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Avo

Thank you!

Avo

My father-in-law Abe recently passed. His assets, including various mutual funds, were in a living trust, with Abe as grantor and his daughter Becky as trustee. Becky wants to sell the mutual funds now, and deposit the cash into a bank account in the name of the trust, for later distribution to Abe'...

Avo

Nope, but his web site has some statements I would regard as giant red flags: "At McClure Capital, we hold informational seminars and insurance sales presentations for our clients and the greater community that feature information on various retirement topics." "Guarantees provided by...

Avo

GridironGems wrote: ↑Mon Aug 14, 2017 9:52 pmI work for the state and their plan is terrible, so not interested 4% rate of return is what I get

By "rate of return", do you mean the state matches your contributions up to 4% of salary?

If so, that is likely still worth participating in, even if the plan is not the best.

Avo

beardsworth wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2017 8:47 amTreasury Direct itself does not issue any direct account communications to the customer (no purchase or redemption confirmations, no periodic statements, no year–end tax forms)

I receive an email from them whenever one of my EE bonds matures.

Avo

Would this strategy give income of 4% + in dividends to cover the RMD (which my dad will give to his 4 kids) Probably not. But most here think that it is a mistake to try to earn enough in dividends to cover RMDs, rather than be willing to have a higher-growth portfolio in which capital gains may a...

Avo

Yes, if you have gains (you might have a loss).

Avo

Welcome to the forum!

Please write out the names of the funds, few here bother to memorize ticker symbols.

89% equities is very aggressive. If they go down in value 50% tomorrow, what do you think you will do?

Avo

Those who buy and hold do not influence the share price after the purchase. Consider: there are 100 shares (total) of a particular stock. You own 99 and plan to hold. I own one. I bought it for $100, and that was the last price. So your shares are worth $100 each. I now decide to sell, and put out a...

Avo

I was assuming deployment of cash across the entire portfolio equally, rather than putting it all in bonds.

But thinking of the cash as replacing a short-term bond position is probably more reasonable. And now that cash interest rates are up from zero, the drag is considerably less.

Avo

Schwab Intelligent Portfolios Schwab's doesn't charge for their robo-advisor service. Fees for funds average about 17 basis points. They also unlike most robo-advisors have a pronounced value tilt. They give this sample portfolio of a 2/3rds stock 1/3rd bond http://i64.tinypic.com/s4mk4w.png I'm tr...

Avo

I bought a pair of Etymotic ER4S when they first came out in 1993 and used them for many years. Clarity and noise isolation is excellent, but they have an emphasis in the highs that I never liked. See these comments on them by famed speaker designer Sigfried Linkwitz: http://www.linkwitzlab.com/refe...

Avo

Having had to take over for someone who became unable to manage their affairs, I found the living trust they set up to be a God send. The assets that were not in the trust became a nightmare since no company, NOT A SINGLE ONE, would accept a perfectly valid durable power of attorney. Assets that we...

Avo

You sure write a lot.

M* chose that 60/40 stock/bond index for MDLOX, not me.

It matches the current allocation of MDLOX, which is 39.96% bonds and cash, 60.04% stock and "other" (according to M*).

Avo

Fee wars are bad for Vanguard. They are already heavily reliant on indexed products. Their rivals makes tons of money on active management. Already we hear many complaints about Vanguard customer service compared to rivals. Fee wars won't help this situation.

Avo

I don't know how you can say you weren't disputing MPT, " MPT is 65 years old. Where are the mutual funds that have out-performed by running an MPT strategy for the past, say, 20 years? " Either you believe MPT is false or obviously mutual funds using MPT have out-performed. My claim is t...

Avo

I always skip to the end of these sorts of articles to see if there is anything I can do to take advantage of the insights in my own investments. The (vague) answer is: buy an AQR multistyle fund.

Avo

Can you file amended returns to change to joint filing? There is a 3-year deadline to claim a refund with an amended return, but I'm not sure if this applies if you owe additional tax. Your accountant needs to fix this at no cost to you. Roth requirements is basic stuff. Because she changed back to ...

Avo

Ethelred wrote:Almost all of the under-performance between Betterment and SIP plus the two tilted portfolios happens in the period 2000 to 2006. What is driving that?

More MCV and SCV, and a big does of Health Care.

Avo

I would like to see the results with a "classic" bogleheads tilt: equal parts TSM, SCV, Total Int'l, and Int'l Small for equities (which is implementable with Vanguard index funds/ETS) and TBM for bonds.

Avo

over the last 29 years (the life of the Blackrock fund) Way too long. The fund outperformed spectacularly early on, with low assets. Over the past ten years, though, it significantly trails the plain-vanilla M* 60/40 global index, CAGR 4.8% for MDLOX vs 5.7% for the index. This is a common phenomen...

Avo

I believe Vanguard will take them "in kind", and allow you to sell them (partially or completely, with a fee for each sale, as mentioned), but not to buy them or add to them.

Avo

As of today, MDLOX (Blackrock Global Allocation, A Shares) has slightly underperformed VSMGX (Vanguard LIfe Strategy Moderate Growth, a classic 60/40 split, currently 40% intl stocks) over the past 10 years, and that's before the 5.25% load on MDLOX. Volatility looks a little higher on the Vanguard ...

Avo

jbolden1517 wrote:That being said if you believe in MPT (which has a lot of evidence) the Vanguard portfolio underperforms most of these robos by way more than 35 basis points.

MPT is 65 years old. Where are the mutual funds that have out-performed by running an MPT strategy for the past, say, 20 years?

Avo

Depends on the fees of the advisor, and what "so-so" means in practice. If Ed's advisor is Vanguard, and guides Ed into tax-efficient asset location, and after a few years Ed figures out he can do all this himself (because it's really not that hard to implement a Vanguard portfolio yoursel...

Avo

knpstr wrote:The academic theory is incorrect.

When do you go to Stockholm?

Avo

Welcome to the forum! No matter what is happening with the market, the best time to stop paying high fees is always now . The only question is whether it would be cheaper to sell at Wells Fargo, or transfer "in kind" and sell at Vanguard. You would need to ask both WF and Vanguard for the ...

Avo

Looks very different on a log plot. It did do a bit better than the S&P coming off the bottom in 2009, but since 1/1/2010 it's been essentially the same as VFINX; look at a plot on M*.

Avo

Oakmark select beat the SP500 for 19 years by an average of 4.6% Oakmark Equity income beat the SP500 total return index by 1.2% Oakmark Global beat MSCI world by 5.6% Oakmark Global Select beat MSCI world by 3.2% Oakmark International beat MSCI ex-USA by 3.8% Oakmark Small international beat MSCI ...

Avo

peigner wrote:I trust that he has fully vetted the advisers that I would be working with

Have you asked him about this?

Avo

If you have enough to establish your own foundation, then you have high ability and also (according to what you write) high willingness to take risk, coupled with a low need to take risk. So, basically, you can have any AA you want, and it will be fine.

Avo

Yes, just sell. Here's one way to think about it: suppose you had been given this fund as a gift (or inheritance, or lottery winning). You would just sell it, right? In that case there would be no worries about "getting back to even". But your actual situation is the same: you own it now, ...

Avo

My current thought process is to liquidate the current holdings at WF, move the cash to Vanguard, and buy their funds - but that brings even more questions. Will there be a tax liability? What fund(s) do I put the $ for each account into? And so on. There may be a tax liability in the brokerage acc...

Avo

Yeah, well I didn't need to read 23 pages of blather from Howard Marks to figure that out.

Avo

Sorry, but I don't understand that either.

To be concrete, let's say I'm running a pension fund that's supposed to last forever, and my default allocation is 60/40 TSM/TBM. What should I do in light of "common sense"?

Avo

We're big fans of the passive buy & hold strategy for retirement and definitely want to reduce our long-term costs as much as possible. Well then of course people here are going to recommend that you switch to Vanguard. There is no reason to believe that a WF sales rep is going to do better, af...

Avo

The tax qualified accts have spouses as primary and the contingent is the trustee (Fidelity upon our death or incapacity) who is directed to stretch the accts. for the kids. Of course once we are incapacitated or deceased there is a fee for trustee services which may include some of the investing m...

Avo

Tilting to SCV is based on the belief that, over time, SCV stocks will do better than TSM (total market). The reason for this may be (1) SCV has higher risk that TSM, or (2) it is a behavioral anomaly. Whatever the explanation is, there is no guarantee that the long-term higher return of SCV will pe...

Avo

What is the cash value of the policy? I don't see how it can be zero at this point.

Whatever it is, taking it would seem to be the best option. I doubt very much that a lawsuit would succeed, or be cost effective even if successful.

Avo

Alex GR wrote:May I ask a really silly question? How is that a risk? When I hold that fund don't I own the underlying stocks that are in the fund?

Yes. The risk, as stated in the OP, is that you might have to pay unexpected capital-gains taxes if your liquidated shares are worth more than you paid for them.

Avo

Great article To me it seems like financial porn whose only goal is to convince you that (1) you don't know enough to do this yourself, and so (2) you'd better give your money to us. Here's an excerpt from near the end (emphasis in original): Where are we today? As I said earlier, risk is high and ...

Avo

Well they're basically the same, so it's only a matter of which details matter to you. VSMGX holds international bonds as well as domestic. The case for international bonds has been much debated, here & elsewhere. It likely makes very little difference either way. VSMGX has 40% of equities in in...

Avo

This ten year view shows Cresent favorable to moderate allocation benchmarks and slightly better than vanguard balanced but close nonetheless. http://www.morningstar.com/funds/XNAS/FPACX/quote.html http://www.morningstar.com/funds/XNAS/VBIAX/quote.html Obviously these comparisons change year to yea...

Avo

Of course the best fund managers add value (alpha). The problem is that they usually don't do it consistently, and you never know when they're going to stop, and it's hard to know who was actually good and who was just lucky. Wellington, Contrafund, and Low-Priced Stock have well rewarded their long...

Avo

I am not a paid member, but like your friend I sometimes get it for free and I sometimes don't. I fly multiple airlines, a few times per year. I have not detected the pattern, if there is one to detect. My last flight I did not get it.

Avo

eager to learn wrote:say you had a small amount of money to invest (maybe to teach your kids about how to evaluate a company’s finances not just for investing but in recruiting the right execs for a business, a company’s or a NPO board)

How old are these kids??

Avo

I believe they track different indices, which might have different small-cap cutoffs. Or they might use different sampling methods to replicate the index. Performance has been very close to identical; compare them on M* charts.

Avo

Mtangler25 wrote:What about SWTSX? is that a suitable choice?

Yes! Very low 0.03% expense ratio, tracks the entire US market.

Avo

We prefer total-market funds over an S&P500 fund. :oops: ...don't say we don't recommend s&p 500 funds I didn't say that. I said that we prefer total market funds. And we do! E.g., from the wiki: "the funds that are best for a three-fund portfolio are: Vanguard Total Stock Market Index...

Avo

We don't recommend holding single stocks. We don't recommend sector funds. We prefer total-market funds over an S&P500 fund. We don't recommend market timing.

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