Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.
That seems like awfully sensible advice.
Life is chaotic for me right now. No, not the markets. We knew months ago that this was a plausible development and so I'm mostly ignoring it, though we are working on February profiles for three funds that…
The simplest answer is (likely) legal; statements available to "the public" are governed by different rules than statements available to "qualified investors" or private clients. If, for example, GMO published their asset class projections for avera…
Don't forget that you asked have the option of sending a private message to any other member of the board. If you'd like to say "hi" to John and Scott, I'm sure they'd welcome the contact.
David
Hi, Vert.
Not value, per se. They own equal amounts of nine ETFs, one representing each major industry. Some of the ETFs are quite growth-y, some are not. They periodically rebalance to get everyone back to an equal weight. For now, that means buyi…
Josh wrote me (and presumably everyone else on the list) on December 30th, and asked us to complete the sentence, "In 2015, I learned that ..." Seized by uncontrollable whimsy, I sent him a rather longer answer than was publishable.
Hi, Josh.
In 20…
Hi, David.
Almost all of the winners in my retirement portfolio were Fidelity large growth funds (and Fido Japan Smaller Companies, bought some while ago at Ed's recommendation).
In Mr. Danoff's case, his major winners were Facebook (up 34%), Ama…
There is, I think, some evidence that Mr. Barse was hard to love. It's not clear that "CEO for 24 years" was exactly correct (there were a couple firms, a couple titles and a gap). It's pretty clear that TAM has been in turmoil for years, which make…
Here's the key detail: Third Avenue has distributed the fund's cash to its shareholders and placed all of its other assets in "the Liquidating Trust." That trust does not trade and you do not have access to the value locked up in that trust. Instead…
Sorry about the delay. Been running since 5:30 this morning, trying to catch up on my professoring, chairing, dad-ing and email. Yikes.
The "us" in "several of us" are Ed and me, several equity managers I've talked with but who don't particularly w…
For me, it was the Augie bunnies. When I interviewed here in '84, I stayed in an on-campus guest room. I came out in the morning to find three rabbits playing on the lawn and three different colors of squirrels - reddish, gray and black - in the tre…
Hi, Pudd.
On Alphacentric, it appears that the fund launched on May 28, 2015. The "A" shares ticker is BDRAX. No guess about when or if Fido will offer it.
Fund companies must get SEC clearance before they're permitted to offer a new fund to the …
My favorite book on the subject is Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (1966). Tuchman is neither scholarly nor cutting-edge. She is, instead, readable, thoughtful and daring.
She might also be the r…
No, sadly, this will be major tax-gain harvesting.
Seafarer gives direct investors access to their low expense institutional class shares; you just need to meet the retail minimum and set up an AIP. The minimum additional investment via Scottrade i…
"Beneficial ownership" occurs when shares that I purchased are legally held in another entity's name. If you look at Seafarer's SAI, you'll see that the single largest shareholder of SFGIX is Charles Schwab at 77.5% of shares outstanding. If you bo…
On Sequoia: stars are mechanical, regularly recalculated and backward-looking. I was mostly surprised to see a two star jump.
On Tanaka: Fingerprint Cards AB is, indeed, up 1200% this year. Morningstar, though, reports a "first purchase" data of Au…
For many investors, that's good news.
RPHYX is categorized as a high-yield fund which is fundamentally misleading. It's designed to be a cash-management fund - 3-4% returns, negligible volatility - but it's benchmarked against high-volatility longe…
The Investor shares disappeared on 10/23. The "Advantage" name disappears in December. Their argument, valid or not, is that "A" shares are widely available without a load so reducing the number of share classes is no big deal.
Maybe yes, maybe no.
Thanks, OJ. Chip has been trying to contact them to see if we could get them to put an anchor link into the portion of their energy essay that deals with climate, but stuff keeps bouncing. These durn little mom 'n' pop websites ...
Oh, right. That…
Leigh shared the following with Jim, sending it as a private message though he'd intended to post it here. He gave me permission to copy and paste it.
David
The FundAttribution site has been up since June 2015. The website is in beta test.
Back…
Hi, Jim.
I passed your query along to Leigh. In general, he's pretty cautious. In our conversations, he's argued that he doesn't want to oversell the research but at the same time the back-testing has been strong. (Back-testing usually is, of cours…
Hi, expat!
Any leads on publicly-accessible versions of NDR's research? I spent about a half hour looking. The links at Ned Davis's "news" page lead mostly to bearish, locked stories. "Given the extent of indicator deterioration, last week's action…
Usually my son and I drive back for the week between Christmas and New Years. He rampages with his cousins, I wander through the Strip and anxiously peck out the New Years issue.
That's not you? Damn. And here I thought we could go clubbing together.
Nuts. Well, maybe an after Christmas coffee in the Strip? With luck I'll be raiding Prestogeorge's some time just before New Years.
They're on my "to-do" list, for what interest that holds. We haven't done much on them yet, but the statistical measurements make them look awfully solid.
SCFAX is the retail version. It'll turn three years old this week. Good performance, seems steady. Looks like Schwab might be the only way around the front load, unless TD knows of a different path?
David
I chatted with Mr. Sherman a bit just before the publication of his quarterly letter. It seems to me that there are four factors weakening his relative performance:
1. mistaken judgments about three individual issues. On whole, those sort of goofs …
As an undergraduate, one of my majors was political science. It was useful, mostly, in giving me reason to read interesting arguments about how we do, and how we should, govern ourselves. One of the best was Dye and Zeigler's The Irony of Democracy.…
