Bogleheads.org

Clarky wrote: ↑Thu Mar 23, 2023 11:17 am

RadAudit wrote: ↑Thu Mar 23, 2023 9:11 am I checked the sector analysis report this morning in the Portfolio Analysis and it appears it has been fixed, at least for my account. YMMV. Best of luck.

All good here as well. Just finished reading something about indexes being reconstituted. Don’t know if that had anything to do with it - or just enough people made just enough noise?

I don't see how it could have anything to do with indexes being reconstituted. Whether or not reporting the bug did some good, I don't know. But I did just add a reply to my original message noting that as of today the bug seems to have been fixed.

Logan Roy wrote: ↑Thu Mar 23, 2023 10:07 am I believe there was a famous academic refutation of Efficient Markets, that showed the level of volatility in markets seemed much larger than would be predicted based on the amount and impact of information being priced in..

Well, try to find and cite that famous academic refutation, please, so we'll know where we're at.

The efficient market hypothesis does not say that the price is always right. It only says that pricing is a random walk around the right price, and therefore you cannot use analysis of price movements to beat the market. I don't think anything about the efficient market hypothesis predicts the degree of volatility.

Mine, too. I'm down to the usual two alerts, both accurate statements of fact as to how my holdings compare with their recommendations. They now show microscopic numerical differences for sector allocations compared to the market, and don't show an alert about it. Not too bad. It's interesting that they apparently did pick up on the minuscule foreign bond holdings in Total Bond, as they say 2% of my bond holdings are international. Portfolio alerts (2) International Exposure Information: To further diversify your stock portfolio, consider allocating 30% to 50% to foreign stocks. Bond Information: Holding more foreign bonds can potentially increase the level of diversification in your portfolio. Allocating up to 20% to 50% of your bond portf...

Yes, not because of Vanguard, but because banks hold fractional reserves, and mutual funds don't. Banks are intrinsically risky because of the way they are supposed to work. When you deposit $10,000 at a bank, your account statement shows $10,000, but the bank doesn't actually have all of that $10,000. They invest most of it. Maybe only $1,000 of your deposit is kept by the bank. So the statement doesn't mean "you have $10,000," it means "you are entitled to request a $10,000 withdrawal, which under ordinary circumstances the bank will always be able to fulfill." Taking this risk is the bank's job. It's what banks are for. There's nothing improper or illegal about it. The risk is there. Regulations and bank examiners try...

I'm mulling over a new computer and possibly a new external SSD to go with it, and in my quick first-cut searches I found I was getting confused by SanDisk having acquired G-Technology, a provider of external rotating drives. So you can now have the SanDisk brand name on a rotating drive. Google, Amazon, etc. not at all clever about identifying SSD versus rotating drives correctly, and my searches for "SSD drives" often included rotating drives.

(My motivation for the external drive is that Time Machine and BackBlaze don't offer a path to quick recovery if the internal drive on a computer goes bad. So I like to make periodic bootable clones of my internal drive to sufficiently fast external drive.)

The S&P 500 is a "Total Stock Market" fund. It was designed specifically to represent the returns of the entire U.S. stock market. They determined 500 was enough stocks to capture the entire markets returns. And looking at the historical returns of S&P500 vs newer indexes holding 2-10x as many stocks, they were not wrong. They didn't "determine that 500 stocks was enough," it was just the most they could do with the computers they had in 1957. Do you have a source for that claim? I cannot find any reference to that with web searches. S&P 500 included 94.81% of the market at inception contains quotations from a March 5th, 1957 New York Times story, "New Market Yardstick: An Explanation of the 500-Stock I...

I think the quotation, at least as usually attributed, is "Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful." "The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets." - Baron Rothschild There's no evidence he said it. The earliest mention of the story is from 1894, almost twenty years after he supposedly said it, and begins feebly "It is related..." Most important, the reference was to literal blood in literal streets during the Paris Commune. Full background including 1894 and later versions of the story. More important, there are at least a dozen handy-dandy maxims around that you can use to provide confirmation bias of whatever thing you've already decided to do. Just select the one that...

Florida Orange, thank you for phrasing it as "volatility is not the same thing as risk" rather than simply saying "volatility is not risk."

But volatility is one important kind of risk. Furthermore, it generally goes along with other kinds. You can find exceptions, but generally risk is risk.

In 2018, I picked a listed of mutual funds representing a wide range different kinds of assets, investments, and strategies. I simply plotted their volatility, as measured by standard deviation, against their maximum drawdown. These are the results, and you can find the actual list of funds in the original posting here.

Now that ChatGPT-4 is out as of March 14 and is reportedly MUCH improved over ChatGPT, I suppose we need to note whether we’re talking about GPT or GPT-4, or just focus on 4? https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/14/gpt-4-has-arrived-it-will-blow-chatgpt-out-water/ "Microsoft announced Tuesday that the Bing AI chatbot, released last month, had been using GPT-4 all along." And it's horrible. See above . Not only did it present factual misinformation about the Jack London story, "Moon-Face," it supported those incorrect statements with alleged sources that did not link to information about that story. And this is the same chatbot that tried to gaslight someone by insisting that it was 2022 when it was really 2...

Interesting piece in the "The Indicator from Planet Money" podcast: What Banks Do when Nobody's Watching . The importance of bank examiners, what they do, and why there is a looming shortage of them. Among other details: WOODS: ...the remote working revolution hasn't hit the bank examining workforce as much as it could in other industries. There's still this protocol of in-person visits, which can be really valuable. WONG: Yeah. Kiah points to what happened at a small bank in Chicago a few years ago when an examiner was doing an on-site visit. HASLETT: An employee pulled the bank examiner over and basically said, this bank is a giant fraud, and you need to come back and do a big, thorough examination of this bank. WOODS: I mean, t...

What about my point of view: suppose a total international equity fund IS marginally riskier than a developed markets equity index fund... is it riskier enough to care about?

the_wiki wrote: ↑Wed Mar 22, 2023 5:13 pm The S&P 500 is a "Total Stock Market" fund.

It was designed specifically to represent the returns of the entire U.S. stock market. They determined 500 was enough stocks to capture the entire markets returns. And looking at the historical returns of S&P500 vs newer indexes holding 2-10x as many stocks, they were not wrong.

They didn't "determine that 500 stocks was enough," it was just the most they could do with the computers they had in 1957.

I think the quotation, at least as usually attributed, is "Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful." The reason why not is that it is not actionable, because it does not give you any objective or quantifiable way to tell how greedy or fearful "others" are, and thus does not tell you when to buy or sell. It is no more useful than "Buy low, sell high." It's just a Rorschach inkblot that gives you an opportunity to project your own unreliable feelings into the situation. By staying the course in a total market fund, however, it can be said (in the same vague way) that guarantees that I will be less fearful when others are fearful, and less greedy when others are greedy. Another Buffet...

Wow, Google Bard is, if possible, even worse. Q; Compare and contrast Edgar Allan Poe's "The Telltale Heart" with Jack London's "Moon-Face." Edgar Allan Poe's "The Telltale Heart" and Jack London's "Moon-Face" are both short stories that explore the dark side of human nature. However, they do so in very different ways. "The Telltale Heart" is a first-person narrative in which the narrator confesses to the murder of an old man. He is haunted by the sound of the old man's heart beating under the floorboards, and eventually he confesses to the murder to the police. The story is a psychological thriller that explores the narrator's guilt and paranoia. OK, not bad. "Moon-Face" is a thir...

DJN wrote: ↑Tue Mar 14, 2023 4:51 am...the lack if attribution is a definite drawback of ChatGPT, perhaps they will develop a version with footnotes...

They did. As noted above, Microsoft's Bing Chat has footnotes. And when I asked it a question and got a completely wrong answer, it turned out that it had made up fake footnotes. Specifically, footnotes supporting completely wrong things it said about one short story turned out to link to descriptions of a completely different short story.

It also, to give it credit and blame at the same time, consulted bad sources: shmoop, and some other place where students go to get crib notes about books they haven't read.

For what it's worth, some banks in Massachusetts insure all deposits in full, period. Up to $250,000 is insured by the FDIC, the amount over that is insured by the Despositors Insurance Fund.



I have no idea whether DIF insurance is any good, nor what the real-world statistics of deposit sizes are, but "all deposits insured in full" isn't crazy on the face of it, because they do it.

Whenever two things are different, people like to argue over which is better, and there's always a case to be made for either one. The fact is that the two are very similar. In fact they have had an 0.99 correlation (99%). I like to go back to fundamentals on this one. The S&P 500 index was launched in 1957. It wasn't intended to be a superior selection of stocks, it was intended to be a total stock market index--as nearly as practical at the time. They wanted an index that could be calculated hourly, and with the computer they used that was the limit. (The computer was a Datatron computer located in Boston; I haven't found out why. The computers in New York weren't fast enough?) At the time, those 500 stocks covered over 94% of the mar...

If there's a tip jar, I tip.

I haven't paid much attention but I think there is, or usually is one at Starbucks.

I have an idea I haven't seen them at Dunkin' Donuts. Might depend on the franchise.

According to Bloomberg, the company is still Dunkin' Donuts LLC and merely styles itself as Dunkin. And why yes, I do think it has been going downhill ever since they quit baking them in-store. I'm trying to remember how long it's been since they had the little handle on them that justified the name "Dunkin'".

I know several CFOs of mid sized companies. What you are preaching is unrealistic and absurd. Maybe at large companies it is somewhat realistic. But CFOs at small and mid-size companies are never going to properly analyze the risk of their deposits. If a CFo can't understand that uninsured deposits aren't insured I don't know why they are a CFO. If it's not the CFO's job then it's the treasurer's. Or the accountant or bookkeeper or whoever is putting the money into the account but understanding that money that is uninsured is not insured is not a difficult concept. Maybe trying to figure out what to do with the money is a little bit more difficult but not that much. Just get a good financial advisor. There are many options The least and ea...

Hmmm... $89 seems a bit lowball to me? I don't have any good answer. The places where I've had my wheels aligned, including two different local tire shops--one a small independent, one a big chain--and the car dealer, several times--just took my money and gave me a computer printout of the results. I've had a lot of upsell, but, so far, not on wheel alignment... for some reason. In our state, the annual inspection includes some kind of crude safety check of the front end. If my car has passed inspection, and the steering doesn't feel loose or shake the wheel or make once-per-revolution noises, I would have the courage to decline front-end repair work. If I went in for an $89 wheel alignment and they wanted to upsell me thirty or forty dolla...

I've seen many posts recently seeming to prefer VEA over VXUS. People are nervous about emerging markets. Anything to this? In my opinion, emerging markets used to be wildly overhyped, due to a burst of outperformance from 2003 through 2007. They have underperformed from 2010 on. Chinese stocks currently account for about ⅓ of emerging markets. I think we're seeing 1) progressive disillusionment, and 2) antipathy to China by US investors for geopolitical and reasons. As well as actual economics in China, where the real estate situation looks odd, and shenanigans of the sort that prospectuses says are typical of "emerging markets risk." There have been steady postings by people wanting a fund that gives them "total internatio...

I don't believe people can distinguish psychologically between the risk of total international including emerging markets, and developed markets only. It would be nice if someone could apply psychophysical methods and tell us the "just noticeable difference" in risk. Many of us (including me if I don't do the math) have difficulty keeping things in proportion when they look at a portfolio that has something in it that they don't like. We weight it by the strength of our dislike. Human psychology seems to feel that any amount of contamination, no matter how small, is thought to ruin the whole. (Think of the California town that drained a 674-million-gallon reservoir because a security camera caught a man urinating in it). I think V...

This is just a statement of what I personally have actually done. It's definitely not a recommendation, and it might also be some kind of behavioral error. But I find it hard to stomach the idea of gaining or losing as much as 1% on the breaks of what might happen in a single day. When I've been in situations like this, I've done it as several partial moves--e.g. four transfers, spaced a week apart, each of about ¼ of the total.

Not surprisingly, Bing Chat is just as bad, and has the really terrible problem of mixing in very good material with completely wrong, made-up BS. Worse yet, it supports the BS with phony "sources." Compare and contrast Edgar Allan Poe's "The Telltale Heart" and Jack London's "Moon-Face." The material on "The Telltale Heart" is fine, but: “Moon-Face” is a short story by Jack London, first published in 1902. It is about an unnamed narrator who has an irrational hatred of John Claverhouse, a man with a “moon-face”. The narrator plots to kill Claverhouse by poisoning his dog and then blowing up his cabin with dynamite. However, he fails to kill him and instead gets caught in his own trap. He dies while l...

...I left a note as well, and was told IT is aware of the issue and the responder claimed that management was made aware as well... Bravo! Well done. ...Went through the phone in process again. Got Jack. Said he would put in a repair ticket... Well done. I am sorry to say that I got an unsatisfactory reply to my note this morning. I had submitted a high quality bug report, including an attachment of the same screenshot I posted here in the forum. A day later I had a need to call Vanguard about a completely different issue, involving a change in bank account information. This morning I got a reply saying We understand that you have already been in contact with a Vanguard representative. If you still have questions or concerns, please do not...

Is there a simple way to calculate weighted expense ratios of a portfolio? For example, if one wanted to compare a target retirement fund with an expense ratio of 0.46% and a portfolio with: 25% fund A (0.06%) 51% fund B(0.02%) 15% fund C(0.03%) 9% fund D (0.04%) Yes. To add to what others have mentioned. The key is to convert the costs to dollars, then add them up and convert them back to a percentage. This is just a way of computing a weighted average, but it makes it easier to see why it is correct. And since the size of the portfolio doesn't actually matter, you can use a round number like $100,000 if you like. In your example, you have $25,000, $51,000, $15,000 and $9,000 in the four funds respectively. So the dollar expenses for each...

I certainly think so. Subject to the proviso that if you have a need for something done immediately, and the person says they "take cash, check, or Venmo," or a teller's check from a bank, you can probably get the money available faster if it's in a bank checking account. (Not sure exactly what the current story is on checkwriting features on Vanguard accounts, there was a recent change).

There's another dimension. Remember please that I personally happen to invest in Total Stock, with no special dividend focus. There are broadly two mental models of how to make money by investing in stocks. 1) You become a participant in a profitable business. They do something useful, customers pay them, they make a profit, and they share some of it with their stockholders in the form of dividends, or possibly buybacks. If the business is in a young and fast-growing stage and you believe in them and are willing to wait, you believe they will eventually pay dividends and share them with you. Either way, you expect to participate in the profits of a going concern, sooner or later. 2) You watch and analyze the same stock fluctuations that oth...

Tidbit from Absolute Zero: Growth of the American railroads and of refrigeration went hand in hand; moreover, the ability conveyed by refrigeration to store food and to transport slaughtered meat in a relatively fresh state led to huge, socially significant increases in the food supply, and to changes in the American social and geographical landscape... Refrigeration in combination with railroads helped cause the wealth of the United States to begin to flow west, raising the per capita income of workers in the food-packing and transshipment centers of Chicago and Kansas City.... The enormous jump in demand for meat, accelerated by refrigerated storage and transport, spurred ranchers and the federal government to take over millions of acres ...

...1) it is kind of ironic that you want to force the depositors to buy Treasuries- and yet Treasuries (albeit notes, not bills) are a main culprit in the SVB downfall... How were Treasurys "culprits" in any way? It was the bank's bad risk management and excessive use of Treasurys. And that wasn't because of "economic conditions and prevailing rates," it's because they cultivated a monoculture of one particular idiosyncratic kind of depositor. At the Financial Times, Robert Armstrong writes: "Few other banks have as much of their assets locked up in fixed-rate securities as SVB, rather than in floating-rate loans. Securities are 56 per cent of SVB’s assets. At Fifth Third, the figure is 25 per cent; at Bank of Amer...

Think carefully about what will cause you the least mental wear and tear. At least you have a clean answer from them--it's not your problem, it's their problem, and they didn't say there would be a fix.

In your mental estimate, take into account IRS being overworked and slugish, the value to you of $200, and your guesses as to which procedures are most likely to go smoothly and without glitches: filing on paper promptly; waiting until the last minute to file hoping for an update; file an extension now and file the return later hoping for an update; file an incorrect return now and amend later. I know which option I would take. Single-sided on quality paper mailed flat.

rockstar wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 7:34 pm Looks like the US want to insure all accounts. What could possibly go wrong?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... #xj4y7vzkg

Of course, I'm a bit worried about due diligence. I don't want to get stones out of the atm.

https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorga ... nes-2023-3

One wishes so much that they were bags of wooden nickels.

No reply yet from Vanguard, and error not fixed, but I don't expect that. I'll be thrilled if they fix it within a month.

In one sense, if you assume that nobody actually acts on the information presented by Portfolio Watch--then this is just a cosmetic error. A very ugly cosmetic error.

On the other hand, a company reporting spurious numbers about one's personal account is a legitimate concern.

It is now almost two years since Livesoft started a thread:Vanguard Portfolio Watch has a new look [Calculations may be incorrect]

The supposed benefits of cloud native agile development ought to be put into the service of something more serious than bling.

I am probably exposing my ignorance, but why should I feel more secure in a non-insured MM fund at a brokerage than non-insured deposits at a bank? Because banks, by design, only hold reserves equal to a tiny fraction of deposits, and are therefore subject to runs. A solvent bank has enough assets to match liabilities, but those assets may not be liquid and in a bank run may not be available to meet withdrawals. So bank runs are possible, and insurance is needed to protect depositors. While money market mutual funds, by design, holds 100% in liquid assets sufficient to back its shares at $1/share. Runs are much less likely and insurance is much less important. Nothing's absolute. What took the Reserve Primary money market down was a kind o...

student wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 4:48 pm

nisiprius wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 4:33 pm [Added: they might have discontinued the graded payment plan. If so, then another problem is the absence of any inflation compensation at all in the annuity payments).

Yes. It was discontinued. viewtopic.php?t=389568

How embarrassing. I posted a lot in that thread. Since the graded option is being continued for those who started it, I must have decided not to worry and blanked it from my mind.

student wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 4:48 pm

nisiprius wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 4:33 pm I believe most Bogleheads who have TIAA-CREF (oops, sorry, it's just styled "TIAA" now) think of it as a good option.

I am also in old geezer territory and I still refer it to TIAA-CREF. lol

rkhusky wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 6:55 pm

nisiprius wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 1:56 pm Under Glass-Steagall, until 1999, it was illegal for a bank to have branches in more than one state.

I don’t think that’s completely accurate. I banked with First Interstate Bank in the 80’s and 90’s and they had branches in different states, specifically near my hometown and in the state where I went to college.

I guess it's complicated. Some very cursory searching suggests that the prohibition might have only applied to federally-chartered banks, and that some states allowed state-chartered banks to branch across state lines.

From Bankrate.com: “Since 1960, reinvested dividends accounted for 84% of the total return of the S&P 500 index.” How does this relate to the current debate? As a relative neophyte, I assume I’m missing something… Yes, what you're missing is that this is a bogus calculation. The right number is about 30%, not 84%. From 1960 through 2020: the average annual price return (capital appreciation) of the S&P 500 was 7.02%, the average dividend return was 3.04%, and thus the average total return was (1.0702) * (1.0304) = 1.1027 = 10.27%. Now the first thing that strikes the eye is that the dividend return, 3.04%, is only 29.6% of 10.27%. So on the face of it, dividends accounted for about 30% of the annualized total return of the S&P ...

adamhg wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 3:22 pm

nisiprius wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 6:45 am Thanks for compiling the list.

The whole point of a bunch of stuff that they did, when? 2012 or so? was to draw a bright line between "retail" and "institutional" money market mutual funds, and I think us retail investors are well advised to stick to the "retail" funds. I think you should identify which are which and list them separately.
...snip...

FINRA does provide the Investor Type as either Retail or Institutional. I have it in column G. Not sure why some of them are empty though.

Of course you did. Sorry. I didn't bother to scroll sideways. Well, I think you should sort on that column, and, as I say, list them by investor type first, and then by yield within investor type.

I'm receiving lifetime payouts on a "graded" withdrawal system from TIAA Traditional, converted to a "lifetime contract" (life annuity). And before that, I took out a chunk of it over ten years through a "transfer payout annuity." So I've been in and still am within that system. What you might be giving up--apparently there is a kind of TIAA Traditional now that does not have the ten-year-payout restriction--is the ability to liquidate any or all of the holding instantaneously whenever you feel like it. Just speaking for myself, I would say that what you might be giving up is the ability to understand exactly what TIAA is or is not doing. I don't say no human can understand it, I'm saying that this is a complex...

OverseasBH wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 11:01 amThis all seems valid. Can I summarize your words simply as being dividend investing may not be necessarily any worse (before taxes), although less diversified, but it certainly should not be seen as any better, although it might just be more convenient?

Yes.

It might be more convenient for certain investors with certain needs.

Harry Livermore wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 12:39 pm...I don't think Glass Steagall would have prevented this after all....

Under Glass-Steagall, until 1999, it was illegal for a bank to have branches in more than one state.

That certainly would have had some kind of effect in limiting the size of banks, and preventing the existence of banks "too big to fail." It would also have made banking less appealing to ambitious people wanting to built national financial empires.

It is perfectly reasonable to substitute Treasurys* for BND/VBTLX, and some authorities recommend it. I don't think there is any timing opportunity here. As far as I'm concerned, the rationale for BND is an expectation of more :moneybag :moneybag :moneybag It hasn't quite worked out that way, but BND has had more return for the same risk . There's no agreement on how much risk to take in the bond portion of a portfolio. Actually, BND itself is ⅔ government issues. BND has been criticized , including by John C. Bogle personally, for having too much in too-timid government issues. The reason it does is because the index it tracks has tended in that direction over the last decade or so. So on the one hand, some experts say most investors would...

I can't prove it, but I have a hunch that the standard "emergency fund" advice is decades old and intended to keep brokers out of trouble. Imagine a young worker who has saved up $10,000 and goes to a broker and wants to invest all of it in Xerox stock (1970s equivalent of a meme stock). The broker could get in trouble for recommending an unsuitable investment unless they say "go away, kid, and don't come back until you've got 6 months' expenses in savings." I feel that emergency funds are appropriate, and that they are a "just eat your broccoli" thing and that people who are aggressively trying to optimize their finances just hate them and look for excuses not to have one. I haven't seen any really good analys...

Due diligence, since the question has arisen. 1) Use the FDIC EDIE tool just to verify what the protection amount really is, if it's anything more complicated than one single account with one single owner. 2) Use the DepositAccounts Bank Financial Health Ratings tool--scroll down quite a way to "search for your bank"--for a quick reality check on the bank's safety. No, I have no idea if the ratings are valid, although during the financial crisis we did see our own bank's rating plunge. 3) This is sheer paranoia but use the FDIC's Bank Find tool to verify that the bank really is a member of the FDIC. Don't panic in a hurry if you can't find it right away, recently banks have been playing a lot of games of having old, stodgy legal n...

Stay away from anything that uses spiffy marketing-like language to describe it. Anybody who uses a name like "Infinite Banking" is pushing something, and will be seeking to persuade, not inform.

Thanks for compiling the list. The whole point of a bunch of stuff that they did, when? 2012 or so? was to draw a bright line between "retail" and "institutional" money market mutual funds, and I think us retail investors are well advised to stick to the "retail" funds. I think you should identify which are which and list them separately. The whole point of FDIC deposit insurance is to eliminate the need to evaluate the financial strength of a bank. You see the logo and you just plump your money into the bank. Money market mutual funds were actually given FDIC insurance for a brief period of time after 2008-2009, but that time is long gone. Right now, we are still in the land of the fiction that we all are perf...

Paranoid or prudent, this is a reason why I continue to get mailed paper statements from Vanguard, even though that's now going to cost me $20/year. (I can see the writing on the wall, it is going to be increasingly more difficult and more expensive to get mailed paper statements from financial institutions--but it should be practical for a while). A printed piece of paper with Vanguard's own logo on it should be pretty good documentation. I don't have any way to automate downloading and savings the PDFs (and it would be two every month, one for my wife and one for me). Mailed paper statements are also very helpful to anyone who takes on the sad task of locating a deceased person's assets. As for "zombie apocalypse," as we speak V...

You can only ask whether it is "rational" in the context of actual reasons. If it is 1970, and it costs $140 in commissions to place a buy or sell order for stocks plus an extra commission for odd lots, and the goal is to derive monthly income from a stock portfolio, obviously a dividend focus is rational. Even today, tools for deriving automatic monthly income from a stock portfolio are surprisingly hard to find--Vanguard actually terminated one of then, their "managed payout" fund. There are choices, but none great, and an old-fashioned "equity-income" or "growth & income" fund is, as a practical matter, one perfectly rational way to meet a particular need. The argument from AUM has some degree ...

...NaN should never render onscreen, though; non-programmers won't understand it. As a similar example, I drive a hybrid car, which displays trip MPG. When I start the car, using only electricity, I have traveled 0 miles and used 0 gallons of gas, so my MPG is 0/0. The trip MPG is displayed as zero, not NaN. (And if I then move my car slowly, it has now gone some distance but still hasn't used any gas. My MPG becomes infinite, but the display maxes out at 199.9.)... Absolutely true story: I remember arguing in elementary school about the batting average of a player who has never been at bat. Should it be 0.000 because they have never gotten a hit, or 1.000 because they have never failed to get one? According to the dividend discount theory...

grabiner wrote: ↑Sun Mar 19, 2023 8:21 pmAnd I also have a NaN error. I get a message that I might benefit by holding some percentage of my bonds in foreign bonds. The percentage that is currently in bonds is actually 0/0.

Did you see the percentage actually rendered onscreen as "NaN?" If so, that rules out the theory that the spurious "0%" values are really NaNs.