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@Derf: After getting out of GP last year, I too sent in a check for the Contrarian Fund. I think it hasn't hit $4M in assets yet. Biotech seems to be widely despised, so I made a bet on FBT in hopes of a comeback. These could well be falling knives
Really ugly crash. The Yankee Air Force Museum near me in Willow Run, MI has a restored B-17 that takes up customers on weekends. It flys near my house and it’s four engines are heard long before it lumbers into view.
PTIAX, ORNAX, and two individual stocks (a nut processor and a medical software provider). These latter are SC, small float, issues. The big machers on this board might pile in and short my babies if I give their trading symbols. LOL!
@Derf: when I trade in and out of CAPE, I think that might be what Old_Skeet does. We're both using either an S&P 500 fund or, in my case, one that tracks the overall US market but has done so with some out performance. Like @Mike, my stock play…
I agree, @MikeM, with your method for finding a buy point. I traded in and out of CVS, buying first when M* rated it 5 stars and selling after a decent profit. These value plays (it is a game with money I can afford to lose) test my nerves and I, to…
That's a wonderful summary of the problem, @hank and @Old_Joe. Boeing, it seems to me, has a huge challenge: how to realign its culture with that of the customers and pilots of its planes. As to the NTSB/FAA failures to coordinate their efforts, I h…
I suspect the "culture that emphasizes collaboration, excellence and intellectual curiosity" is the same culture as found at Grandeur Peak/Rondure. One of this culture's contributions was a highly successful winter Olympics in 2002, an event charact…
@Crash. Ditto on deplorable MI roads. We often remark on how much better the surfaces are when we travel to other states. The other day we returned to DTW and took the shuttle to our parking lot. The short ride was so rough that I said, "Well, we kn…
It's an important question, @davidmoran. Pinto has had to take over allocation decisions for the fund because his colleague, Gibson, who handled the fixed income, departed. Pinto, according to M*, had been responsible for the good equity performance…
One takeaway for me has been to review what flights we have taken in the recent past on airlines that are not flagship quality and which may have employed pilots trained who-knows-where. Several domestic flights in China in the 1990's when we were t…
I just wasted a lot of time thanks to M*'s dropping of the "Purchase" tab for researching MFs. Going to both Schwab and TDA I found that AFOIX is available only to institutional investors at the former and not at all at the latter. My surfing to Alg…
Thanks @hank. I might have mentioned that Langewiesche brings to bear his own experience as a pilot as well as his extraordinary contacts in the field of air crash investigation. I didn't check his Sullenberger article for the exact quote, but the l…
Glad you agree, @Gary. It did seem to me shortly after the crashes that the facile and perhaps discriminatory story that “foreign” pilots were to blame might have been untrue. After reading this article, my ire at the FAA and Boeing has diminished s…
I was an enthusiastic early adopter of GP, including GPMCX. I also had positions in GPGOX and GPIOX. I sold of all these funds and I remember commenting here about my dissatisfaction with GP management's explanation for why most of their funds had l…
Check out the MIT/ Jeffrey Epstein scandal for another example of how one of our beacons-of-intellectual-hope turns out to be crass beyond comprehension. Heads have rolled, as they also have at Michigan State University, although no one has ever com…
@Old_Joe and @hank: I'm of an age that I remember the 70's, not with any wistful nostalgia. In 1971 there was a gas war here in MI during which a station branded "Progessive" posted a price of 19.5 cents/gallon. Energy was so cheap that in '73-4 our…
I am very happy with the travel photos I take on my iPad (recent smaller format that easily fits in a murse. @davidmoran is right about wildlife pics. I have a pretty unsatisfactory image of a leopard in India, a rare sighting in a national park. OT…
It's just possible that some of us have too many funds because we just enjoy accumulating them, almost collecting them. I'm guilty of buying too many, but I do so in other parts of my life. I've owned so many golf clubs that I had to sell a whole bu…
I may have mentioned on another thread that I had also initiated a trading position in CAPE at almost the same time as Old_Skeet entered his spiff. I have a 3+% gain, also. Somebody’s telling me I should sell Monday. I could do a lot worse looking f…
Market-cap weighting certainly is hard to justify. Also nutty, IMHO, is the Dow’s weighting of its 30 stocks by market price. Boeing is somewhere around $350, so it is weighted more than Walmart, for example. We have the 737 Max fraud revealed and t…
OMG, @Mark, I just assumed the slew of links was posted by @Ted. My bad, once again. @The Shadow (and his/her friends) know(s) and I bow in reverence to his/her expertise. The latter allusion is another key to my age. I humbly accept the apologies a…
Did any of you IOFIX/IOFAX fans catch the prospectus @Ted just posted for another Alpha Centric fund? Go to alphacentricfunds.com to see a fairly bizarre/agressive/innovative lineup of offerings. Now they are proposing a hedge fund in the wraps of a…
Just a new short-term position in CAPE Initiated in early August. I have owned it before. The last couple of up days have pushed it squarely into the green, but it’s been a rough ride. I may have explained elsewhere that I don’t trade DSENX, but tre…
I think Meridian has some other ex-Janus managers. There was a wholesale turnover at the firm after the sudden death of the founder, Rick Astor (around 2009, I think).
@Old_Skeet: I was thinking the same thing on EMs. However, I have to remember how many times in the past I have gone in because they were a "screaming buy," only to discover that the screaming could go on for a long time.
I like @Edmund’s suggestion of VMNVX because its performance is far superior to the recently touted ACWV by M* here:
www.morningstar.com/articles/942390/a-low-risk-approach-to-the-global-market.
If I were building a portfolio from scratch as the O…
