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.
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…
The 30 day SEC yield is the best approximation of what a fund would return if it held its bonds to maturity/call. If one thinks of a portfolio consisting of a single bond, the SEC yield would be the YTW.
For example, a 5 year bond selling at $…
No problem on the M* investor site downloading VWELX data going back to 1929. Of course M* data for that era is only monthly. So while daily values are downloaded, they don't change most days. You might want to do some interpolation as a fixup.
The fact that 73% of TROW is own by so called “smart money” ... says something
Regardless of whether one agrees with that or not, one doesn't get that datum (73% owned by institutional investors) from a ranking of the largest institutional investo…
I find "Top Institutional Holders" tables of dubious value. The pecking order correlates with the size of the institution. Vanguard owns a lot of everything because Vanguard is larger than other institutions. That doesn't mean that it's enamor…
Not only that, but if the stock is sold within 61 days of purchase, that dividend will be taxed as ordinary income.
https://www.fidelity.com/tax-information/tax-topics/qualified-dividends
My condolences as well. The first thing to do is to take a deep breath and not rush. Especially with Vanguard. For one thing, as others have said, they're just not available now. Another reason is that the instant you notify them of the death…
It's Friday night, thoughts getting a little weird. Below the image is my Rube Goldberg-ish idea on what Vanguard might have done.
When the institutional investors place exchange orders from retail to institutional class shares, Vanguard redee…
The savings bond calculator will display the value of a savings bond as of any given month. To find the net amount of interest credited to the savings bond between two given months ask for the values on those two months and take the difference.
N…
The Regular TDF did not have its own institutional class. It didn't even have Admiral shares. Below is an excerpt from the 2020 SAI for the funds.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/752177/000168386320000191/f2353d1.htm
That's why Vanguard…
Was it possible for Vanguard to preemptively convert retail fund shares
(for $100M+ accounts) to institutional fund shares and avoid this debacle?
Yes and no. For, say the 2030 target date, there were two completely different funds. A retail fun…
I suppose it's possible, but the investors would had to have been lucky in their timing. For example, suppose they looked at Vanguard's projected cap gains distributions and decided that they had to pay a Q4 estimate by Jan 15th. They might have…
See yogi's thread (citing also WSJ and IBD)
https://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/59772/vanguard-settles-on-tdfs-with-ma-regulators
The reporting on this has left me rather confused. As near as I can tell, Massachusetts was focused on…
So, what was that all about pointing out FZDXX is subject to redemption gates, without mentioning that SWVXX is also subject to the same redemption gates?
Schwab doesn't treat SWVXX as a checking account. So at Schwab you can't pull money out (say,…
The incremental yield between SPAXX and FZDXX is about 40 basis points (0.99% vs 1.40% SEC yield as of June 30th). And as @BaluBalu noted, you don't have to move money out of FZDXX to write a check. So you get that extra 40 basis points for week…
From Fidelity: " government money market funds: Transact at $1.00 and are not subject to SEC liquidity 'gates and fees'".
https://institutional.fidelity.com/app/item/RD_13569_45072/government-money-market-funds.html
Same difference. All prime fun…
Anyone can open a conventional taxable brokerage account at TIAA.
https://shared.tiaa.org/private/mytcbrokerageaccountopening/aobrokerageapp/secure/required
It gives you access to what you'd find at most brokerages - stocks, ETFs, mutual funds. …
I put in an order to sell entire SWVXX at Schwab yesterday [Wed June 29]. I had to wake up today at 6 AM PST to pick a family member at the airport. So, I checked my Schwab account pre-market and the SWVXX sale cash was already in the account.
Cas…
What I tried to do was look for a similar historical period and see how different stock allocations would perform under those conditions. The cash buffer was a conceptual attempt to mitigate most, but not all impact of market swoons.
In essence,…
One can't always believe what one reads. Especially from tertiary sources.
Investopedia writes:Not every security will have the same settlement periods. All stocks are T+2, and mutual funds differ but are T+1 and T+2, depending on the fund. Howev…
I agree that seems like one part of the issue. Another perhaps related part may be the way the put spread collar works.
Because the three month collars have different start and end months in each of the funds, it's possible for one fund to be i…
While I a not sure I believe them, Schwab chat claims with fed reserve raising rates, next months payout will be close to 1.19%. The "waivers' apply to individual investors also he says.
That sounds more or less correct. As with MMFs generally, SW…
