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.
Could you explain that?
Insurance companies are essentially financial institutions: They take in money and dole out money, just like a bank does. (Many insurance companies are even branches of large banking conglomerates.) Also, like a bank, they …
Some of those subsidiaries--Geico, Duracell, See's Candies--
Just as Berkshire owns and controls entire businesses, so does See's in turn:
See's Candies owns and operates all of our own retail shops. We do not sell franchises, but we do offer a Lic…
The idea of sunk costs applies as much to liquid assets like fund shares as to less liquid assets like the real estate mentioned in the article.
Once you invest $1K in a fund, that cash is gone; what you have is N shares. Aside from tax implica…
One didn't need to look at any funds to see this. The sharp divergence between the Dow (value leaning), the S&P 500 (blend), and the Nasdaq 100 (growth) has been very apparent over the past couple of days. (There's a reversal today, so far.)…
I know a couple of individuals who own a few PR bonds. Most but not all from these small samples are nonperforming. One went from performing to nonperforming in the past couple of years. Their prices have bounced all over the map, with some bo…
"should operate under a uniform set of rules"
Harder than it sounds. Each state sets its own voter qualification requirements.
https://www.usa.gov/who-can-vote
Consider just one requirement - can a convicted felon who has served his sentence vot…
"Everyone is leaving CA and NY for the wide open spaces."
Yup. Everyone is leaving Manhattan for the wide open spaces of ... Brooklyn??
While Manhattan’s real estate market continued to reel in August, Brooklyn had a near-record number of contrac…
I may be saved, but I'm not so sure about OJ, where voters:
- appear to be rejecting the idea of regularly assessing commercial property (technically commercial property virtually never changes hands so it never gets reassessed under Prop 13, unli…
Gerrymandering is a completely different question, as you acknowledge. However, even without gerrymandering, minorities in a district are often effectively disenfranchised. That's a "feature" of winner take all representative democracy.
There…
A second topic that came up is yields. There is the SEC Yield and trailing twelve month yields. Some funds pay annual dividends and others pay one time dividends. Why should you care? Take GAVIX. The forward yield is 7.1%, the four year averag…
As investors, we're all familiar with the idea of property carrying voting rights - the more property you own, the more votes you get. Such property can be shares of a corporation or mutual fund, or even land when voting in a home owners associati…
People talk about one person one vote. But then they talk about going to a direct election of the president as though it would help poor, underrepresented California, without looking at what "person" means, and what the numbers show.
If we're tal…
As FD1000 has written elsewhere and here, one shouldn't plan one's life around black swan events. Though as I've written before, what some call black swan events happen with almost predictable regularity.
Because of Fed intervention (IMHO tha…
Fewer years than one might expect.
Just think, with the power of compounding, after just two years, one would have not 0.10% (2 x 0.05%) in total interest, but a whopping 0.100025%! And it only gets better after that.
Kitces cites a movie, a book, and a Simpson's episode as examples of where tontines have entered popular culture. Here's another (excerpt from the Old Soldiers episode of M*A*S*H):
What, no name change for this fund like the other Spectrum funds, perhaps to Spectrum Flexible Income Fund since it can hold up to 25% in the Equity Income (stock) fund?
The more important change, common to Spectrum Income, Growth, and Internatio…
That link only gives tax brackets and standard deductions. But there's more to taxes than tax tables. For example, if the current law eliminated mortgage deductions starting in 2021 (it doesn't), would you still say that taxes weren't being incre…
Fidelity Canadian Growth Company Fund
https://www.fidelity.ca/fidca/en/products/cg?series=B
Fidelity Global Innovators® Class
https://www.fidelity.ca/fidca/en/products/uet?series=B
Fidelity Special Situations Fund
https://www.fidelity.ca/fidca/en…
Morgan Stanley funds currently managed by Kristian Heugh:Actually, these are all the share classes that he manages. I've grouped the list by funds so that this is clearer. Also, the H share class is defunct, as is an entire fund (Opportunity Por…
Spiders (SPDRs) and VIPERs (Vanguard)
CATS, TGRS, and LIONS (proprietary versions of STRIPS)
According to M*, there were also RATS, COUGARs, GATORs, EAGLEs, and DOGS (Dibs on Government Securities, not to be confused with the aforementioned dogs of…
@WABAC Thanks for the thought. I didn't get a response to the email I sent the Board of Elections, so I called. They told me that with so many ballots coming in, they hadn't posted information about any of the ballots they'd received. Fortunat…
M* reports an adjusted ER for PIMIX of 0.50%. (See footnote 1 of Annual Fund Operating Expenses in Summary Prospectus.)
https://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/comment/128191/#Comment_128191
Average HY fund ER: 1.02%
Average multisector…
Here's a table (data from M*) comparing the 3/5/10 year standard deviations of several of the funds listed. I've divided it into funds with high grade portfolios and funds holding substantial amounts of junk bonds. Not surprisingly, over every t…
You may be thinking about the SEC rule that requires an investment company (fund) having "a name suggesting that the company focuses on a particular type of investment (e.g., an investment company that calls itself the ABC Stock Fund, the XYZ Bond…
Combining the thoughts in the last two posts, and with apologies to Dr. Seuss (Horton Hatches the Egg):
You said what you did and you did what you said,
You can't tap home wealth 'till you're gone and dead.
@BenWP, that's an excellent point about checking the total assets for which the manager has responsibility. In addition to other funds (to its credit, M* appears to list offshore as well as domestic funds), managers may also be responsible for pri…
Global Franchise is also a good one of theirs, if memory serves.
Need to be careful on any loads or 12(b)-1 fees, though.
I haven't found any way as a retail investor to invest in a MS share class that doesn't have a 12b-1 fee, unless I can pony up…
WATFX has had some poor days.
This sounds more like performance chasing than a fundamental reason to change horses. It has lost 1% in the past three months. About 1/2% worse than DODIX, and still in the middle quintile (barely, at 59th percenti…
I agree we're finished here. You had asked about M* premium features and then made a sharp turn into how delighted you are with StockCharts' presentation of performance data.
You might have been led astray by Crash's post where he first describe…
PSSAX has beaten SH by a significant margin. For a while I thought it was just the bond portfolio aspect of it, but I don't think it's just that anymore, maybe something also to do with how they trade futures.It might be trading or it might just be …
you can drag the right edge of the slider to specific start and end dates. ... I am correct ... sliding the right edge towards the left of the screen produces exact date ranges
Sliding (dragging) the right edge toward the left changes the end date…
You're right about my confusing $ and %.
(BTW, one drags the left edge of the slider to specific start dates. Editing errors by one and all :-))
My point about setting specific dates was not that you couldn't do this with the StockCharts slider (…
It not just NYC's geography that's unusual.
Years ago I worked in a company that, in part, developed classification systems. They would give as an example of a simple hierarchical system: state contains county contains city. (The company was bas…
Vanguard now reports YTD (10/29) of $1.75, StockCharts reports $1.73, and M* reports $1.75. That's more than yesterday's penny's worth of rounding error. While I appreciate that real investors care about real account balances, I consider the fund…
When I want to compare two funds in M*, I go to a legacy performance page for a fund, add other funds (one at a time), and get tabular comparisons. Not only how well each fund did over standardized periods, but how much better (or worse) the refere…
We agree that StockCharts is wrong. Vanguard showed 1.71% (it now shows 1.75% through 10/29), and Vanguard is the authoritative source.
If you're clicking (interactive chart) and clicking again (YTD) at M* to get YTD data, it's not surprising tha…
