Bogleheads.org

Would add that total costs for prenatal care and delivery (not to mention any other non-OB medical expenses during the year for OP's wife) should far exceed deductible for even high deductible health plan. So is this bill actually costing you any more than you would already have paid in the year fo...

OP--what is your insurance situation?

You will pay the rate negotiated by your insurer. You should not pay the bill until you get the EOB from your insurer. That will confirm you are paying the correct amount. Depending on how the hospital is setup, you may get multiple bills--the hospital and the doctors often bill separately.

I suppose this thread does show one of the advantages of using ETFs--they can be held anywhere. That's not true with proprietary fund products, whether they be DFA funds, Vanguard Admiral shares, and the like.

Happened to me a while back. Once selecting a new password I also changed my security question answers. Everything has been in order since then.

The opposite of a stock picker's market is when you have "risk on/risk off,"

To start with, an annual standard deviation of 4 is definitely not correct. Possibly the program is calculating a monthly standard deviation using monthly returns? In Excel, compare your results of STDEV vs. STDEVP.

To answer your direct question, you can always compare the pricing that is being offered by Merrill on bonds/CDs versus what Fidelity and Vanguard show on their website. That's really the only way to know if you are getting a good deal or not. However, the preferred way by most people here is to buy...

I think when people say "I have a long time horizon so I can take a lot of risk" they usually mean they don't plan to access the money for a long time. There is a low risk they will be "forced" to pull out money during a downturn because the money is require for expenses and/or ...

So my education is this: I spend end more time watching these 4 stocks and getting frustrated over my buy/sell decisions than the remaining 97%. I think this is one of the big benefits of having a small "play money" portfolio. Usually, the less time you spend "optimizing' your overal...

Has anybody sold any "play money" investments at a big profit? Lots of people with long-term holdings here thus far.

I've always understood the small-value premium to be driven by a small percentage of "lottery tickets" within the larger group.

Does anyone have a citation for this? I know it gets said here periodically (I've repeated it myself), but I actually don't have a reference.

Thanks.

What is amusing to me is that people question value premium based on persistence. But same people don't question stock premium --yet value premium has been more persistent than stock premium. Actually, my observation is that the Bogleheads who question the "value premium" going forward ar...

Hasn't been listed yet. You can look this up at ishares.com

Actually, I always like to look at the fund data because it reflects what really happened, not what could have happened. Funds change indexes. Index providers change the way their indexes are constructed. Those things have happened and will happen again. There is always a lot of discussion around he...

The funds are very similar in terms of duration, so you're not missing anything. One thing that is worth doing is looking at the savings in *dollar* terms. If it's worth the trouble in dollars, then go for it; if not, then just stick with what you have and don't sweat it. Once the dollars really sta...

With individual corporates, munis, and CDs, you may want to consider accounts at multiple brokers. Bonds do not have exchanges like stocks do. With stocks, placing an order at Fidelity isn't much different than placing an order at TD Ameritrade. With bonds, each broker has access to different invent...

If you're ever on a snow packed downhill, downshifting, whether in an automatic or manual will always give you better traction than breaking. As you downshift you may want to press slightly on the accelerator, then over 2-3 seconds decrease pressure to slow your speed more gradually. At higher spee...

What kind of bonds to you want to buy?

I guess I am in a "camp" ... something for me to be aware of as any camp likely has its pitfalls. Ha ha! And what I meant by that were the people who've written papers on the topic and who tend to cite one another. Off the top of my head, names to google to read more papers would be Falke...

No brownie points for DFA and their clients for accepting RANDOM tracking error. It is what is expected of a good index tracker. It is what is expected with Vanguard. In fairness, this kind of error has occurred in the past with VG when they switched index providers from S&P to MSCI. The exact ...

But it might be negative some years\decades? The "premium" is in expected returns, not actual returns. The basic theory is that: --one should expect riskier investments to have higher returns than less risky ones. --value stocks have significantly outperformed the market across time and m...

Yes they would functionally be very similar.

As I said before, the "low vol" camp wants us to live in the CAPM world Wrong! The low vol camp believes that CAPM is false to a much larger extent than F/F do. It's simply not the case that there are only two ways to view how markets work, CAPM or F/F; just because you aren't in the F/F ...

This post is about Low-Vol .... per M* ... low-vol investments like SPLV (least volatile S&P stocks) are tilted value stocks Note that if you look at the various "price-to-X" ratios, SPLV has higher ratios than the S&P 500. Right now, whether you do low vol or min. var., you are t...

The record in this regard is mixed. During the Great Depression, it was indeed the case: from September 1929 until June 1932, Ken French’s data show that large growth stocks lost "only" 82% of total return versus a loss of 89% for large value One big caveat on this data is that this is a ...

Eric: Just to make sure I understand you correctly, do you think that low volatility/minimum variance portfolio are more, equally, or less risky than that market overall?

The reason we don't now all have traditional pension plans is that the 60/40 allocation didn't work to properly fund the plans. So all this talk about risk is not only important to us, but would also been important to understand for those who were in charge of pension plans No, what happened was th...

I think the advantage to some of these newer strategies is that they oftentimes help one avoid unknown risks, such as making big sector bets. People often fret around here about how low. vol. strategies are just a bet on utilities or value strategies are just a big bet on financials. Fundamentally-w...

Probably worth noting that Vanguard's index funds are not split between value and growth based only on book value. They use multi-characteristic sorts. Most academic research relies on price/book. Most practitioners or people who backtest for a living tend not to use P/B because there are other metr...

But low vol seems to be well explained by other issues To get to the practical level, why should I care how much one return stream covaries with another one? If I can get the market return and take less risk than the market overall, who cares whether some academic or fund company selling a differen...

Also, I find it curious that EEMV (iShares EM low vol ETF) is, according to Morningstar, a large growth fund. Their growth:value score is 34:18, basically 2:1. Of course, MS could just have it wrong. Morningstar is right. The ishares website shows the same thing. As you have noted, low vol/min. var...

Low vol has gained traction from proponents who want to suspend asset pricing research that has taken place for the last 4 decades. If we go back to a CAPM, one factor world, low vol looks great, as does just about everything else! Eric--actually if you read Falkenstein's stuff he bashes the CAPM m...

Interesting discussion, but does any of this really help one determine with any level of accuracy what her risk tolerance/capacity is? The one key comment is that you only know in hindsight. How you are impacted by a big decline can be determined by a wide range of factors--age, wealth, current job ...

I use this approach, although it was originally done for reasons that no longer apply. Years ago, the Total International Fund was a fund-of-funds, investing in the Europe, Pacific, and Emerging funds, and as a result, was not eligible for the foreign tax credit. The second reason I did it originall...

Also keep in mind that it's REALLY REALLY hard not to be an emotional investor Exactly. These questions always assume some hypothetical emotionless investor that doesn't actually exist. This hypothetical investor could reasonably expect that his 100% stock portfolio will beat an investor with a bal...

If you want a fourth fund, what Alex said.

could someone tell a new guy what the ramifications of this are? thanks. It means that when Small Value underperforms Small Growth in the future, tilting advocates will be able to blame the index switch. :twisted: The real answer is, "not much". The funds all target the same asset classes...

Of the companies that I've actually used the "customer service", I'd vote for REI and Amica Insurance.

If you happen to call them up and ask why the increase, please share the answer--that would be useful information for others going forward.

If you want a possible home run for 1% of your portfolio, find an individual US microcap stock you like and buy that. You need to be more concentrated if you want the kind of home run where 1% of your portfolio will matter.

I assure you, this fund belongs in approximately no one's portfolio. Several issues: 1. The bid/ask spreads on these companies are astronomical... 2. 5% of equities is almost a waste of time for anything... 3. The risk is off the charts... I agree with Eric on this one. Such a fund certainly offers...

grayfox--I don't have a number handy, but I do remember reading a paper a year or two back where the authors looked at stocks that moved between "value" and "growth" buckets in one of the major index series (I think it was Russell). Their conclusion was that the stocks' behavior ...

Question for the OP--what would be the advantage of going with the BCBS plan over a HD Plan F? In helping my parents work through the options when their retiree health plan changed last year, they ended up going with HD-F simply because the other options might have been good, but there was nothing t...

The correct number of bikes to own is N+1, where N is the number you own now. As such, life would be out of balance for your spouse if they did not buy the bike.

If that's true does that mean that traditional asset allocation balances (eg Age In Bonds, etc) are actually too conservative? Should we all be shifting more towards higher risk, high return allocations? This is pretty anecdotal, but it feels like even here on bh.org, there are many who subscribe m...

For the average stock, I believe beta explains something like 70% of the return. (That's a number I recall off the top of my head from a class I took.) I think it's that beta explains ~70% of the fluctuations of any relatively well diversified portfolio, such as, say, a smallcap-value index fund. I...

Utilities aren't "dividend stocks", they are a sector. Like consumer staples. Or healthcare. And all sectors have a ton of ideosyrncratic (diversifiable) risk. The model works best on broadly diversified portfolios that have already had the random noise rung out of them. Exactly why the F...

A few things I've learned from working at my megacorp for almost 20 years now: --Salary inequities are the norm. --Reorganization is the norm. --Changes in one's salary tend to be uneven. --Everybody, no matter how much they make or how much the work, feels overworked, underpaid, and underappreciate...

Switching from the 500 to a pure momentum fund significantly increases the risk of the portfolio. Have you seen the drawdowns that momentum strategies experience? If you wanted to do such a thing, I'd bump up your bond holdings significantly to even out the risk. Bet on enough anomalies and don't yo...