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.
Eerily, I was reading a long New Yorker piece from the 90’s on the crash of USAir flight 427, when the news broke about the JejuAir crash. The article is wonderful in its depiction of how a team of investigators is assembled, functions, and struggle…
@WABAC: cash I have on hand will go almost entirely to OSTIX and CBLDX although I have not ruled out CB’s Nordic fund. Now that CLF has fallen 10%+ from where I bought it, I may try to double the position tomorrow. Josh Brown on CNBC said to anticip…
@hank: I have no real evidence or medical facts to back up the following opinion. However, here goes. The American sedan has fallen out of favor in recent years because most of the potential (and past) buyers are in such poor physical health that ge…
@Old_Joe: in 1987 North Korean operatives planted a bomb in an overhead luggage compartment of KAL 828, a Baghdad to Seoul flight. On board was a Korean diplomat, a possible target. Everyone on board was lost. The sister of the diplomat, a nun and c…
Joined @WABAC in GRID today when midday saw almost everything sag. Where is a good corset or waist-cincher company when you really need one? Many Santa Claus Rally deniers on the prowl today. OSTIX distribution day, so planning to deploy more cash o…
@rono: thanks for your warm and reaffirming holiday message. In fact, there is little any one of us can do about big issues (war, pestilence, famine, miserable leadership), but we can grow flowers and put them on our bridges for the wonderment of al…
My bent mind sees the prospect of annexing Greenland and Canada as a very clever way of locking the exit doors from the now-intolerable US of A. Moving to a sovereign Canada or a Danish-controlled Greenland or even to a Central American paradise, pl…
@PRESSmUp: even tho we live in a metropolitan area of SE MI, our house might as well be in rural MI for connectivity purposes. The neighbors have Xfinity, but that company wanted $3500 in 2008 to connect our house. We tried a TV dish antenna for 2 …
@Old_Joe: sometimes I play dumb. I did not know the origin of the term and was too lazy to look it up. Somehow my wife can see right through my attempts to say I had no idea what she wanted done and therefore did not do it.
If it weren’t for @Mark’s link, I’d have never found whatever in creation I was looking for. Now that PK has my email handle, I seem to have access to a whole stack of reading material. I get that. However, @ Old_Joe, where does the “sub” come in? I…
The frightening aspect of this for me is that there are loyalist/fanatics who have been preparing a take-over of key agencies for several years. They are hitting the ground running, something that they were unprepared to do in 2017. Appointing detra…
@hank: Travolta did this ad last Christmas season also. There may be a couple of slightly different scenes this year, but I can’t recall all of last year’s ad. Jennifer Garner’s presence in other CapitalOne spots and her smile give me more than a li…
We signed up for a free week of Discovery+ in order to watch a 4-part series. We were astounded at the number and frequency of ads. I assume if you pay double the intro rate, you get no ads. No interest in that, just a confirmation of why we don’t w…
Rasputin comes to mind when I ponder what historical precedents there may be with which to compare the presence of Musk in the new administration. Many presidents have had shadow cabinets, but I fail to come up with an example of an unelected actor …
@davidrmoran: Brooks is dreadful, no doubt. On what foundation does his moralizing rest?
As the year ends, I take solace in Krugman’s last column that left us with the unforgettable addition of “kakistocracy” to our floundering efforts to describe …
@Anna: “I tariff you, you tariff me,” sounds like something we might indulge in at the end of the office holiday party! It would take our minds off of interest rates and market volatility, and it might be good exercise.
As MMF rates decline, I plan to move some cash from SWVXX into CBLDX and OSTIX, after the fund distributions are paid. An RMD and another source make payments to us in late December, some of which will go to the two bond funds (the only ones we own…
@MikeM: On a hunch, just the other day, I did the same with VEEV, which I had been watching. Damned if it didn't shoot up at the opening the next day. I put in a sell order, Schwab improved it by $2, and I had a $500 profit. I used it all to make d…
I set my play-money buy limit way down on CLF, but the order went thru today. It’s either a reversion to mean or a value trap. I don’t know of a worse looking group of stocks than steel makers:
https://money.usnews.com/investing/stocks/steel
English could theoretically adopt the equivalent of « one/one’s » as found in Romance languages. However, what people actually say has much greater influence on how a language is used and is changed; changes decreed or even suggested by some authori…
Thanks all for your supportive comments. I should have mentioned that a sore neck has been the only discernable physical injury my daughter suffered. It happens to be a high-stress period for her as she interviews for a residency, a four-year stint …
@hank’s purchase had given me new-car fever. This lasted a couple of days until our youngest daughter called from NC to report her car totaled by a pot-head who ran a stop sign. Her car was to last thru med school; that would have been May. Shit hap…
@Old_Joe: you and I missed out on the latest stuff a long time ago. Several years ago our well pump had to be replaced by a guy who came right away on a sunny Winter day. He told me what I owed him (a lot) and then said he would accept Crypto. He ex…
The nominee may be indulging in « foxhole praying, » which is said to afflict those of no faith, but who are desperate for some help as the final hour approaches. First he gets Mom to « retract » her stern memo about her son’s moral failings, then h…
For some reason all the comments in various threads about the deterioration of morality, legal standards, and justice make me wonder what would become of me if I shot and killed someone in the middle of State Street in Ann Arbor. A large part of my …
BLK has been more profitable since its 1999 IPO than the Nasdaq or S&P indices, returning 20.7% per annum. That kind of performance means the shareholder could easily afford an accountant to figure out the K-1 form at tax time.
https://x.com/S…
We lived in Seoul in 1980 under martial law, the last time it was imposed in Korea. Had to walk past bored looking armed soldiers on the campus of Yonsei University, near where we lived. The guns may have been unloaded, but we did not then have enou…
