Bogleheads

[baw703916]

Some of you may have noticed, as I did, that the yields on Tax-exempt MM Funds (for exemple, Vanguard's) have been going all over the place. In particular, they dropped from about 3% to 1.5% earlier this year, and are now back up a little above 2%.

I assume a lot of this has to do with the failed auctions of municipal bonds, the bond insurance situation, etc. I'm not (too) worried, and I hope none of you are either.

My question is the following. Vanguard gives the current yield of their money market funds, updated each day. But what would be really interesting, and I didn't find in a brief search, is a plot over the last few months of the yields of TE money market vs. treasury or prime money market (either for Vanguard or in general).

Anyone know of a place to see this data?

Best wishes,
Brad

edit: changed thread title
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I don't foresee any Black Swans appearing in the future

[discman017]

On Vanguard's website, they let you compare price and yield history for two funds. Here's how you do it...

1. Go here: https://personal.vanguard.com/....torysearch
2. Select Tax-Exempt Money Mkt
3. Select "Daily Price History"
4. Enter a date range
5. Click "Get History"
6. Now select Prime Money Mkt
7. Click "Get History"

Vanguard shows you the prices and yields side by side for the last two funds selected (Tax-Exempt and Prime Money Market, in this case). Price isn't interesting for these funds (consistently $1), but it is definitely interesting to see how the relative yields have fluctuated.

[baw703916]

Thanks discman!

Wow, that really is enlightening. The yield has gone up by 80 basis points in the last 5 business days. I had been surprised to see last week the yield at under 2%, because it had been above 3% the last time I had checked a month or so ago.

For others who wish to see what the data looks like, I did manage to (kind of) automate the process. The link below gives the data from 7/1/2007 to 2/26/2008 for Tax-exempt MM. I don't think I can put a link to directly compare two funds, because the site seems to use your browser's cache history to do that. (I doubt this link will work long term)

Link

Best wishes,
Brad
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I don't foresee any Black Swans appearing in the future

[NoMoreInvestingExcitement]

[indexfundfan]

Wow, thanks for the post.

Looks like it is time to move back from Prime MMF into tax exempt MMF.
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My signature has been deleted.

[tfb]

Thanks for the heads up. I didn't know what the thread was about until I got the alert from IndexFundFan. I will shift back to the tax exempt fund tomorrow.
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The Finance Buff

[baw703916]

Hi tfb,

Based in part on your post, I decided to change the thread's title. Originally I was trying to figure out how to look at the data of yield vs. time. Now that NoMoreInvestingExcitement has explained how to do that, and that the topic seems to be of general interest, it seemed like a title change might encourage more people to join the thread.

Best wishes,
Brad

PS: ...and thanks to indexfundfan for publicizing the thread
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I don't foresee any Black Swans appearing in the future