November 1, 2018

By David Snowball

Dear friends,

It’s fall.

By the oddity of scheduling, Augustana’s fall trimester ended just as it felt that fall had descended. My students decamped on November 1, numbed from long nights of study and challenging finals, anxious to get home for “some real food.” They leave behind a campus preparing itself, at long last, for the sere and snowy season to come. Continue reading →

Who won October?

By David Snowball

October was an exciting month for investors. By various reckonings, it was the worst month since September, 2011. US stocks declined by $2 trillion in value, with Amazon alone dropping $250 billion. It was so bad that Jeff Bezos reportedly had to postpone plans to buy several small countries. Global markets, equity and fixed-income together, shrank by $5 trillion. Unless you ask The Guardian, which tallies the global equity loss at $8 trillion.  That seems unnecessarily depressing (and unattributed), so I resolved not to ask Continue reading →

Largest Upgrade Yet To MFO Premium

By Charles Boccadoro

“In God we trust,

all others bring data.”

William Edwards Deming

Beginning with our October monthly data update to MFO Premium, we will incorporate one of largest improvements to the site since launching our beta version in November 2015, three years ago.

The improvements began, like most of the features on the site, by user requests … this time, for more evaluation periods. All risk and performance metrics will now be provided for Continue reading →

Launch Alert: Seven Canyons World Innovators

By David Snowball

It is rare that we issue a Launch Alert for a seventeen year old fund. Then again, it is rare that we find a 17 year old fund as remarkable as Seven Canyons World Innovators (WAGTX / WIGTX). World Innovators was launched on December 19, 2000 as Wasatch World Innovators. The fund, with its sibling Strategic Income Fund (WASIX), was rechristened with the new Seven Canyons identity on September 10, 2018.

Seven Canyons Advisors was formed in September 2017 with Continue reading →

Launch Alert 2A: RiverPark Floating Rate CMBS Fund

By David Snowball

On November 12, 2018, RiverPark Funds launches RiverPark Floating Rate CMBS Fund (RCRFX/RCRIX). Like several of RiverPark’s funds, RCRIX began life as a hedge fund (2010-2016). Unlike any of its predecessors, it originally converted into an interval fund, a sort of closed-end fund under which structure it operated for two years (RiverPark Commercial Real Estate Fund, 2016-2018) where investors only had quarterly liquidity. That fund began begin life with $50 million in assets from its private predecessor, of which $10 million is the manager’s own money. The newest package presents the fund as a traditional open-end mutual fund with daily liquidity and both retail (RCRFX) and institutional (RCRIX) share classes.

(Why “2A”? This is not only the second Continue reading →

old license plates on a wall

Funds in registration

By David Snowball

Before funds can be offered to the public, they’ve got to be submitted to the SEC which has 70 days to review the application. That means that funds hopeful of launching by December 30th needed to be filed by October 15th. We’re looking for funds that might be accessible to the average investor or advisor; we include active ETFs but not passive ones. That last restriction allows me to pretend that neither ProShares Pet Care ETF nor the US Vegan Climate ETF is about to be inflicted on us. Continue reading →

old alarm clock

Manager changes, October 2018

By Chip

In the course of a normal month we’ll highlight 60-70 manager changes in equity and allocation funds. We mostly skip bond funds because, frankly, it’s a danged rare fixed income team that’s materially affected by the departure of a single individual. In a really quiet month, 38 funds saws partial or complete team changes. That’s not only half the long-term average but only about a third of the changes reported last month.

By far the most significant, if only symbolically, was the announced retirement of David Poppe at Sequoia Fund (SEQUX). Mr. Poppe was famously a champion of the Valeant investment Continue reading →