my old roommate invests in 2 country based international funds. Israel and Poland. he's sworn to me for over 15 years I need to do so as well. Its basiclly matched a international index.
I personally use AVDE and AVEM from Avantis since 2021. That replaced DFIVX which I owned for 5-6 years previously in my 401k.

I broke my own rule by buying into BLX in Panama.
Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S.A. (the Bank) is a specialized multinational bank. The Bank is established to support the financing of trade and economic integration in Latin America and the Caribbean.
My tax circumstances mean that it doesn't make sense to invest where a portion of my profit via dividends will be pre-taken from me, before the cash shows up in my account. But that outfit is making money, and with a low P/E. (7.07 per CNBC.)
In the USA, the brokerage lets you choose "zero withholding." I discovered that in order to get that simple thing done "outside," I'd have to create an account with each of the foreign Tax Authorities. No, thanks. .... I "bit the bullet" and bought BLX due to its performance and rather hefty dividend, so if a slice is taken before I can get to it, then I'll just live with it. (yield = 5.17%)
**********************************
Elsewhere: Africa, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, is a dumpster fire. In days to come, it will be interesting to see whether Syria can re-join civilization and sign-onto the Rule of Law. It was the Regime, not the population generally, that kept Syria from un-becoming a filthy, corrupt disaster. So far, it looks like they're making positive moves. Everything moves slowly when you have to deal with PEOPLE!
Watch Europe's defense/military providers. Dassault comes to mind.
https://www.dassault-aviation.com/en/defense/
Uncle Orange has demonstrably stepped back from having the USA be the Leader in NATO. Poland's leader explicitly addressed fellow High Mucky-Mucks, saying Europe must depend upon themselves.
Philippines is corrupt, along with countless other places. And the Orange One lately suspended the U.S. law which prohibits U.S. companies from bribing people in foreign countries in order to do business in those places.
Here's a nifty little list of Australian basic materials companies. Some of the info is blocked unless you subscribe. NZ always gets overlooked. I'm overlooking them, too.
https://www.tipranks.com/compare-stocks/basic-materials/australia
Canada likes to sell rocks and trees to the world. But tariffs to come? I'd wait. The 5 biggest Canadian banks are highly regulated, but own 90% of funds on deposit in banks and credit unions, nationwide. The 6th-largest is Nat'l Bank of Canada, but does not trade in the US. You'd have to buy shares in Toronto. There are huge, impregnable walls, barriers, to entry into the banking market in Canada. At the right price, they are always a safe bet. Lately, TD (Toronto Dominion) had to pay a fine for money laundering, in the US.... But is Canada "foreign?" It's North America.
BMO BNS CM RY TD.

Lest my passing comment about eggs be misconstrued: I abandoned the standard American Diet (SAD) quite a number of years ago. I consume no animal products, processed foods, no chemical additives and try to limit sugar and oil consumption to strict minima. Eggs, therefore, do not have a place in my diet. Nor does bacon, the other hot-button grocery product mentioned frequently during the last presidential election campaign. It appears to be one of the worst foods one can consume. The most influential sources that pushed my wife and me towards this diet are The China Study by Campbell and Campbell, and two books by Michael Gregor: How Not to Die and How Not to Age. According to a workshop presentor I heard just recently, Dr. Gregor’s next book will consider how not to get cancer. In a nutshell, we follow a Whole Foods Plant Based (WFPB) diet. I try to respect others’ choices, fully aware as I am that challlenging others’ perceptions of what constitutes a healthy diet may instigate a food fight. The science behind the Campbells’ and Gregor’s work appears sound to me; however my academic training and professional work are not in science. My cholesterol level has dropped to 103 from about 135 20 years ago, but there are practitioners in the dietary field who say that 100 and below is the right target.

Most major corporations incorporate in Delaware for, as Reuters puts it, "its stable law and well-respected courts". Supporting that stable law is voluminous case law. And because Delaware has a well-established rule of (corporate) law, investors have been happy with their corporations being incorporated there.
With certain corporations moving or threatening to move out of state, the state legislature is enticing them to stay by advancing a bipartisan bill that would significantly weaken investor protections. "The bill was not drafted by the state's bar association, which typically oversees changes to the state's corporate law." (This is an example of why some investors here are taking a closer look at how politics is affecting their portfolios.)
Reuters article (via Fidelity): https://www.fidelity.com/news/article/top-news/202502172152RTRSNEWSCOMBINED_KCN3F304K-OUSBS_1
Here's commentary by Ann Lipton - Professor in Business Law and Entrepreneurship at Tulane Law School.

Fiduciary obligations are, like the rigidity of the corporate form itself, a type of state regulation: They are a judicially-imposed limit on exploitative conduct by managers.
But Delaware’s been eroding that form of regulation for quite some time ...
Still, fiduciary obligations seemed to make something of a comeback ...
So I suppose it was inevitable that the Delaware legislature would seek to undo that last vestige of regulation, as well as all other remainders.

https://www.businesslawprofessors.com/2025/02/delaware-decides-delaware-law-has-no-value/

There are definitely different ways to play shareholder yield. Cambria's funds put their thumbs on the value factor. Wisdom Tree's WTV puts its thumb on the quality factor. WTV has only been using the shareholder yield factor since 2017, as near as I can tell.
I am definitely keeping an eye on WTV for my taxable account.
I bought SYLD and RWJ in 2023, and they have done well enough since then (12.5% and 14.5% if M* can be believed) that I don't regret their purchase the way I have regretted some others. I doubt I'll be adding to those positions. They were certainly too bumpy for my IRA.

For most people, an egg a day does not increase your risk of a heart attack, a stroke, or any other type of cardiovascular disease.
...
Of course, it matters greatly what you eat with your eggs. The saturated fat in butter, cheese, bacon, sausage, muffins, or scones, for example, raises your blood cholesterol much more than the cholesterol in your egg. And the highly refined "bad carbs" in white toast, pastries, home fries, and hash browns may also increase your risk of heart disease, stroke, and other cardiovascular diseases.

Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Medical School, April 16, 2024
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/are-eggs-risky-for-heart-health
It's saturated fat in eggs, not cholesterol, that leads to the recommendation that egg consumption be capped. The USDA guideline that capped cholesterol consumption was removed a decade ago. "When the facts change, I change my mind."

We confirm from the review of the literature on epidemiological data, meta-analysis, and clinical interventions where dietary cholesterol challenges were utilized that there is not a direct correlation between cholesterol intake and blood cholesterol. ... A great number of epidemiological studies and meta-analysis indicate that dietary cholesterol is not associated with CVD [cardiovascular disease] risk nor with elevated plasma cholesterol concentrations. ... However, if the cholesterol sources are consumed with saturated and trans fats, as happens in the Western diet pattern, increases in plasma cholesterol may be observed. The most recent epidemiological data and clinical interventions for the most part continue to support the USDA 2015 dietary guidelines that removed the upper limit of dietary cholesterol.

Fernandez ML, Murillo AG. Is There a Correlation between Dietary and Blood Cholesterol? Evidence from Epidemiological Data and Clinical Interventions. Nutrients. 2022 May 23;14(10):2168. doi: 10.3390/nu14102168. PMID: 35631308; PMCID: PMC9143438.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9143438/#sec6-nutrients-14-02168
More on saturated and trans fats:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/fat/art-20045550
More on dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=correlation+between+dietary+cholesterol+and+blood+cholesterol&ia=web

Distillate Capital also runs at least three ETFs using a cash-flow model. COWZ had wonderful performance in 2020, 2021, and 2022, and has attracted a whopping $25B in AUM. I was a fan of DSTL, DSMC, SYLD and COWZ until 2023 when fortunes turned notably south and have not reversed. During the COVID drawdown, MFO members batted about these funds when many were in search of something that might stem the downward trend of the markets.

The Week in Charts (02/17/25)
The most important charts and themes in markets and investing, including:
00:00 Intro
00:54 Topics
01:44 Eggflation Is Back
07:19 Fed on Hold
10:30 Another Record High for Earnings
14:28 Everything Is Up
17:21 Why Home Price Appreciation Is Slowing
22:27 The DOGE Savings Tracker
26:05 Rising Real Wages
Video
Blog

In the Off-Topic section @Mark has posted "Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong", a non-political economic report which I believe to be absolutely accurate, and of major significance. It describes how the government information on the major facets of American economic life fails miserably to accurately reflect reality.
I strongly recommend that anyone interested check out Mark's posting.

It's amazing how backwards modern organizations can still be these days. And in VG's case, what Shostakovich describes is inexcusable!
I needed to request a vital record from a NY locality and they could only mail me the form via USPS. Other localities had it on their website and/or emailed it right to me so I could print it out and get it notarized.
And last month I needed to update my state witholdings in Maryland. If I was a MD resident, I could do it online, but if you were claiming exemption from Maryland taxes, you had to download, physically sign, and return a paper copy to Annapolis.
In 2025, this kind of workflow is outdated, cumbersome, and plain embarassing.

BTW, its 2/17/25, and I'm still waiting to receive my year-end distribuition notifications for the funds I hold in my Vanguard Roth account.
Just trying to understand here. You seem to be saying that you're expecting a notification for each fund. That's something I might look for if I held the funds on Vanguard's legacy mutual fund platform. If that's what's going on, then that may also be the explanation - Vanguard providing virtually no support for this platform.
Are you talking about 1099-Rs? I ask because those don't report distributions from individual funds. They just report the aggregate distribution from the account as a whole.
In any case, and this is purely anecdotal, I've seen someone's 1099-R from a Roth that was posted online on Jan 12. And my 1099 (taxable account, closed in 2024) was posted on Jan 27th.
Three possibilities: we were lucky, you were unlucky, or there's something different about the type of information you were expecting. Again, just trying to understand.
Regarding opening a new account (aside from the rhetorical question: why?):
Would this page work: https://personal.vanguard.com/us/investnow/si/oaoverview
I vaguely recall having issues opening an account online because I wanted to fund it with an ACAT transfer and they system wanted cash. Not sure anymore though.

Cambria has rolled out LYLD and MYLD to capture large and micro caps. WTV and SHRY also track shareholder yield in their own way. It is interesting to compare them to each other with https://www.etfrc.com/funds/overlap.php
OFVIX is another fund tracking shareholder yield. The M* blurb doesn't tell you much, so go here for more info on their thinking about shareholder yield: https://osam.com/Commentary/shareholder-yield-a-differentiated-approach-to-an-efficient-market
A wrinkle on the cash flow idea are the Invesco revenue etfs RWJ, RWK, and RWL that track the S&P 600, 400, and 500. They weight by revenue. IIRC, their thesis is that all sorts of games can be played with numbers after revenue is reported. Out of the Mag 7, only Amazon and Apple crack the top ten of the RWL fund tracking the 500.
I own RWJ and SYLD in my taxable. I used to hold them in the IRA until I began the simplification process.

A little story about Vanguard friendliness. Several weeks ago, I mailed in an application for a taxable account. I had actually called Vanguard sometime back to get a mail-in application, because I couldn't find one online. I received the application, but never got around to submitting it.
So, after a hiatus, I filled out the snail-mail application and sent in a check via USPS. I got a call from Vanguard saying that my account form was invalid, because it was an old form. No suprirse I guess for any member of this forum - I actually deal with mutual fund companies all the time and nothing about the application struck me as odd; it was all the usual stuff, everything that you'd expect to see on a new account application, and everything you've seen dozens and dozens of times before.
Puzzled, I asked: "Okay...can you tell me what field is missing in the old form?". The customer service agent told me he did not know. So, I said, "please send me a new form and I'll fill it out and mail it back in". The agent told me that he'd have to get approval to send me a mail-in form; it could take a few weeks. I replied "Wait a second...you need senior manager approval to send me a form to do business with you?" The agent said yes. I responded in a baffled tone: "...you realize I'm trying to give you business; I initiated this whole transaction. I'm trying to actually give you my money. You're giving me a disincentive to do business with you; hell, I'll pay an extra fraction of a percentage point on the ER to be able to do this via mail. And, I must say, you guys don't seem particularly easy to do business with...". The agent chuckled and said "believe me, sir, I get it; we hear this type of thing all the time, its just management policy...". The guy sounded as exasperated as I was.
The, three weeks later (maybe four) I get a dry, terse letter from Vanguard via USPS letting me know that my application to open an account has been denied. My check was returned. I said screw it, and went with another major fund family and the application was processed in a week.
BTW, its 2/17/25, and I'm still waiting to receive my year-end distribuition notifications for the funds I hold in my Vanguard Roth account. Per my request, I still get all fund notifactions via USPS.

I would think the massive government layoffs has to eventuality have an adverse impact on stocks and a positive impact on higher rated bonds. The past month higher rated bonds have seen above average returns and maybe in anticipation of the February employment report on March 7. Much like the action that occurred following the surprisingly weak July employment report on August 2 that carried over the next trading day on August 5. While that response was short lived not sure if it will be so short lived next time around, Regardless I think the tell, be it good or bad, will be that March 7 report. In my neck of the woods which is about as red as it comes politically, the grumbling has already started. That’s because there are worries that the cutbacks to an already understaffed and underfunded National Park is going to impact the local economy. Shrinking an over bloated government sounds like a great ideal until your family falls victim to such shrinkage.

I have followed the activities of Boaz Weinstein on social-media. I also took a flyer on his etf of CEFs CEFS. It's ER is HIGH even taking into account that the underlying CEFs have high ERs. I think he likes to pocket a lot of money himself and investors have to count on trickle down.
https://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=CEFS&p=D&yr=3&mn=0&dy=0&id=p17466725366

”We've heard over and over, do not let the political environment sway your investing decisions.”
@Crash - That’s probably great advice for 80-90% of investors - mostly younger and employed - who research shows are usually better off letting it ride. I’d still give that advice to a 25 year old just starting out with maybe 40 years to retirement.
But take a look at the “Buy Sell” thread. ”Set-it- and-forget-it” ? Huh? ISTM most who frequent financial forums like this one do alter their investments quite a bit year-to-year. So, of course, political climate affects their decision making and is worth discussing.

Right. Dare I assert that most of us here are NOT spring chickens anymore? I'm having repeat surgery coming up in March.... As Leonard Cohen said: "I ache in the places where I used to play." (Tower Of Song.)
**********
Skip right to 0:20. (LOUD start!)
Crescent Street mural, Montreal:

”We've heard over and over, do not let the political environment sway your investing decisions.”
@Crash - That’s probably great advice for 80-90% of investors - mostly younger and employed - who research shows are usually better off letting it ride. I’d still give that advice to a 25 year old just starting out with maybe 40 years to retirement.
But take a look at the “Buy Sell” thread. ”Set-it- and-forget-it” ? Huh? Not to pick on the thread … but ISTM most who frequent financial forums like this one do alter their investments quite a bit year-to-year. So, of course, political climate affects their decision making along with a myriad of other considerations / assessments and may be worth discussion.

14 Feb, 2025:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2025-02-14/bloomberg-real-yield-02-14-2025-video
Sticky inflation, FED will not be cutting rates. Maybe 10-year at 5% this year...Powell: "we are close, but not there," with regard to inflation.
Through the week, there was a 0.20% range being traded. That's BIG in the bond market.
Big sovereign deals during the past week: UK, France. Near record orders: over 115B euros.
USA Treasury Auction:
3-yr: 4.3%
10 yr: 4.632% (highest for new issuance since 2007.)
30 yr: 4.748%
(Schwab's SWVXX MM right now: 4.18%)
Anastasia Amoroso: favorite bond market sector: hmmmmmmm. Spreads are tight, offered rates are range-bound. So, she likes private credit.
Leveraged loan vs. private credit discussion with Christina Minnis, from Goldman. Both markets are "growing, robust and strong." and there is lots of dry powder still on the sidelines. Rates will stay where they are for longer. Biggest opportunity is "probably in the the private investment grade space." the prospect of rising RATES and GEOPOLITICAL considerations are the biggest looming risks. It would be an untoward thing if the FED felt it necessary to bump-up rates.

I agree with @msf (different thread) that ”Many people find government pronouncements and actions relevant to investing.”
- There’s a thread along that line offered up by @Soupkitchen January 28 in the OT section - mostly buried now by the avalanche of anti-Trump posts & comments. Worth a second look. Where America is Heading and your Investments.
Like everyone else I’m looking for clues. From the two financial blogs / newsletters I subscribe to, here’s what I’ve gleaned …
- On February 3 Bill Fleckenstein wrote: ”Lastly, on the subject of Trump tape bombs, while we should expect them to be a feature of his term, they may become less frequent, and we may get a better handle on what they individually mean. Even so, I think they mandate carrying a little bit more cash or being slightly less aggressive than one might ordinarily be because they can literally come out of nowhere and gaming whether Trump is serious or not will be hard to do in real time.” https://www.fleckensteincapital.com/dailyrap.aspx?rapdate=02-03-2025
- James Stack (InvestTech) actually raised his recommended “Net-Long” market exposure a few percentage points from around 55% to 58% about the time Trump took office (but didn’t connect the two). Stack has been extremely cautious for a couple years. The remainder, he advises, should be in T-Bills or money market funds. https://www.investech.com/
- And Barron’s this week features several Trump related articles - not all complementary. One, titled ”11 Tariff-Proof Dividend Stocks”, mentions consumer staples, financials and energy as among the better plays on that theme. Another article, ”The Markets Trust Trump. How to Trade It”, focuses on options plays. A third article notes that there has been a sharp uptick in very wealthy investors moving wealth abroad, some out of fear of a weaker dollar, but in some cases from fear of retribution by the party they opposed.
It should go without saying that other investment ideas / suggestions are appreciated. Nobody really knows at this point. But risk is inherent in most investing. If it were safe or easy the rewards would be small.