – 11 July 23
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Please find link to one aspect of our MFO Premium webinar tomorrow at 11 am Pacific: Our World – Fund Demographics.
Join us if you can by registering here.

You could save the trouble and buy just about any CEF if you enjoy the volatility. Down 30% and than up 40% not uncommon. And the manager does all the buying and selling for you … typically for a 3% cut - give or take.

You may be thinking of the typical 2 and 20 fees for hedge funds.
https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/capital-markets/2-and-20-hedge-fund-fees/
CEF fees are not all that different from actively managed OEF fees.

CEFs’ average annual fees sit at 1.09% (or $109 for every $10,000 invested), according to CEF Insider data, though it’s not unusual to see fees in the 3%-4% range.

https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/investing/t041-s001-cheap-cefs-7-closed-end-funds-unusually-low-fees/index.html
(2019 data)

WSJ article quoted: https://www.wsj.com/articles/read-the-ingredients-before-buying-this-25-billion-etf-2e9b279d
The excerpt in isolation is a bit confusing: "This should have been a great year" for contrarians. The wording suggests that the past 18 months (ending June 30th) was not great for value. Yet the 7.6% figure for IVE indeed blows away the S&P 500 index (VFIAX proxy) return of -4.3%.
The point of the full article is that value (or growth) is not well defined, and performance figures vary depending on how value is defined. Bill Miller's Legg Mason Value owned growth companies when he felt they were value plays (undervalued).
A value strategy not mentioned in the article, dogs of the dow (highest yielding stocks), when applied to the S&P 500 (SDOG) shows very different results - nearly flat (small losses) in 2022 (-0.13%) and YTD through June 2023 (-0.84%). (Data from ALPS; M* figures slightly different.)
Despite its superficial stability, SDOG was 10% more volatile (std dev) than IVE over the past 18 months, per Portfolio Visualizer.

Not today. I’m referring to the mania of the late 90s which culminated in a 740% massive drop in the NASDAQ from its earlier high beginning in March 2000. Other major markets also suffered heavy losses.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
(The above article notes that Barron’s had began sounding warnings at about this time and that Sir John Templeton made a small fortune by shorting tech prior to the wreck.)
Notably, all 4 panelists on the famous Wall Street Week With Louis Rukeyser show’s end of year program December 31, 1999 sounded downright “bubbly” in forecasting the year ahead. Not one, including the program’s distinguished host, foresaw the approaching train wreck. (So much for “the experts”)

+1. "Dabbles." So, not a specific energy or metals CEF. OK...

I'll add this with my experience with what I considered an early A.I. My wife was working on her Masters thesis in 1999. We were both working full time and this was a daunting task for her. As my typing skills were very good, I assumed the task of dictation/transcribing from yellow legal sheets, her notes and statements for this work. At the time, we had a '1997' desktop computer running Windows 98 which also had the MS Word program. This was fine, but still not getting the work done fast enough. I purchased the 'Dragon Systems NaturallySpeaking 1.0 ' voice recognition program. This was simply the program and a headset microphone. I spent about 1 week, during off hours, teaching the program my voice 'sounds' for whatever word I spoke. The error rate became very small for its understanding of how I spoke numerous words. I could now read into the Word document what had been written or spoken by my wife. There were always some corrections to be made (typed) from words not understood or known, but the speed of producing the final printed document increased a great deal. I was amazed with the use of a computer interfaced with this program. Voice programs are available now, too; and are embedded into some office suite packages (MS 365, etc.) And cell phones.
I remain most hopeful, using A.I. and computing power, with the speedy process(es) for medical applications of all types.
NOTE: This was written by me without use of any additional programming features.
Below, about the Dragon speak program.

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

Remain curious,
Catch

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Thursday, July 20, 2023, 12:00pm – 3:00pm EDT
Join Dr. Ben Bernanke, PIMCO and Fidelity
https://fidelityevents.com/marketseconomyyourportfolio?ccsource=em_Marketing_1091825_1_0

ET Energy Transfer plodding higher. The court's decision about an extension re: the Lake Charles facility is a setback. But the chief players in this L.P. seem oblivious as to how much money they throw into projects and acquisitions. I'm holding. Amazing divs. Selling HYDB and SCHP when both dividends from 10 July get recorded in my account. Proceeds will go into BHB.

I bought the wrong CEF Friday. Historical performance too volatile and fees too high. Have better one in sight, but need to wait for $$ to settle before selling the former. Meanwhile it has bumped up nearly 1.5% today. With some luck will be able to pocket a few dollars from the short hold. Casino for sure. But nice to be able to trade in out of these vehicles almost at will.
I’m certainly not in the euphoric camp as equities go. But who knows?
@Level5 - 5.5% is a nice return for sitting on your hands.

I should have concluded my mid-night post better. The conclusion is that if one were to make idiosyncratic bets one probably should go with a proven active manager than using passive indices. The only active real estate OEF I ever invested is BREIX and I was happy with it when I owned it. I think I sold it sometime in 2014 but continued for a while my RE bets through fixed income with PDI, DMO, PCI, & PIMIX. Now, I own none of them and am a bit rustic in my knowledge of the sector and am trying to get up to speed.

...You're still pretty young- there's a chance that your writing skills may improve.

OJ, I think improving his toxic personality should be goal #1.

@MikeM, many corporations offer retail corporate notes ($1,000 denominations) with slightly higher rates. Some offer them directly & even offer check writing. But there is no FDIC protection, & in case of trouble, you become a general creditor in bankruptcy court. So, stick with high-quality companies & use this as a supplemental program. Avoid those from low-quality co with juicy rates.

Actually I'm waiting patiently for year's end to find the new gold mine of stocks down 31%. Then I swoop!

Ha! Yes, 7.6% net gain (0.69 * 1.56) over 18 months ... or, 7.6% per month gain since January if you were lucky enough to apply the strategy.
It's easy ex-post.

Today's WSJ "Wealth Adviser" newsletter begins with this item:

This should have been a great year for contrarian investors. The 50 stocks in the S&P 500 that fell the most last year lost an average of 31%, then rebounded a startling 56% this year. Simply buying the losers at the end of December was a winning strategy.

"A winning strategy." If I'm doing the math right, that's stunning volatility for a 7.6% gain over 18 months?

Dallas firm expects to hand back keys to 19 hotels, including two in Plano
The Plano properties are among a portfolio that would have required a paydown of $255 million and $80 million in capital spending.
Read in The Dallas Morning News: https://apple.news/AegWIHgtISIa34X7E9rHjDQ
I am assuming this is the right thread to post the above, given the OP. If not, please feel free to move it to the right thread.
I know everybody talks about office RE being the only sore spot in real estate. A few weeks ago two landmark hotels were surrendered by the owner in SF and I told myself that SF probably has some idiosyncratic issues and this is likely limited to SF and that if travel and entertainment is booming, the office contagion is unlikely to get to hotels.
I guess I need to read the Baron funds link @devo posted to understand the nuances of the RE.
Edit: Baron funds link covers Travel related real estate on page 8 of the 16 page document. Note that the fund, while talks about the great prospects for travel related RE, has allocated only 4.4% to Hotel & Leisure (15+% going to Casinos (grouped in Travel)).
Hotels 2.0
Timeshare Operators 1.5
Ski Resorts 0.9

July 9, 2023, CBS 60 Minutes, AI, 27 minutes Note: A closed caption icon is available at the bottom of the video area, for those with hearing impairments or those needing to view the video without audio 'on'.
Yes, AI has been discussed for several years. I've posted videos and articles about this, too; in prior years....Boston Scientific, Quantum computing, etc.
I remain a technology person from my early days of tear downs of my bicycle, rebuilding a Chevy V-8 engine in my parents home basement at age 16, through formal training in electronics in 1968 and a work career in electro-mechanical, computer interfaced devices.
Today, there are many more areas in which to invest in these continuing expansive sector(s). Your desire and choices will vary from one another.
This 60 Minutes program link should be of interest, regardless of your feelings about the good or bad from high level technology. A portion of this technology keeps us invested in the medical technology area, as well as more broad based areas.
Remain curious,
Catch

These things do change depending on where the starting line is.
The difference in daily returns from June 21, 2016 (mid-summer) is 8.58%.
The difference in daily returns from August 4, 2016 (the day Albert died) is a little over 4%.
Monthly return from the end of August 2016 is 1.35 in favor of SPY.
From the end of September the advantage to SPY was down to .61
Monthly from 10/31/2016 to 7/7/2023 it's NICSX 135.13 to 132.39 for SPY.
Looking at MFO premium (July through June) I see:
7years SPY 16.26 David 16.13
6years SPY 12.55 David 13.55
5years SPY 12.22 David 13.82
4years SPY 12.69 David 13.24
3years SPY 13.48 David 15.29
2years SPY 3.28 David 5.69
1years SPY 19.39 David 26.57
That's good enough for me for an IRA watch list where I would be considering risk factors, in addition to total return.