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.
It is hard to imagine a more backward conclusion than this. Who on earth does he think is offering active, non-transparent ETFs? Oh, yes, the mutual fund companies.
American Century, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price ... The mutual fund companies have faced…
I caught Mr. C. on a lawn chair in his backyard, trying to place a trade just after a snake slithered under his chair. (His wife is teaching elementary school online, so he was trying to stay out of her hair.) Here's the note on distribution options…
Chickens and eggs, if I understand the distribution problem. It costs a mint for a tiny fund to get on a platform, even TF. The fund needs investors in order to be able to pay for it. They get investors only if they're on a platform. Which they can …
Hi, guys.
Sorry for the early-month silence. This whole "running a college by remote control while fretting every time your throat tickles" thing is enormously time-consuming, and surprisingly tiring.
We tried to avoid trivializing the pandemic by…
Hi, guys.
I'll reopen this thread in 24 hours if you'd like but, for now, the heat:light ratio seems to be getting a bit high.
Take good care of yourselves and others!
Hi, Mark.
I'd never heard of WhyHunger before, though I did just skim their website. What strikes you about them?
The ulterior motive is that I do want to encourage folks, in our April issue, to reach out and I'd like to offer some "reader recomme…
I've asked for permission to reproduce the two graphics from today's Research Note in our April issue. One gave the returns for about 20 assets or indexes and the other compared current valuations to today's. I'll share if I'm allowed.
Other highli…
Hi, Shostakovich.
Exactly. Though I didn't pull the numbers, I'm guessing that bonds and EM stocks had ... ummm, modestly disparate levels of volatility. That's partly why I placed them side-by-side.
RiverNorth, whose strategy centers on CEF arbitrage as the key to their competitive advantage, posts the following "Cliff Notes" version of their recent conference call.
The following provides a brief recap of the RiverNorth conference call held on …
Hi, expatsp!
I remain comfortable with RPHYX. It's doing what I anticipated. The manager continues finding opportunities, some reportedly remarkable.
Mr. Sherman has never compared his fund to an insured savings account. He's also said that it co…
Just as a reminder, RPHYX is the Short Term High Yield Fund and RSIVX is Strategic Income. The former is down 2.5%, the latter down 14.5% as of 3/23/20.
Hmmmm ... top 10% of its peer group for the trailing 1 week, 1 month, 3 month and YTD periods.
If you check the factsheet, you'll notice that two of the top ten issuers are cruise companies (Royal Caribbean, Silverseas) and at least one is energy (…
Hi, WABAC.
Simply typo. Or braino. "way from the trough in a bear."
The key is that bear markets tend to blow past fair value on the downside. The trough, or low point, of the market tends to be when stocks are selling at a substantial discount to…
Embrace career risk.
That might or might not require a free site registration. It let me in seamlessly but I'm there a lot and so might have some auto-logon set. Regardless, easy to get to.
The Leuthold folks track a bunch of metrics. Some target the distance to "normal" and others target the distance to "fair value."
The fair value note released this week looked at price/cash flow, price to book, dividend yield and three flavors of P…
Hi, ET!
We all do what makes sense for our families and our communities. Sometimes that means buying a little peace of mind for ourselves, sometimes we have the luxury of trying to share a little peace of mind with others. Both paths make perfect …
I'm likely to cash the check, divide it between two envelopes and hand them to folks with young families for whom this time will be vastly more stressing than it will be me. Plan B would be to give half or more to the Riverbend Food Bank and the res…
Hi, Mark.
Don't know about the AIP. I'll ask when they're not all sweaty and panicked. As I note in the "nibbling" thread, TD waved the fee when I called and asked.
David
Hi, catch.
I'm at TD because they bought Scottrade, which I used because they had a convenient local office (and wasn't Schwab).
BIAWX has a transaction fee at TD, which the online execution would have triggered. I decided to call and request a w…
Hi, Alex.
That's interesting. What sort of bias are you observing? They're certainly - for good business reasons - obsessed with the comings and goings of large funds and larger fund families, some of their folks are perhaps a bit rosy-eyed about t…
fwiw, I couldn't place local cell phone calls for a while this morning. I was trying to reach my bank with an entirely innocuous question and three times got a busy signal and "all lines are busy" announcement, followed by a hangup. I sounded more l…
Hi, John.
You might want to check in with T Rowe Price. They have revised the glide path for their Target Date funds and have, for a number of years, recommended considerable caution in the years immediately before retirement. If I recall correctl…
Hi, VF!
I'm not sure what Mr. Sherman might be permitted to say, but I'll ask.
In general, I wouldn't make surprised if some of these are mark-to-market losses; that is, he might be holding a bond that (a) he intends to hold to maturity but that (…
Hi, rmt.
GP has two product lines, so to speak: their core funds and their Stalwart funds. Their core competency is global micro cap to global very-small cap. That's the focus on the capacity-constrained core funds. The Stalwart funds were later ad…
I need to read more carefully: the Morningstar article was limited to the Morningstar 500 funds, which tend to be larger funds with full analyst coverage. That would explain the MCSMX absence.
As of this morning, the Shiller CAPE was 24.46 and falling.
Good news: that's probably a five-year low.
Bad news: that 50 year average looks to be 15-20.
So "the market" isn't classically cheap.
Sensible grown-ups, El-Erian most recently, are an…
Grandeur Peak announced yesterday that almost all of their funds are moving from "hard close" to some variant of "soft open" or "soft close." The translation is, given the (likely) combination of outflows and improving opportunities, the funds will …
Hi, Kaspa. You might be interested in the story of Akre in our "manager changes" article this month. It feels rather like a Mairs & Power-ish management transition (which is to say, seamless and nearly invisible) has been underway.
Hi, david. I…
Blaine Rollins, founder of 361 Capital and former Big Dog at Janus:
The moves are extreme but reflect the now-dual uncertainty of something that we have not seen since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. Don’t expect this volatility to end anytime s…
The audience for the other stalwarts were advisors with established relationships with Grandeur Peak who were unable to access the closed funds for their new client accounts; the Stalwarts were a sort of peace offering that tried to balance GP's pri…
Hi, Mona. Yes, lower turnover helps. Tax conscious selling helps. Burgeoning asset base helps. I can separate out how much any of them account for the level of efficiency.
Morningstar reports a tax drag of 0.49%, less than one-quarter of the group average.
Here's the key: fast-growing funds are always more tax-efficient than others because the tax cost gets spread out over more and more investors. So the fund might d…
Mr. Sherman affirms our guess: "RPHIX excess spread over treasuries has diminished as rates rose. Further, high yield index spreads compressed toward historic lows which permeates to all investment selections and also created crowding in the very s…
It's an intriguing reaction. The Fed cuts rates, which usually triggers a melt-up and gets a melt-down instead.
Why? Online speculation is that the publicly available evidence (particularly sentiment indicators, which Powell implied was what drove…
Hi, Gundlar.
Sharpe is a calculation of a fund's risk-adjusted returns minus the returns available from a risk-free investment, typically a T-bill.
Neither the risk nor the returns of RPHYX have meaningfully changed. The volatility measures for RP…
Just as a quick update:
we had a very long talk that covered a lot of ground.
The shortest version of his investment strategy is to buy and hold "global champions," which he defines as companies whose pricing power is supported by a network effect…
