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.
Regarding quality of markets, IMHO the problem is more the level of enforcement than unpredictable legal environments. An example of the latter might be attempting to remove Section 230 protections from social media companies in order to secure mi…
Remember this is for the advisor share class. The retail Investor share class for Oakmark tends to run about a dozen basis points higher.
See also the different share classes for Oakmark E&I (13 basis point difference), Oakmark Int'l (11 ba…
Curiously, the advisor share class OAYMX of the Oakmark Fund OAKMX is available at Vanguard ($1,000 min), Fidelity ($2500 min), and TD Ameritrade ($100,000 min), but the advisor share class OAYCX of the Bond Fund is nowhere to be had.
M* purchase p…
Since Tesla's addition to the S&P 500 has no direct effect on its market cap (though an indirect effect by requiring S&P 500 funds to buy it), this should have little impact on its inclusion or exclusion in market-cap based indexes. For ex…
What matters is how large a percentage of a fund portfolio the stock constitutes, rather than how large a percentage of the company a fund holds.
For example, VTISX holds roughly the same amount of BB as does VHCOX, about 1.4% of the company. …
FEXPX started out in 1994 as Fidelity Export Fund, focused on companies deriving at least 10% of their revenue from exported goods and services. Aside from driving the fund toward larger companies, I'm not sure what effect this constraint had. …
I'd at least hold off awhile with this new fund. It's not clear how it is managed and ISTM you are comparing its performance with the wrong benchmark.
Fidelity's prospectuses are typically vague, but this one more than usual. This is a fund of f…
The latter figures posted (i.e.-5.2% YTD, 5.9% MTD) are NAV performance, not price performance. IMHO NAV performance is a better indicator of long term performance (i.e. how well the fund is managed), while price performance tells you what invest…
There are lots of what in most situations are minor differences between 401(k)s and IRAs. This includes at least a couple I don't think I saw in any of the links: Roth 401(k)s have RMDs, and so long as one is working, RMDs don't apply to a 401(k) …
Strange but true. Figures (as I noted a few posts ago) are from Fidelity's "Key Statistics" page for the respective companies. The number represents "EPS Growth (Last 5 Years)".
AAPL is no slouch, but everything is relative. Quite a period i…
IJR and VTMSX should track pretty closely, because they're both based on the S&P 600. The former is a pure index fund that is designed to track the index. The latter "purchases stocks included in the S&P SmallCap 600 Index—an index that …
I wouldn't compare BRK.A to anything else.
I don't see any reason to own BRK.A
SPY beat it easily for 1-3-5-10 years and with lower voltility.
Okay.
Apple P/E = 35.6 (link)
You must have a reason in mind, some point you're trying to make, by prese…
"And one could argue the planet’s environment itself though without human agency is a stakeholder. "
One has ...
Stone, Christopher D., Should Trees Have Standing - Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects, Southern California Law Review 45 (1972)…
All true, but I think it misses at least two points:
Yet in recent decades, Boeing — like so many American corporations — began shoveling money to investors and executives, while shortchanging its employees and cutting costs.Schools teach, or at lea…
No spin - you chose to use CRSP indexes as your authority, I just looked at what those classifications represented.
Would you say that BRK.A is, or has been a growth stock over the past several years? I ask because based on the metrics you gave it…
somewhat OT, but can anyone find a link for closing a vanguard 403B and rolling the money out in-kin to another firm? I am having trouble assisting one of my kids in this ...The firms where I've had employer-sponsored plans have generally performed …
From a fund perspective, nothing is changing. People are overthinking this.
Say you own some fund in a fund family. The manager of that successful fund decides to go off on his own and form his own management company. But the fund really like…
Stock companies specify the number of shares they are authorized to issue. This can be increased by the shareholders. A company is not required to issue all shares authorized.
When shares are issued they are sold; for a public company this i…
Reasoning by appeal to authority. The inference being that if a stock is in VUG it is a growth stock, whatever that means. As I explain below, the inference is flawed.
Some index methodologies, CRSP among them, partition the equity universe - a…
So long as you get more back on your CC than you pay in service fees, you come out ahead by charging taxes. (This ignores any impact on your credit score of a possibly large charge.)
For example, Pay1040.com charges 1.87% for IRS payments. Fidel…
One can get to the pages I linked to above without logging in.
The automated message at the number on those pages says that it can help with temporary passwords. Of course if you want to talk with a human being, with Vanguard you are limited to w…
I received email yesterday from TRP about this but had been too occupied to take a close look at this (or much of anything else). Structurally, it looks like the parent company, T. Rowe Price Group (TROW) is "merely" splitting its investment manag…
Can you try 877-662-7447?
https://support.vanguard.com/triage/technical-support/B0037
That's the same number that one gets by following the contact us link at the top right corner of the Vanguard home page.
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.
