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.
What does "better" mean? You asked for the vehicle that most closely correlates to WTI oil price. Closest and better performing are not the same. Nor do I suspect that any of the 1099 funds would track that closely, because they're likely to us…
Not quite every ETF operates under the same rules. As the PR notes, "Rule 6c-11 will be available to ETFs organized as open-end funds, the structure for the vast majority of ETFs today".
A couple of not so obscure ETFs with a different structur…
Traditionally, indexed ETFs were not required to disclose holdings on a daily basis. The rules were changed in the past few years; in 2015 the WSJ wrote:
here’s what many ETF investors probably don’t know: Passively managed ETFs—those that seek t…
Barron’s ran the numbers for the items the government CPI omits
That 7.9% inflation figure that everyone is touting is comprehensive.
Excluding food and energy, the Y/Y figure is 6.4%.
I gave the link for the BLS data in an earlier post: https…
Cape Cod where unless you can run your internet off your phone ( hard to do with movies etc) yo have one choice Comcast.
Verizon shows DSL speeds of around 3Mb in Cape Cod. I've managed to watch television on 1Mb DSL, so in theory you should have …
Between marcom babble, poorly informed writers, and sometimes well intentioned attempts at "simplification", some of what's written about annuities winds up as confusing and contradictory as it is enlightening.
Basic annuities (ignoring bells and w…
I suggest you change the title. Deferred income annuities (DIAs) are essentially immediate annuities where the payments are deferred, in contrast to SPDAs, where annuitization is deferred.
FINRA: "Think of DIAs as immediate annuities with a dela…
I drive 1-2K/year, so I'm relative impervious to rising gas prices. (Gasoline and used cars have gone up around 40% Y/Y, at least triple any other non-energy category.) But the Starbucks I walk to raised its prices twice in the past four months, …
The back of the envelope calculations produce a pretty fair approximation of costs, given some simplifying assumptions. It's worth knowing where the oil goes even if that doesn't significantly affect the final figures.
One gets only 19+ gallons…
Generally I agree, and it's worth not being too greedy and trying to time the market bottom.
For those over age 72, keep in mind that one has to take one's RMDs first. Even if one takes the distribution in kind, it still represents a higher percen…
Could simply be that fair value pricing is more difficult these days for foreign holdings, especially small caps.
https://www.morningstar.com/articles/374934/fair-value-pricing-isnt-always-fair-but-its-needed
(To see what I did, "quote" this post; that will show you the HTML.)
https://ibb.co/DVX5yDM
Name Ticker %TR YTD %TR 5 Year %TR 10 Year
William Blair Large Cap Growth I LCGFX -21.08 19.62 16.55
Akre Focus Retail AKREX …
Please provide links.
Press Release
Unfortunately statements like these refer to the clearing house, not the introducing brokerage. You have to know which clearing house your broker uses. Even then, your broker may not sell everything that it co…
Though the old chart tabs don't chart multiple tickers, they do still chart multiple benchmarks. Admittedly not the most useful feature since the "appropriate" benchmark is already added automatically.
The problem with the purchase tabs isn't tha…
The M* brokerage availability pages are not all that reliable, but FWIW the PMEFX page says that the fund is available only at Schwab.
http://financials.morningstar.com/fund/purchase-info.html?t=PMEFX
Listing: https://streeteasy.com/sale/1588857
Checking prices for houses on the market in the neighborhood (there are seven), shows its price per sq ft ($2,352) to be at the high end. Others are: $1748, $1665, $1999, $2117, $1234, and $1,372. Sti…
"Management companies [mutual funds] usually are structured as corporations or trusts."
https://www.sec.gov/investment/fast-answers/divisionsinvestmentinvcoreg121504htm.html
Thus:
- Corporations as well as trusts may be used as "umbrella structure…
The discrepancy between the performance of the stated fund share price and the performance of the portfolio may be due to fair value pricing.
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-302
Morningstar provides last trade price, which for Russia…
M* also reports TRP's 86% loss. But looking at the portfolio I find that hard to believe.
Looking at the starting (12/31/2021) portfolio, the six worst YTD stocks made up 27.42% of the fund at the beginning of the year. These were the only stoc…
Quite a contrast to US Global Investors Emerging Europe, EUROX, which has fallen "only" 42.16% YTD. They each have about 3/4 in emerging Europe. TREMX has about 6% more in Russia and 5% less in Turkey, otherwise nothing jumps out. This suggests…
A headline stating the obvious: "Nuclear reactors ‘not meant to be exposed to missiles’, analyst says"
That was a live feed from Al Jazeera a few hours ago which has since vanished.
Most of these are pretty mundane: a basis point or two one way or the other (decrease or increase), but a few of the reductions are impressive, up to 6 basis points.
The very last fund on the list though is VASFX, where the ER jumped by 1/2%, from …
Many brokerages describe their 1099 mailings as being divided into three groups. Here's Raymond James' description of which statements get mailed when:
GROUP 1: DATED FEBRUARY 15
Forms mailed for accounts with holdings where issuers have finalized…
Interesting question. Don't know the answer. The services in question for the most part sound like tasks the transfer agent performs. Here's a nice 7 page chapter from the ICI on the major moving pieces in a mutual fund, including the transfer…
The trust is about to acquire three funds. And now it decides to more than double the size of its board. Coincidence or response to taking on more responsibilities? If the latter, shouldn't those creating the need have some say (even if only pro…
I'm afraid I was a bit simplistic in saying that this was merely moving the funds from the Mairs and Powers Trust to a larger trust that already holds funds of various families.
While funds operate similarly whether organized as trusts or as corpor…
Every fund's and ETF's assets are held in a trust
How about the TRP funds that reorganized out of Massachusetts business trusts into Maryland corporations on Oct 30, 2017? Here's the proxy their shareholders were given.
https://www.sec.gov/Archiv…
Net trade didn't change sign in 2021. The US still exported more petroleum (including refined products) in 2021, but the surplus shrank. The government 2022 projection is for net importing. Note that in terms of crude oil, the US has "always" (…
When you read ERs, do you mentally add back waived fees, figuring that the shareholders pay the full freight one way or another? Or does the management company take the hit by reducing its fees, taking a lower profit?
The analogy is not perfect b…
(I should have read more carefully.) The link that Lewis provided is for a 2011 proxy. Here's the current proxy:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001521353/000089418922001123/mairspowertpmproxy.htm
The 2011 restructuring into a Delaware…
Corporations tend to incorporate in Delaware primarily, as Lewis wrote, because of its pro-business regulations. Another rationale given is that Delaware has the most developed corporate law. Though this is somewhat circular - companies incorpora…
This last miscue by TRP was relatively minor compared with my once-in-a-century travails in transferring an IRA. What got me was the way the conversation went. It wasn't so much that I had to push the rep to actually dig into the records. Unfo…
Given that M* provides a figure for FGMNX's 2021 performance and Yahoo reports N/A, perhaps it is how Yahoo transcribes numbers and not M*'s data that is the problem? Or perhaps Yahoo calculates its own figures (e.g. adjusted closing prices) from …
Beating a dead horse, and yet it continues to kick.
I used to have an individual 401(k) with TRP, but closed it three years ago. Really, really closed it - informed TRP that I was terminating the plan, filed a final 5500 with the IRS.
Got a mail…
We've seen something similar before. Several years ago two funds in another fund family mispricing securities. When the prices were corrected, the funds suffered one day drops of 44.0% and 69.4%.
That mispricing was not done by tweaking compu…
When a fund house (VG) can tumble from #3 to #43 in a year there’s something wrong with the gage being used.
When the cause of that decline is laid (in part) at the foot of VPMAX, there's more wrong than just the gauge.
Vanguard's drop occurred, i…
It's impossible to keep track of all these series without a scorecard, and even then, I'm not sure.
Until 2013, T. Rowe Price offered an aggressive, but stable (unchanged glidepath) product, unlike its leading competitors, Vanguard and Fidelity.…
I hadn't looked at the performance tabs on Yahoo. That's a really nice feature.
Now, if Yahoo would only report accurately. FGMNX had three losing calendar years: the two you mentioned and also 2021. Yahoo show 2021's return as N/A, though it…
