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.
While the study's general conclusion is correct (few funds land in the top 25% every single year), it has from my perspective four serious problems.
1. The baseline period is March 2009 to 2010, which is to say they looked at the funds that had the…
On the Wall Street Journal articles: try Googling the article title. Often the Google link works fine but my attempt to republish the link fails miserably.
David
Hey, big guy.
Same research as http://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/14398/preparing-for-the-cliff-high-yield-investors-are-shifting-from-hy-funds-to-hy-etfs#latest.
David
Thank you, sir. Ted's greatest strength is his utter commitment to the enterprise. I'm on break, the baseball schedule is light and the worst of the flood of workmen has passed, so I've got time - in Ted's absence - to share a few articles in the …
Yuh ... despite the fact that we have an unprecedented amount of riverfront this week, our riverfront celebration of the Fourth has been canceled.
Nuts.
David
(nods)
Most of the reporting in the WSJ is solid and the reporters are willing to run contrary to the opinions of the ideologues who control the daily three page homage to Karl Rove. The news coverage in the paper, for example, doesn't try to glos…
They're too transparent. Big firms build and dismantle positions over a period of days and they can't afford to have hedge funds forever front-running them by noticing that an active ETF made, say, the first of ten purchases of Costco. So they wan…
Shall we add Alice's recognition, in Alice in Wonderland, that, "The hurrier I go, the behinder I get"? It has a wonderful, almost Amish feel to it.
David
Artisan's EM fund has always made me a bit uncomfortable (a team that I didn't know and that didn't seem to have experience in running a mutual fund, the oddity of a purely institutional focus, high downside capture, and a portfolio that doesn't see…
Hi, guy.
By virtue of age, size and load, Ivy's outside our coverage universe which is why I haven't said anything about it. To be clear, I'm not arguing that Artisan HI is going to produce 8-9% a year as Ivy has done. Sorry if I left that impres…
As Mr. Berra once (allegedly) opined, "it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
That having been said, I think this one is safe: Artisan's not going to put their business model at risk by nibbling away at the autonomy of their …
Thanks, big guy.
Will's team dropped in the quarterfinals. A tight game under, well, it wasn't anymore.
Still working on the "how do I get all this done?" thing, which explains the lack of a thread on Mr. Krug and Artisan. The short version: he'…
Uhh ... wow.
I did read the slide deck and Andrew's latest letter, we also exchanged notes today about just-filed changes to the prospectus. He's really good.
Leaving at 6 30 for Will's last tournament. He's ready for it to be done.
More soon,
…
I'm not sure whether to read DoubleLine's decision to liquidate the fund as "principled effort to protect our investors" or an ill-natured temper tantrum. Hmmm...
David
Chickpeas. Sigh. I could be such a good (okay, "halfway adequate") vegetarian if it weren't for the need to eat legumes. Emma, who voices the Observer's audio profiles, is vegan and we actually had a series of very tasty meals out in NYC. As it …
A now retired friend of mine used to observe, "it's all grist for the mill." I never quite stop thinking about your folks, my students or my discipline. David
Hmmm ... thin pickins. I screen Morningstar for funds that met three criteria: at least 15% EM, at least 15% US and at least 15% bonds. By their calculation, about six funds qualified:
CCA Core Return (CORAX) - same unwarranted $100k minimum as t…
Hey, D.S.
Years from retirement? What a thought. I'm not sure how one decides when to retire or quite what retirement would look like (if I publish MFO but don't teach full-time, am I retired?). Maybe 10 - 20 years, health, sanity and family per…
Hi, guys.
Two notes by way of explanation.
First, we received a number of flags last night. We reviewed the thread in question and removed two posts which we judged to be somewhere near the edge and somewhat over the edge. I wrote to one of the …
Heard back from Mr. Schaja this morning. Here's what he says:
The 30-day SEC yield as of May 31 was 4.47% Retail and 4.72% for Institutional class. We estimate the yield-to-worst at 5.2% and the yield-to-maturity at 6.6% (both gross of expenses…
OAKIX actually trails OAKEX over the past 12 months, by about 300 bps.
As I look at the portfolio, OAKIX has, over the past 12 months, had huge wins on two European car companies (Daimler +62, BWM +42), a modest win on their single biggest holding …
Two quick updates on a travel day
To ET91: you're right. The new guy is doing Value and Small Cap, not Value and Real Estate.
To heezsafe: I'll post manager notes later today. Talked at length with Mr. Krug and a couple others. Also tracked dow…
Chuck, by the way, uses a really cool dual microphone that attaches to the bottom of his iPhone (picture something that looks like two tiny spotlights side by side), turning it into a broadcast quality audio recorder.
I love toys.
David
I suspwct that some of the stories are mostly prewritten. Morningstar has an onsite newspaper that reports, in advance, on what the speakers are going to have said. (Neat verb cluster.) So reporters start with that and add snippets from the post-…
Hey, MJG.
Wish you folks were here too. It turns out that MFO is modestly more well-known than you might suspect, and so I've been drawn into more impromptu conversations with fund folks than I'd budgeted time for. In the long run, that will help…
"Global brands" certainly seem to represent a popular theme among the international crowd. There's really a sense that the emerging EM middle class will be a growth driver (50% of global GDP currently, 60% by the end of the decade) and that lots of…
Morningstar's funny. "Smaller" = "our smallest medalists." The sizes here range from $1 - 8 billion and Kinnel himself admits "the last two [Causeway at $5B and Manning & Napier at $8B] are a little too big to count" as "below the radar" but …
Hi, heez.
A number of families - Artisan included - have text-free semi-annual reports. They strike me as a waste of paper. In RiverPark's case, the managers do uniformly solid quarterly letters though with the inevitable (given the tech, nearly …
Thanks for the Bryan questions. I'd been curious about his decision to leave Waddell & Reed (was bloat an issue?), his take on HY valuations (including stuff in the portfolio other than HY bonds) and how he sees himself as distinctive. Had not…
Curious. I hear rumblings of dark doings at Third Avenue from one of my senior colleagues. The insider buzz seems to be a struggle for the soul of the company and control of its next generation. I have no independent information to confirm that s…
