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There's a limit to what the guys are allowed to talk about just now. I did ask about two things that I thought were permissible. First was why they delayed in 2017 and the second was why the fund is flagged as closed to new investors.
A1: The post…
TBH, things mostly seem to go swimmingly. I sort of assume most people have 28% compounded annual rates of return and nod appreciatively. And I certainly have no reservations about sharing external resources. There have been some reports of active r…
from the new prospectus: "Subject to certain exceptions, the fund is currently closed to new investors and new accounts. Investors who currently hold shares of the fund may continue to purchase additional shares."
Curious.
We ended our 2020 profile of the Bruce Fund with this note: "Bruce is an enigmatic fund because its managers choose for it to be so. They don’t explain themselves to the public, though do answer calls from their investors." Talked to Jeff Bruce for …
I agree. Mostly I was discomforted by misrepresenting two datapoints about the fund in our original write-up. I'll probably send an email update once Chip returns from New York.
The most embarrassing element of the machine-written text is its shamelessness. "Compared to other small-growth equity funds, this one has exceptional risk management" or whatever. Computer Dude, it's not a small-growth fund and your blissfully conf…
Eponymous funds are hard investments. Muhlenkamp was bequeathed to Ron's son, and has been vastly better without him. Akre Focus was the outgrowth of one betrayal of Chuck Akre by his analysts; he intensely prepped their successors. By MFO Premium's…
A couple notes from Mr. P. On inside ownership of the fund:
The GoodHaven Fund disclosed in its annual and semi-annual reports insider ownership as follows - and please note the vast majority of these shares are related to Mr. Pitkowsky and entitie…
I shared a link to this discussion with the Good Haven manager and invited him to weigh in, either directly or indirectly. He seemed intrigued. I'll share what, if anything, I hear back.
Harry started his critique of traditional finance practice by thinking about the behavior of bettors in a casino. "I'll put it all on red 27" is a recipe for misery, so bettors spread their bets, trying to tilt the odds in their favor. Sometimes tha…
Harry was in interesting soul. His work lays, as you point out, the foundation for much of the modern finance industry. And yet he, himself, was not a finance guy and not particularly interested in the subject. He started out writing algorithms and …
I do wonder how much of that was Steve Leuthold personally. I get a sense that the firm had a fairly major refresh at the point of Steve's retirement, rethinking a number of positions that might have been getting a bit too dogmatic.
Last year Leuth…
My first recommendation is always to drop a quick note to Charles, Master of It All. He's Charles@ followed by the name of our site.
My second recommendation is to choose "Management" in the screener then either Adviser or Sub-adviser but not both.…
They've trimmed gold from 6% to 2% and are looking for "an exit point" to go further. He charted the recent decline in YOY inflation against the record for the rate at which inflation normally subsides. (Data maybe from '62 on?) The current rate has…
The estimate Lewis Braham wrote:
An imperfect alternative is to find a substitute for a closed fund that either ... is run by the same manager. This March, T. Rowe filed for a prospectus for the Capital Appreciation Equity ETF, run by the same mana…
We've had nice feedback about Devesh's synopsis of his time with David Sherman and David's investment reflections. I think that Lynn makes a good case for concern about a "hard landing." And I'd love to find a way to raise the visibility of the HSA …
The Norwegians left in a huff over some issue about ... you know, tolerating Catholics or some similar heresy. They expressed their independence by taking their prairie schooners north and west, landing in lovely Sioux Falls, South Dakota. They prom…
Morningstar's gutted portfolio list (it now shows only the top 10 holdings) shows that nine of the top 10 holdings made money over the past 12 months with eight posting double-digit gains.
Given a sideways comment in the manager's latest update and…
He seemed like a good guy, from what I could tell. His survived by his wife and two adult sons. Had a career of just over 30 years with Kornitzer Capital Management. Passed away at the age of 54. The family asks that you consider a donation in his m…
Steve retired about 11 or 12 years ago and moved from Minnesota to Maine. At the time of his recent death he was, I think, in California. So he's been out of the loop for more than a decade.
There's an argument that his departure was good for the f…
Thank you, sir!
I've been pondering alternate risk-return tools lately, including the Ulcer Index and capture ratios. I was heartened to see that Ariel Global, whose manager is good and utterly adamant about the "the market on opioids" thing, was p…
Just fyi, we'll run a full profile of LCORX in June. It has a side by side comparison of the metrics for the three variations on the tactical allocation theme: LCORX, Leuthold Global and Leuthold Core ETF.
As an aside, the minimum initial investmen…
Hi, MikeW.
David Sherman does things that I like (and respect).
(1) His strategies are consistently distinctive; there's not a "me, too!" in the bunch. They're thoughtful and serve a valid and important purpose: providing fixed income strategies …
Concentrated, high quality, small cap growth strategy. 400 bps lead over the Russell 2000 since the beginning of the 21st century. The Big Dog had a stint at Jundt back in the '90s (who now remembers the glory days of Jundt Growth Fund, which was ma…
The arguments we discussed in the two essays I linked to allow that "less intertwined with China" might not be the managers' goal. In at least some cases, it's simply a desire to avoid the level of uncertainty - hence unpredictable risk - involved i…
Hi, sma!
Hmmm ... I may have lost my claim to being a Weeble ("Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down!") but I'm still moving forward more than back.
Working on setting up manager interviews. Seafarer Value (the only EM fund that didn't crash …
The March issue is live now, and rich.
Devesh has spent rather a lot of time thinking about international investing in these past few months and has come to the surprising conclusion that active management might actually be worth your money. As par…
When it launched, we referred to it as "Mr. Miller's retirement present from Legg Mason."
He's collecting a 0.77% management fee on $1.1 billion in a fund that - per Morningstar - is in the 100th percentile for the past week.
Month.
Quarterly.
Y…
Interesting.
The fund absolutely cratered in its first two years, 2014 and 2015. Terrible absolute returns - down about 40% - and terrible relative ones. Great since then but reopening, I'm guessing, because it saw massive outflows in the last coup…
One point I touched on in December was that a dramatic market fall might well be occasioned by the group that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch decried as "the toddlers running Congress." In a 2011 tantrum, the House refused to raise the US debt ceiling w…
FPA Queens Road Small Cap Value (QRSVX) is pretty much atop the pile, at least if you value long-term performance. Over 20 years it matches the S&P 500 with comparable volatility and a noticeably small maximum drawdown. Also, nice people.
"A federal judge in New York formally dismissed the last remaining indictment against Huawei's chief financial officer after prosecutors agreed Meng had abided by the terms of her deferred prosecution agreement."
Apparently arrested, arguably under…
"The sharp rise in interest rates and the widely expected resultant recession may also be the 'zombie killer' that finally forces a wave of restructurings among companies reliant on accommodative capital markets to provide cash infusions to cover in…