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.
As I read this, Vanguard is closing legacy platform access to advisors, not to direct investors. Note the title: "culling" not "cutting".
“There are some cases where I think people do lose some functionality” by switching to the brokerage account,…
If M* can be trusted:Sometimes a picture paints a clearer picture. WCPNX has more volatility than others with less return to show for it. I'm sure it is a fine fund, Weitz is a good bond house. It's just that M*s glowing statistics compared to picto…
@MikeM - exactly what I was going to say! Along with FLRN there's also FLOT. They're not quite indistinguishable, but pretty close.
The knock against IG floating rate funds is that they don't do as well in falling interest rate environments. Or…
It works w/o margin. I placed a test order (not entered, just reviewed) in my Schwab IRA (no margin with IRA accounts). I got a warning about potential freeriding:
1. Caution: This buy order was accepted without sufficient settled funds to trade …
For those who are "doubly challenged", the additional standard deductions stack, so they come to $3,200 (married) and $4,000 (single or head of household).
ML otoh specifically says 'this is not a sweep fund.'
Neither are the non-core Fidelity MM funds (cash is not swept into them).
Schwab not only says that this is not a sweep fund, but adds:
Schwab Purchased Money Funds require you to place an ord…
what happens if inflation keeps going up
keeps going up?
If by "inflation" you mean prices, prices have been going up continuously YoY every year since the Great Depression, except in 1949, 1955, and 2009 (Great Recession). Nothing new here.
I…
What matters for inflation is unit cost. As labor becomes more productive, increases in wages are (or can be) counterbalanced by increased productivity.
Boeing is having such design and manufacturing problems that simply building a plane that …
When it works, it's fine. It is a front end for two pharmacies, Truepill and HealthDyne. (Wikipedia, as it is wont to do, has wrong information, listing only Truepill.)
The price you pay is cost + 15% + $5/prescription + $5/order. This informat…
One can be easily misled if one reads statistics without looking Beyond The Numbers.
It can lead one into suggesting in January 2020 that "For cash sub use SEMMX".
SEMMX had been quiescent for several years. It had had a std deviation over the pr…
In the wake of [tariffs introduced by the Trump administration during 2018, i.e.] this increase in trade protection, the United States experienced substantial increases in the prices of intermediates and final goods, dramatic changes to its supply-c…
for me at schwab, i can place an order for anything even if i don't have the funds to pay for it immediately. i am told, before placing the order, that i'll need to have the necessary funds in my account within two or three days (can't remember wh…
@msf If the remaining 5% is still sizeable, rinse and repeat. What do you consider sizeable ?
How much risk and money is important is an individual preference. If I'm moving $100K from an investment to a non-sweep MMF, I'm not going to care abou…
If you sell all the shares of PRWCX, you don't know the exact results, just buy 95%. The next day buy the rest of the MM.
Yes, Schwab made money on that small amount.
Why give Schwab the float? What I've done at Vanguard is sell a dollar amount eq…
When selling or exchanging shares, you should be aware of the following fund policies:
For accounts held through a financial intermediary, each fund typically expects to pay sale proceeds to the financial intermediary for payment to redeeming share…
This is an example of an economic concept called Baumol’s cost disease. "It explains why barbers make more in San Francisco than in Cleveland and why services such as health care and education keep getting more expensive. "
https://www.vox.com/new…
Thanks @hank for doing the legwork and posting this. From what I gather from rapidly reading from the links provided, most of those who participate on this board may not qualify for the new ETFs. The strategy appears aimed at people who have north o…
Maybe @msf could check my math and simplify further
Eyeballing (mentally multiplying $12K by yogi's 1.3+x to get approximately $15.6K+), things look about right.
It's been a looong time since I graded math papers. I'm not restarting now :-)
I assume my deductible and my copay are additive ($200 +$1800 = $2000). At that point the cost of meds are fully coverage by my plan...whoopie!
Yup. Took me years to understand the interplay between copays, deductibles, and out of pocket max's, es…
wonder how much Prolia costs here (did not drill down):
https://www.pocketpills.com/drug/prolia
One can't drill down without a Canadian address - signing up requires one to enter a province name.
GoodRx shows pricing between $1,700 and $1,800 per…
Zero or low costs for all our meds too (Optum, Costco, CVS)
Drug plans often get little attention when comparing MAPD plans. For most people there's little difference - generics, preferred or otherwise, are either "free" or dirt cheap on most plan…
@Level5
Thanks for the well stated post. I agree that much of this comes down to trust, which is a variant of what @fred495 originally expressed as peace of mind.
Your supplemental plan, whether it is NYC's Senior Care or a standard Medigap plan (…
For a review of the history of our struggle to maintain our choice of health services you can visit one of the union sites here: https://psc-cuny.org/whats-happening-retiree-healthcare/
This is old news because basically nothing has changed since A…
You're talking about old news here. I'll have to dredge up old links from when this was new news and I was talking about it with some NYC retirees. As I recall, neither side was being especially honest. And there was an earlier proposal for cov…
I'm not going to try to dissuade you from staying with Plan F. Peace of mind has a certain intangible value that for you exceeds $372.
Regarding absence of bills with Plan F, that's the theory. And at worst, you may get a couple of bills that you…
@Crash - so much to unpack there about Medicare generally (i.e. not specific to Plan F or G).
Medicare does have a network; it's just very large and includes about 99% of non-pediatric physicians as of June 2023. Unlike Medicare Advantage plans, …
When Plan G came out, the expectation was that over time, its price advantage over Plan F would increase. The reason is that the pool of customers for Plan F would shrink (and age), thus adding risk to for the insurer and increasing potential payo…
Here's the Pub 590A section on withdrawing IRA contributions.
https://www.irs.gov/publications/p590a#en_US_2023_publink1000230703
You can generally make a tax-free withdrawal of contributions if you do it before the due date for filing your tax r…
The salary-cap also went up by a higher wage inflation of 4.45%.
https://blog.ssa.gov/social-security-announces-2-5-percent-benefit-increase-for-2025/
Yes, workers' wages went up more than inflation (CPI-W) last year. This is a good thing. It me…
It's OLD news.
The insurance industry uses 3rd party services from Infosys/McCamish and it had a breach. But companies have been tight lipped about it and the news is coming out like cockroaches. Those that have admitted so far are T Rowe Price/TR…
M* extended methodology is used for many reasons. The second on the list is changing its legal structure.
Last year, QRSIX was moved from one trust run by FPA to another trust run by FPA. Certainly you would not want M* to drop all performanc…
steps - lots of them. Ever hear of escalators?
I was going to add a comment about inaccessibility, but I couldn't find the page I was looking for to cite. NYC is by far the worst system in the country in terms of complying with the Americans with…
decades of corruption and criminality
The scope of the accusations are stunning. Prosecutors say that for almost a decade, Eric Adams abused his power as Brooklyn borough president and later as mayor in order to receive illegal campaign donations an…
Launch a national cryptocoin (pander to rich crypto bros, [negatively] impact the financial system)
But, but ... you don't seem to understand. Impacting the financial system is not a negative, it's a positive to take down the anti-conservative ba…
AP: After just a few hours, U.S. election bets put on hold by appeals court ruling
The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued an order Thursday night temporarily freezing the matter until it can consider and rule on the issue. …
Have you considered an alternative like NEAR?
Better YTD, 1,3,5 year returns, lower expenses, nearly identical average duration, a positive Sharpe ratio (rare for this type of fund), nearly identical SEC yield, same average credit rating (AA- per…
Here's the wire story. LSST. You can just look at the URL, though the text says more.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240912751874/en/Natixis-Investment-Managers-to-Close-the-Natixis-Loomis-Sayles-Short-Duration-Income-ETF-NYSE-LSST
TCW MetWest AlphaTrak 500 Fund (M class)
This fund served as a competitor to PSTKX while being slightly cheaper and performing slightly better. It even bested VFIAX over the past decade by a hair, though hugely tax inefficient. But unlike PSTKX…
There are two different figures here, and they may be getting mixed up.
One is interest rate (not yield) assuming daily compounding. The other is total annual return. The former is indeed lower than the stated rate of a T-bill, though the latter…
