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.
The précis: despite one of the sharpest stock rebounds ever, the stock market continues to have upside but only if interest rates remain near zero and wages remain stagnant. The author's tone is distinctly cautious, perhaps because the stock market…
Hi, Ted.
Hadn't meant to dink with your post but I'd really like Stephen to get a wider hearing: guy guy, sensible discipline, four stars, low risk, Great Owl, strong absolute returns, rotten relative ones this year and no investors.
David
Reply to @AndyJ: Hi, AJ.
No, I don't think I was recalling a post of yours. More I was just marveling at the challenge I face in talking about fixed-income funds, and especially those that aren't simple closet indexes. I feel at least vaguely clu…
His talk was one of the more interesting at the Morningstar conference this summer. Here's my abstract of it, from our July issue. The link goes to the original discussion from when I posted the note to the board during the conference.
For what i…
One of the comments that amused me a few weeks ago was folks suggesting that my enthusiasm for the fund might be premature (that's entirely possible) and allowing that they were going to withhold judgment until they had a chance to see the holdings.…
Reply to @DavidV: On Beck, Mack, click on the Featured Funds tab at the top of the page to get to our profiles (written and audio) of the fund, plus an mp3 of a call with the manager and links to other resources.
On the second, it depends on the fa…
Reply to @Skeeter: For what interest it holds, we now think it was our security system. Every site has a front end, the part you and I see, and a back end, the part that administrators see. The back end of our site controls our control panel and o…
Reply to @Charles: I'm not particularly arguing that the market is egregiously overpriced, just that I'm unimpressed with "JK"s approach to argument and evidence.
Here, I hope, is Morningstar's total-market stock valuation graph:
Modestly overva…
Reply to @kallerid: Sherman has about 40% of the RSIVX portfolio in the same securities as in the very conservative RPHYX, and was planning on letting cash accumulate a bit. In general, he imagines the fund living somewhere between the durations of…
Uhhh ... the author's page one premise strikes me as arrantly silly:
In fact, the overall forward P/E for the 50 largest US large caps is less than 14. This compares to the forward P/E of the Nifty Fifty in 1972 which peaked at around 35. The top 50…
Reply to @Skeeter: Yes, yes. I've long lived in dread of the prospect that your army of Twitter followers would discover that "Skeeter" lays behind their beloved idol, and that a mad rush squealing followers would descend in pursuit of you.
Such i…
Dear friends,
One of the folks at RiverPark was approached by a prospective investor in RSAFX, who'd read this thread and was curious about the level of insider investment in the fund. RiverPark shared this note:
The SAI that is referenced in the …
Hi, nath!
I'm not a financial planner or anything, but I'd almost think that you'd start with determining what you need rather than what you prefer. Will the combination of your current assets, future contributions and 3-4% appreciation get you w…
Hi, Clem.
In general, that would imply that the fund might soft close, then hard close and if the size was still unmanageable, they might begin returning parts of their shareholders' investments in cash. They might, for example, redeem 2% of the s…
Reply to @Derf: Heigh ho! I actually do track things when we have extended down periods, a sort of informal and undisciplined "downside capture" inquiry. They've just be rare of late, but I'll keep an eye out.
Take care,
David
Sorry, guys. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to embed an html table. That was the source of the Alcatraz ethos in the draft posting. If only Charles (or chip or Accipiter) were here, they'd make it all better!
David
Reply to @JoeNoEskimo: Yeah, I'm trying to be thoughtful about HSTRX. It has a tendency to rise when other funds fall, which would be more useful if either the rise were dramatic or it managed to remain in the black. It's the nature of small posit…
Hmmm ... both the Riverpark income funds, RPHYX and RSIVX, were up. Hussman Strategic Total Return (HSTRX), a small hedging position in a family portfolio, likewise.
David
Reply to @Mark: Hi, Mark!
Thanks for the heads-up. I posted a short note onto the Morningstar thread, which might be the first time I've done that. I think the posters, as a whole, might have been off-track on two topics: the prospects that Ende …
If I read the chart rightly, the US, UK and Canada are the world's priciest ("most overbought") markets. Sweden (Sweden?) and several emerging markets are the least pricey and might be verging on "interestingly valued" but aren't there yet.
David
http://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discussions-3/#/discussion/8798/247b-pimco-total-return-knocked-off-its-perch-as-biggest-mutual-fund
Ted posted and I mumbled darkly about the rate of inflows into a fully-valued market.
It's the closed-end version of F P A Perennial. Both FPPFX and SOR are Gold-rated and currently three star. The investment discipline is to focus on high quality, domestic mid-cap growth stocks. Two differences: SOR has a slightly lower e.r. and …
You're right. 5000 active funds might well require 5000 boxes to ensure a great fit. I wonder if a compromise is to add another (I know, I know) bit of information: quality of fit. Morningstar calculates (but does not always publish) R-squared va…
And not just by a little: Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund (VTSMX) has $40 billion more than Total Return ($287 billion to $247 billion). If I read the article correctly, that reflects about $10 billion of market gains and more than $30 billio…
Reply to @TSP_Transfer: Especially since it's a hard close.
The lead manager is responsible for 13 other funds and about $16 billion in AUM, mostly in European and international small cap stocks. Mostly very solid funds. International Small Compa…
Then, too, it's not very good. At least over the past three years, it's badly trailed a whole variety of benchmarks. Perhaps the combination of no assets and no returns warrants ... ?
David
Reply to @RJalpha: Oh, sure. Over the past 30 days, 21% of site visitors were new readers. Indeed, as I write this, 24% of the 18 people on-site are new. The challenge becomes trying to find an appropriate balance between the need to bring new re…
Uhhh ... actually the story focused on the limitations of Morningstar's star rating system. RPHYX, which we've been talking about for two years and whose closure we signaled about a month before the event, received its first star rating in October …
In truth, it looks like a bunch of funds are reorganizing. I flagged three or four in October that made similar announcements. Generally these are change-of-ownership events, either managers selling out to larger advisers or managers buying their …
Hi, Sven.
The record for ARLSX is too short to provide a meaningful comparison. If you overlap the charts of the two at Morningstar, it appears that MFLDX is modestly more volatile and has produced a modestly greater upside since the ARLSX launch.…
Howdy.
I interviewed a bunch of long/short managers last year, some quite talented. The conclusion that I reached was that ARLSX had the most thoughtful, clearly-articulated risk management discipline of them all. I talk about that in the fund pr…
Reply to @Charles: ...like D&C, once a BM&O employee, always a BM&O employee
I admit that I find this argument fascinating. BM&O was founded in 1931. In the last 82 years, exactly two partners (that is, the folks who manage the m…
John and I had a nice chat over the noon hour yesterday. His general theme was "now we can get back to normal finance topics, rather than 24/7 debt crises." Mine was, "yep, but it's not going to get any easier." John does read MFO (you might be s…
By Morningstar's calculation, high quality (wide moat) stocks are sitting exactly at fair value as of 10/17 while low quality (no moat) stocks are about 8% overvalued. Just as I look at the three-year valuation chart, 8-12% overvalued is about as h…
Hi, Slick!
Here's an inexpert question: assuming a 22% tax rate, wouldn't you need to expect returns of noticeably more than 5.5% on your IRAs over the next two years in order to justify selling the bonds? That is, the bonds are guaranteed a taxab…
