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Sven
Lynn,
Thank you so much. I am planning on a 3-year ladder since I am a year away from retirement. Lots of spreadsheet work to calculate the income replacement needed. This ladder will create a steady income stream. So thank you for all your help.
I moved back to high quality bond funds this year. Some of which you covered in the SA article. For now, I will stay with agency bonds to the bond ladder. I will pick active managers for corporate bonds.
Sven
Timing may not be the best right now considering the country is slowing down or entering a recession. I would be careful with smaller cap funds, especially growth style.
Would consumer staples sector be more connected to food prices? Below is a link to VDC and its portfolio. Noted not all of them are considered “food”, i.e. tobacco.
https://investor.vanguard.com/etf/profile/portfolio/vdc
Take a look at Fidelity Strategic Real Asset fund, FSRRX, which invest in a combination of real estate stocks and debts, commodity, precious an industrial metals, convertible sec, and bonds.
https://fundresearch.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/compositio…
Great! Just want more vehicles to counteract the high inflation. Bonds are struggling this year with rising interest rate. Lots of talk on the increased probability to recession.
@MikeM and @hank, in addition to commodity futures (COM) and gold (IAU), food prices are rising rapidly this year. Perhaps, agriculture futures such as DBA may present another opportunity.
https://finviz.com/futures.ashx
Grandeur Peak funds invested in domestic and overseas mid- to micro caps stocks. These areas are not readily available in ETFs. Right now, money is flowing toward large caps and GP struggles. The business cycle perspective also points toward lar…
Future of EVs lies in new battery technologies to enable the EVs. Most of today’s lithium ion batteries have many limitations ranging from safety hazard (fires from accidents and battery failures), raw materials and immature charging infrastructure.…
Really good find to learn more about Ms Kofman from M* (forgot the old M*). She also manages Hartford Dividend and Quality Values funds. The track record is quite good.
@old_Joe beat me to it. BlackRock has one of the largest Russian exposure, $17 billion. For now Russia stocks are delisted from the west’s stock exchanges and the securities are mark-to-market as they underwent free fall… Even if the sanction are l…
Several experienced Wellington managers retired in the last 5 years. But Wellington have deep bench where newer managers typically have more than 5 years severing as co-managers in similar funds. Wellington is also advisors to Hartford funds and y…
Companies are increasingly deciding not to have their chief executives serve as chair
Given Warren Buffet’s advanced age, they may have a point to have a second person to assume part of the responsibility. The vice chairman, Charlie Munger, is se…
Gold is still ok so far. The future market for Monday continues to decline today.
At least you did not invest with Cathie Wood. Her flagship ETF is down 45% so far.
My mistake, it is VGWLX, Global Wellington. A global version of Wellington.
Wellington also manages International Core Stock fund, VWICX. I reduced my EM and growth exposure in late 2020 as part of risk reduction. Now bonds are falling as well…
Large US tech companies are reporting next week. Netflix took a big hit the week and will the rest of FAANG stocks do better.
Also crude oil future declined to $99 per barrel as the Chinese demand has soften due to lockdown on several large citi…
@bee, once again, thank you for Alex Umansky’s interview. Lots of good insights on his stock picking process and the risk of high growth stocks. These stocks are the future Amazon and Apple before they become so dominant today. Mentioned that Russi…
I'm a VWILX ¹ investor and the fund has performed poorly over the past year and YTD.
Same here, but I exchanged most of VWILX to the more value-oriented VGWEX for reducing risk. Growth is out of favor now after it out-performed value for many yea…
The point of going to short duration bonds is to minimize interest rate risk, especially when are more rate hikes coming until 2023. Going to long duration bonds make sense when rates are falling.
Bank loan bonds referred in the article are shor…
and long government-bond funds saw inflows."
Last I checked long term treasury index funds are down over 17%. Please help on why these bonds attract investors?
In addition, there is likely several rate hikes this year and 2023.
Funds that invested in commodity futures use TIPs as collateral which is affected by higher rates. Several 50 bps hikes are planned this year. So commodities will likely to give back some of their earlier gain.
This year there are few safe optio…
Situation is worse than that of Wuhan back in 2020. Several large industrial cities are being affected and production for Tesla and Foxconn have stopped as OJ posted above.
The worst is the Chinese vaccines are barely passing the WHO benchmark wi…
@yogibb, this board had a discussion on FRDM last year. https://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/57904/investing-in-freedom-freedom-100-emerging-markets-etf-frdm/p1
For what it worth, this year this ETF is having a much smooth ride given …
I have no issue wearing mask on flights, especially for oversea flights. We found double-layer silk mask from traveling shops to be most comfortable in term of breathability and comfort versus KN95 mask. Price has doubled since the pandemic. Still…
Please take a look at Freedom 100 EM ETF, FRDM. Fact sheet is provided below.
https://alphaarchitect.com/wp-content/uploads/compliance/etf/factsheets/FRDM_Factsheet.pdf
Country selection and weights are based on composite freedom scores derived f…
The situation with Russia is worse than that of 2008, where everything took several years to fully recover. Is there a turn-around this time?
BlackRock stands to loss the most - billions $ since they have the largest Russian exposure. Earning s…
It will sell up to $60 billion of U.S. Treasuries and $35 billion of mortgage-backed bonds per month.
Wonder which direction balanced fund managers will tilt toward ?
@hank, Don’t think we are out of the wood yet with COVID. Will learn the motivation behind this terrible act soon. Pandemic stress could be part of it. Nevertheless, we all must love our neighbors regardless of the circumstances. Please stay safe…
@msf,
One can eek out another $5K in savings bond purchases by overpaying on one's Jan 15th tax estimate. Add enough to create a $5K refund to buy the bonds.
With year-end distribution, it is often not easy to estimate how much to “overpay” the …
@old_Joe, agree that Intel would be a better choice and there are few others too.
Apple moved away Intel X-86-based chips to other advanced (faster and low power consumption) architectures, M1 for their computers. M1 chips are designed by ARM, a …
WB held IBM for a long time before he realized it has no competitive advantages or wide moat. He sold IBM later. He bought Apple (and lot of them) and this turns out to be a right pick. HP appears to me is more like IBM, hope WB proves me wrong.
How about comparing to iShares Canada ETF, EWC on both the upside and downside?
Single country funds/ETFs can be rewarding and volatile at the same time due to lack of country diversification. Good research topic but be careful.
Canada is having inflation issue too. In April, they will raise rate by 50 basis points and likely more throughout the year. So I would wait a good entry point and dollar average in to your target allocation.