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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
@Observant1, I have been investing with Vanguard since the 90’s before the internet age. My frustration with Vanguard today is their customer support simply cannot keep up with our needs. As a Flagship customer, we use their special phone number w…
Thank you for the detailed summary.
Vanguard got their work cut for them, especially with their customer service. There should be a lot more than broadening their ETF offerings and lower their expense ratios.
I have the same question too. If bank loan bonds are risky, why does David Giruox, PRWCX holds 7-10% of bank loan in the portfolio? He spoke why he held bank loans and other high yield bonds being held in the portfolio. And yet the fund done well …
The strong employment data released on Friday affected different bond sectors differently. The lower risk, investment grade and muni bonds got hit much harder than those of riskier high yield bonds. Bank loans held up well even though many suggest…
We can use a combination of First Eagle ETF and a gold bullion ETF, IAU. The mutual fund maintains about 10% in gold and high single digit cash. Always have lots of respect with Matthew McLennan.
We moved to DODIX (core plus bond), BND (total bond index), and PYLD (multi-sector bond ETF) over 6 months. All of them are intermediate-term investment grade bond funds. Short term T bills have been falling below 5% yield since July this year and …
Lastly, this is all for now. Our COVID funk is still hanging around with fatigue; and for me, I've lost my sense of taste...........bummer, for sure.
Among the older demographics, we have to be careful and there are anti-viral medications that you…
Polling data is useful for popular vote counts. It is the electoral college votes that elect the president. So I watch the battleground states: MI, WI, PA, NC,GA, NV, and AZ. 2016 election should remind folks that winning the popular votes does n…
@mskursh, you have done your fellow employees a great favor to find a decent 401(k) provider, especially form smaller companies with limited resources.
Last company I worked for has a pension plan but it was poorly managed so that the $ grew ver…
We sold the bulk of our stable value fund before Powell announced September’s rate cut. It provided a respectable return and stability through 2022. Now it the tiime to move on elsewhere.
LCR is a good fund but we are not invested in it because it is traded at 11,000 shares as of Friday, September 27, 2024 as @skostakkovich mentioned. I prefer a more health trading volume of 100k or more. Additionally, the management fee at 0.88% i…
Adding to smaller cap funds, consumer staples ETF, utility ETF, and VCIT, Vanguard Intermediate term corporate bond index. Will not reinvest T bills and CDs as they mature.
Ironically that investment grade bonds of all duration fell while high yield bonds held up.
Will there be more cuts coming this year? The days of holding money market yielding 5% will likely coming to an end sooner than one thinks.
He just wants attention, nothing more. If he bails on the stock, it implies that he has no confidence of winning the election. He claims he does not need the money. Right?
Thanks @Crash. Correct my spelling.
So much mental decline compared to his 2016 performance. Some suggested his slurred speech is very alarming, and it gets worse when he is under pressure to response appropriately. Don’t worry he will not debat…
@catch22, We wish you a speedy recovery. Take lots of rest and fluid. Please seek medical attention right away if it does not improve within few days. I understand the anti-viral drugs are very effective but you have to request the prescription f…
Fact checking stopped his momentum on relentless lying. Soon he forgot his talking points and go off track by calling his opponent names. Noted the sentences gotten shorter and shorter. Instead of talking on his past accomplishments and future po…
Fact checking by the moderators call out the continuous lies. It really made a big differences that got him rattled badly as the debate went on. His words were getting slurred. Someone suggested poor preparation and his debate team should be fired.
@hank, W. will not announce his endorsement unlike Dick Cheney who took his stand.
Liz Cheney recently gave an interview on NBC.
Former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney encouraged anti-Trump Republicans and independents Sunday to consider voting for Vice Pr…
Here is something that big retailers are doing to their suppliers. Walmart has been doing this for years in order to lower their prices, and consolidating the retailers, killing off the mom and pop retailers, for example.
https://reuters.com/artic…
Thank you @Observant1.
1. Very timely to wrap up the labor market data and trend. 25 bps rate cut is the most probable on September’s FED meeting.
2. September is generally weak for stock market. Tech pullback in recent weeks is an example. Aga…
Thanks @Catch22 for the data. My bonds have done well this week. As I stated earlier, they are low hanging fruits comparing to that of tech stocks/funds, which is undergoing a sell off this week.
It is often unclear in Fidelity site. Pimco bond funds, for example, have sizable % on “others”. Generally they are derivatives. Their annual reports provide more details on “others”
@Catch22 posting on ETFs are the benchmarks in which active funds are comparing to. Their up and down reveal the returns with respect to duration and credit quality. These are very useful metrics to track in 2022 with rising interest rates.
Core b…
This is a nice feature I learned from @msf years ago. In the long run, it help to build sizable positions in institutional shares of OEFs. The $5 spend pays itself many times over from having lower expense ratio.
Does Schwab offers similar fearu…
@catch22, thank you for the link above. The one link to Bogleheads is most relevant for my planning. I worked briefly with Vanguard Selected Advisory Service and they ran their Monte Carlo simulation with several scenarios with expected return, in…
After several years of high inflation and geopolitical conflict, we sold the entire gold position.0, IAU, this summer. It was very volatile but we held on that resulted a modest gain.
If we venture into precious mretal, not so much the miners, we …
Thanks @Mark. Your link provide content may be useful for investors. I look at MaxiFi several years ago and decided it was not for us. We have relatives who work in wealth management business. From what I see over the years, their returns are real…
We are not there yet. Here is our plan on stable value fund in our 401(K):
1. We will hold enough cash to cover one to two year expense (minus social security and pension) from the staple value fund.
2. The bulk of our staple value has been re…
In the past, he called fallen soldiers “suckers and losers” and did not honor those who gave their lives to this country. Now he is using the photo opportunities at Arlington National Cemetery to change his narratives in order to improve his image …
Thank you for the summary, @observant1.
Two points are of particular concern.
US debt to GDP ratio was probably 50% or 60% but is now at 120%.
The Fed balance sheet has grown 10 times during the past 20 years!
One can choose of not following the crowd. Market fell this week even with good earning from Nivida.
Thought I saw market.broadening, but it was a mirage. Wonder if the market will reacts poorly if the Fed plays it safe and cut 25 bps instead of…
The market broadened out last few week to smaller stocks. I think better opportunities are here and not the big tech stocks. I use active managed funds for smaller cap stocks. Many smaller cap stocks are not profitable and end up as value traps as y…
My guess is to attract new asset with ETF wrappers since they can be traded in many brokerages outside of Vanguard. Vanguard mutual funds cost $75 to purchase at Fidelity. These new Vanguard ETFs are not clones of their equivalent OEFs. Thanks @ms…
Two scenarios of outcome are possible, soft landing or hard landing (recession). In soft landing case, all bonds will do fine, whereas in recession junk bonds would fall like stocks. Only you as an investor can decide how to position your fixed inc…
