Bogleheads.org

I have located the relevant language in the registration statement (Form N-1A) that Vanguard files for each of its ETFs. Example: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1021882/000093247110002288/scottsdalefunds485a_052010.htm Vanguard, through the NSCC, makes available after the close of each Busin...

Not in Maryland. Maryland has no chargemasters, it has an all-payer government rate-setting system for hospitals. All payers pay the same rate. http://www.hscrc.state.md.us/documents/HSCRC_PolicyDocumentsReports/GeneralInformation/MarylandAll-PayorHospitalSystem.pdf You are missing the key point. T...

It may not be necessary but you could make it four checks: #1 from husband to mom #2 from husband to dad #3 from wife to mom #4 from wife to dad That way it's obvious you're under the gift amount. It is not necessary for avoiding gift tax. It is, however, necessary if you want to avoid filing a gif...

So that means that the companies the Berkshire owns are "double" counted in VTSMX for example? As in, shares of Coca Cola are owned by VTSMX outright, and even more shares are owned indirectly by Berkshire, which also is in VTSMX? The CRSP US Total Market Index is a float-adjusted index. ...

I was looking at my one index fund (SSgA S&P 500) in my 401k and comparing to Vanguard's Total Stock Market (VTSAX) - turnover is 19% at SSgA and 3.2% at Vanguard. Second eye-catcher is that SSgA's 3rd largest holding is some sort of futures contract - so this looks more like an actively manage...

The indexing they are talking about isn't just the total stock market. But when SPY is the most heavily traded security every day for months, and when other popular ETFs are the focus of option buying in huge amounts the fact so many stocks are being bought and sold as a unit might become significa...

Of particular interest right now is the divergence in creation/redemption baskets, compared to the underlying index. Vanguard should be able to use this tactic to its advantage when moving from MSCI to FTSE indexes. For example, for VWO, it could define the creation basket to have no Korean stocks. ...

In December 2012, the Federal Reserve committed to keep the fed funds rate below 0.25% until either unemployment falls below 6.5%, or inflation rises above 2.5%. We are currently at 7.9% unemployment and 1.6% inflation. Thus, rates will not increase for some time to come. Of course, we should all ho...

Amazon customer service is great ... except when it isn't. 99% of the time, they will readily accommodate you, losing money on the transaction on the belief that it's better to keep you as a customer and make it back in the future. The other 1% of the time, you will discover that Amazon is as stubbo...

Indeed, one of the reasons that TIAA-CREF has such high expense ratios, compared to Vanguard, is that they have high servicing costs. They send people to campuses to meet with professors. They have local offices where you can make an appointment and ask questions. Each retirement plan differs, so th...

I agree that generally portability benefits the "medium net worth" couple. But in a country of 350 million, there will be a few cases of the very low income widow who wins a $10M lottery or has an unexpected big inheritance from a rich uncle. Then dies a few years later and her kids find ...

I would not be too concerned that you cannot find information in the newspapers. This sort of change is unlikely to be well-publicized. Between TIAA-CREF and the State of New Jersey, I've seen a number of arcane details that turned out to matter a great deal. I'd read the find print and find an inte...

Don't get discouraged too quickly. On July 1, 2013, TIAA-CREF becomes available to all public school districts statewide in New Jersey! Although TIAA-CREF is certainly no Vanguard when it comes to low cost, they do have some very respectable index fund options. Even their actively-managed funds carr...

When WB buys a company, there a good chance he has an office somewhere on the company grounds and has a say in what goes on there. No. Warren Buffett is well-known for being a hands-off owner. He insists on only one thing after he takes over a company: that they send all their cash to the mothershi...

BH is triple A rated and net cash. His weighted average cost of capital is extremely low. And almost anything he does that spends cash increases his return on capital (because he has so much cash around). Berkshire Hathaway currently has a AA credit rating. Not AAA. However, this doesn't matter too...

Can someone explain to me in normal human-speak how Buffett uses his insurance company as a form of leverage? I keep hearing that he does this to get an advantage the rest of us don't have, but I don't understand it. Leverage is when you borrow money to invest. Normal people can get leverage by buy...

There are actually people who wash and iron their dollar bills, so that they're clean and crisp. You may have received one of these bills.

U.S. paper currency is made out of cotton. Just like your jeans might shrink when they go through the washer for the first time, so would dollar bills.

The thing is, electrical circuits rely on a continuous path. Because multiple outlets are daisy-chained together on a single circuit, the problem could be caused by any failure at any point upstream of the bad receptacle. The problem might be with the receptacle itself -- or it might be a melted wir...

You are right. Cash secured put. Although naked sounds bad, isn't it actually less risky than a covered put? A covered put can lose more than 100%. Yes, that's right. In terms of payoff, a naked put is equivalent to a covered call -- you can only lose 100% of the strike price. Whereas a covered put...

I bounded this off a friend, who skimmed the article and read the SEC description. He says that buying this "reverse convertible" is essentially selling a naked put, and that's about it. So yes, it's risky, but also yes, there are legitimate reasons someone might want to do it. Sounds lik...

Actually, the cost basis for XOM stock inherited on January 19, 1996 would be $20.3125 per share. It is not the split-adjusted closing price. As stated on p. 18, Instructions for Form 706, "The FMV of a stock or bond ... is the mean between the highest and lowest selling prices quoted on the va...

Interestingly, Vanguard Emerging Markets Index is now primarily an ETF, due to the enormous inflows that have gone into the ETF shares in recent years. ⋅ As of October 31, 2009, the fund had $27.4 billion in net assets, of which $15.5 billion was in ETF shares. ⋅ As of October 31...

The problem is not the spreads -- and certainly not the spreads on index ETF options. The problem is that the premiums are too high for what you're getting. Major institutions can deal with the investment banks directly. The i-banks will write bespoke options that go out as far as 10 years. Warren B...

Because companies are poor allocators of capital, outside of their core business. That includes the financial business -- i.e., their own stock. Just as most acquisitions actually destroy shareholder value, most buybacks are done in a way that destroys shareholder value. There were plenty of cash-ri...

I would be mildly curious to compare the taste of ordinary (corn syrup sweetened) Classic Coke and one sweetened with cane sugar... I always keep an eye out around Passover but I always forget. Love to set up a blind taste test for myself with two equally chilled bottles, etc. But I am almost sure ...

My bias against my PIN Debit/ATM card is not that I am using a PIN. It is lack of rewards, possible ATM fees, possible holds on my funds, lower fraud protection, ... There are many reasons to prefer credit cards over debit cards. However, debit cards have increased their share of payments during th...

American Express tried to popularize smartcards in the US in the early 2000s, particularly with their Blue credit card line. They couldn't get any traction with it. They then decided to back RFID. Smartcards face a number of obstacles to adoption in the US that they don't face in Europe. (1) An esta...

That's not even close to the actual distribution. By "the SCF oversamples wealthy households", DetroitRed was not referring to some minor bias that needs to be tweaked. Rather, the SCF intentionally oversamples wealthy households. This is necessary because wealth is so intensely concentrat...

As of a few weeks ago, BRK.A and VTSMX had similar 10-year returns. I think Buffet's main advantages lie in his ability to structure deals that ordinary guys cannot. VTSMX is priced at net asset value at the end of every day. BRK isn't. At any point in time, BRK's stock price may be overvalued, fai...

The thing is, there are two types of ETF buyers. There are the buy-and-holders, who use ETFs as a more tax-efficient form of indexing than mutual funds. (For Vanguard ETFs, though, they would be sharing the benefits with the mutual fund share classes.) Then there are the traders, who use ETFs to rep...

GMO is comparing Call buying vs Put selling. Buy-write vs Put selling should have similar results. GMO says that call-buying underperforms the market -- which I find to be quite intuitive. As I stated quite clearly above, my question is not about call-buying -- but about why their put-writing progr...

It's actually called the BuyWrite Index, and it simulates successive writing of one-month covered calls. The ticker of the iShares ETN is BWV. Performance appears to be roughly on par with the market, but returns vary. (For example, during 1996-2008, the BuyWrite did better than the S&P TR.) &sd...

Besides the 1.6% expense ratio for GAFAX, looks like a 5.75% front-end load (that M* doesn't take into account on the charts). Well, since inception, this fund has underperformed Wellesley, Wellington, all the TR funds. Volatility is low, but for the long haul over bull and bear market cycles, I do...

Until the company actually winds down operations, the stock certificates will not be cancelled. That's because when it comes to liquidations, on occasion there is actually some residual value to be paid out to the shareholders. 99 times out of 100 it will be worth nothing, but that 1 in 100 chance i...

Historically, dividends were taxed at the ordinary income rate. Therefore, if your broker loaned out your shares, it really didn't matter whether you received actual dividends or payments in lieu of dividends. Borrowing for the purposes of short-selling developed in this environment. Once the borrow...

The broker does not want to pay the gross-up for a special dividend. Therefore, they withhold client shares from the borrow market -- and even callback the shares that they've already lent out. With fewer brokers willing to loan shares, the stock thus becomes harder to borrow. The most famous case i...

Securities in a margin account are only at risk if you carry a debit balance. In that case, the broker may pledge securities equivalent to 140% of your debit balance. So long as you carry a credit balance, your margin account is not that different from a cash account. The broker is required to maint...

Securities lending can be quite lucrative for a brokerage if the stock is heavily shorted and therefore hard-to-borrow. I've seen borrow rates exceed 100%. However, this situation does not arise in this case. VTI is an ETF; VCITX and VGENX are mutual funds. The borrow rate on ETFs is practically nil...

Who would want to write a call option with no premium? A short-seller who doesn't want to pay an annual carrying cost of 60%, that's who. (And this is actually down from 70% last week!) These shorts are essentially giving up everything below 2.50 in return for a free short with no carrying cost. To ...

Total Look is not affiliated with Mint. Banks dislike Mint because it inserts itself between the customer and the bank's web site. They tolerated Quicken back in the 1990s, but now they'd prefer you to visit their web site. There are a number of software companies that sell stuff like Total Look to ...

Well, I hate to break up this talk of privacy by returning to the financials, but to me this is the most important part of that Reuters article: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70359V20110106 The financial statements were not audited and offered little detail about how Facebook generates it re...

The daughter's current interest in physics is probably a result of recency bias. Would she have gone for physics last year, when she was taking chemistry? Or two years before that, when she was taking biology? High school science is very different from academic research in science. Given MnD and Mrs...

The Berkshire/BNSF transaction is structured as a merger between BNSF and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Berkshire. The effect will be that of an acquisition, but the documents will refer to it as a "merger." There are actually several unusual elements of this transaction. The merger, the of...

Turbotax Online also does not allow you to import TXF files. This was a dealbreaker for me that forced me to buy the desktop software version. I wasn't going to type in fifteen pages of stock transactions. (Don't worry, that's just play money. The bulk of my money is in Vanguard index funds and ETFs.)

The Chinese destroyed a nonoperational Chinese weather satellite. We destroyed a nonoperational American spy satellite. If the Russians had destroyed a nonoperational Russian communications satellite, then you'd be right. But this collision took out an American communications satellite, one that was...

For me, this is the money quote from the AP story: Iridium satellites are unusual because their orbit is so low and they move so fast. Most communications satellites are in much higher orbits and don't move relative to each other, which means collisions are rare. True, but also misleading. Most com...