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.
explains that street whores make way more than whorehouse employees, trading wages for risk reduction.
Not here in Ecuador, where ladies of the night work the streets when they can't get employment in the clubs. They make less due to both lower ra…
I believe that the credit union is required to publish a blended APY, combining 4% for 4 months and 1.65% (the current rate for the remainder) for the final 12 months.
See Reg DD Appendix A. This is a stepped rate CD. Section B talks about bl…
the threatened penalty for keeping VG mutual fund account is $20/yr/fund holding. [...]
[...] people also got notices to switch to electronic statements to avoid $20 annual fee. [...] the previous threshold to avoid that fee was $50K in household …
For Vanguard bashers, I believe (not going to check now) that Vanguard will not cancel a Vanguard mutual fund order that has been submitted on its legacy Vanguard fund platform (even hours before closing). It will cancel orders for Vanguard or oth…
Exxon doesn't care who its owners are.
That's a pretty good definition of poor governance - ignoring your shareholders. Ultimately that comes with consequences.
A year ago this month [May], a small hedge fund won an unlikely victory against Exxon…
Making alcoholic beverages is morally wrong
Certainly some ratings penalize (or exclude) the manufacture of alcoholic beverages for moral reasons. However, M*'s Sustainalytics concerns are not moral but (surprise) sustainability:
Based on assess…
Follow the money. M* needs to show these metrics have value:
CHICAGO and AMSTERDAM, April 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Morningstar, Inc. (Nasdaq: MORN), a leading provider of independent investment research, today announced it has reached an agreement …
In a sense, the mark-to-market prices are not much different from the redemption with early withdrawal penalty. Each represents the price one could get today for offloading a CD. It's just that in one case one is offloading to an arbitrary buyer…
These are features of legacy pages from two iterations ago. M* hid them many months ago, though it has only recently completely disabled them.
In its current iteration (at morningstar.com) one can still compare fund performance by using interacti…
Not directly on point but worth keeping in mind is that active share is only a measure of how many stocks held by a fund are not identical to stocks in its benchmark index. So a 100% active fund could hold Pepsi instead of Coke, UMC instead of TSM…
As one digs a little, it just keeps getting better.
It seems that the 10% performance fee used to be 11%:
https://prdistribution.com/news/tbo-capital-announces-reduction-of-performance-fees-for-all-balances-2.html
The application form lets you sen…
Unexpected large mutual fund year end distribution is where it get sticky.
True enough. Though Uncle Sam doesn't require you to pay taxes on money earned faster than you make it. If you have large YE distributions, Uncle Sam is fine with your pa…
Call me paranoid, but when a "fund" manager says how extensive his experience is but won't detail it in writing (i.e. on the fund site, let alone in the prospectus), that suggests to me that he's worried about putting something dodgy into a legal do…
FWIW, my wife and I both receive pensions and withhold more than enough to cover our taxes from those payments.
That's all you need. If withholdings cover taxes, you do not have to make any estimated payments.
Generally, most taxpayers will a…
Historically, MMFs paid higher rates than bank/CU MMAs. They have to. Why would anyone use a lower yielding, uninsured product that can, and thanks to the Reserve Fund has, lose money?
The GFC and ZIRP turned things upside down. MMF yields wou…
If that late spring conversion was in June (summer began June 21st this year), then the taxes would come under the third quarter (Sept) estimate not the second quarter (June) estimate.
If without the estimated payment you'll still have paid in enou…
Oodles of red flags. Starting with performance that would make Bernie Madoff blush. Not a single losing month from January 2016 through June 2022. (I can hardly wait to see it post July results.) Smooth as silk. Just look at the graph.
htt…
Most credit unions are insured by NCUA, a federal agency.
One of the NCUA’s responsibilities is managing the National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund. It is the NCUSIF that guarantees money in credit union accounts is backed with the full faith…
From the Science piece:
scientists on both sides of the fracking debate agree that it is very unlikely that microfracturing of rock formation itself contributes to the vertical migration of gases. The problem, they say, is with a minority of badly …
Instead of SMVFX (C shares), one could buy the less expensive A shares SAMVX (NTF at Fidelity) or the even better I shares SMVTX (NTF at Schwab). Are you limited to the high ER shares through your workplace or broker? If you still like the fund,…
that there is only one company in the world presently capable of supplying the most advanced chip-manufacturing equipment
A minor point - ASML is the clear leader in lithography, but the manufacture of semiconductors, broadly speaking encompasses …
I completely agree that the focus on numbers is wrong. I didn't pick it. The thesis of the opinion piece was that from a financial perspective, fracking is a sham.
A piece that presents readers with dubious assertions creates impression that …
For a variety of environmental reasons, I'd like to see the end of fracking. But that doesn't diminish the appearance of the cited NYTimes Op-Ed piece as a polemic, grounded in misleading, cherry picked data.
Start with the except quoted. Here'…
The speaker [i.e. Pelosi] serves as an example of good ethics - she is not among the "66 members of Congress [enumerated in the cited piece] who have violated a law designed to prevent insider trading".
It's not the responsibility of the Speaker…
As noted in the excerpted text ("long the province of structured products"), this sounds a bit like old wine in new bottles.
Buffered ETFs vs Index-Linked Annuities
There are differences including ETF-specific risks of "suboptimal [management] deci…
at the expense of maximizing shareholder returns in the Sub-Adviser’s assessment.
Taking action to mitigate factors that impair a company's ability to recruit the best employees is not social activism; it's just good business practice. Failing t…
Here's a picture of the link to navigate (what Yogi calls backtracking) to the next level up:
For wonks: One can wind up at an unexpected "parent" page if one creates multiple paths (network organization) to a given page.
See graph below. Th…
Going into even more detail ...
Step 1:
Orig post: I think this is the result you got.
https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=0000036405
New post: Starting with mcq's search result
Embedded link in new post is identical to URL given in orig post. …
Just goes to show how often I trade options. (I've only owned ISOs and NQOs.)
According to Fidelity, the option holder can override the auto execution. Which gets us back to the prudent investor. While I could understand someone turning off t…
Surely I'm not the only one who noticed that the NVDA trade was an exercise of in-the-money (by 53% or more) options on the expiration date of June 17th. Had they not been exercised then, they would have expired worthless.
That's not using insider…
Reiterating what I did:
- Starting with mcq's search result, obtained by searching for VFINX on the mutual fund search page and following the CIK 0000036405 link on the results page for the Vanguard Index Funds trust ...
- Follow the "Classic v…
Let's apply the law for all.
Okay. Let's apply the disclosure requirements to all, not just to "US congress rep[s]". Would you care to start by disclosing your trades (and ranges of dollar amounts) on a monthly basis?
The violations identifie…
One way to "income average" is to literally sell over time. Say 10% each year. If it is income-generating land, then you could get 90% of the revenue when you retained 90% of the ownership and so on.
That's a little messy. A way to effect s…
I think this is the result you got.
https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=0000036405
Try switching to the "classic" version. As M* and Coke have demonstrated, "new" is not necessarily improved.
This "SEC classic" page links to filings all the …
Yahoo is okay for some things, but when the quality of the data is important, it's better to go upstream, closer to the source. Yahoo is just a tertiary source, getting much of its data from Morningstar. Though "US equities and global index hist…
I have held issues in a Roth account where the foreign tax is not withheld.
While I haven't held foreign stocks directly or "semi-directly" (via ADRs or GDRs), ISTM that the withholding of foreign taxes on stocks mirrors that of foreign taxes on m…
1986. Ten year income averaging is still available for qualified plan lump sum distributions to people born before 1936.
Subtitle E: Miscellaneous Provisions - Repeals income averaging.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress/house-bill/3838…
@Ben is correct. So long as one pays more than required each quarter, whether that is everything in the first quarter or just paying a bit of excess in the first three quarters, everything should be fine. It's only when you make more money YTD th…
Generally, with lots of exceptions, the IRS expects you to pay your taxes equally in each quarter. That should be pretty obvious, because otherwise everyone would skip their first three estimates and just pay everything on the last estimate.
For e…
