Comments on: 2006 Year-End Review II: Performance

By: The Sun

The Sun — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 03:38:45 +0000

All my mutual fund accounts are with the fund company that offers the fund. I used to use mutual fund supermarket like Scottrade before the start to charge fees. The benefit of using fund company directly is that there’s no extra fees. The drawback of course is you have to manage many accounts separately if you have a lot of funds. There are still places like Firstrade that offers no-fee mutual fund investment, but there’s no guarantee how long that’s gonna last. I will go with the fund company directly to avoid future hassles.

For IRA, I use Scottrade before and only recently moved four out of five funds to Vanguard as they are Vanguard funds. For Scottrade, since I use their automatic investment plan, the transaction fee reduces to $2 per mutual fund purchase, otherwise the fee is $17 for real time purchase. To minimize cost I contribute every quarter instead of every month.

By: Ming

Ming — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 07:07:15 +0000

Where do you open your account for you mutual fund and IRA? Do you open the dedicated at each mutual fund company or just use a brokerage account to hold all those mutual fund?

By: The Sun

The Sun — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 05:15:41 +0000

LFC is indeed extraordinary for the past year, making me feel like a bubble. I read your post about China stocks and like your choice of CHL. Emerging markets like China and India present lot of opportunities, maybe too many opportunities to make good picks. Did you look at China ETFs? They may not have the huge gains as individual stocks, but the risk is relative lower as well. Commodity prices are driven by growth in China and India, but I am not sure how far the prices can go since they are already pretty high.

Yes, I know I have too many funds in the taxable and 401(k) accounts. I plan to do some clean up to reduce the overlaps as some of the funds (such as CGMFX and CSVFX) drifted aways from their original style boxes.

By: TJP

TJP — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 07:01:38 +0000

LFC was a great pick for 2006, plus you’ll benefit from the upcoming stock split. I plan to add a few Chinese stocks to my portfolio for 2006 as well.

I also fully agree with your IRA portfolio. Recently I’ve been searching for a new mutual fund, but maybe I’ll try an index fund. They trade just like mutual funds, and are a lot cheaper over the long run.

Which index funds are you going to add to in 2007?

I think the commodities will slightly rebound, and emerging markets will continue their rapid growth. Places like China, Brazil, Russia, and India are probably a good start.

You have a lot of holdings spread out over those 4 accounts. If you trimmed down your holdings a bit, it would make your life a lot easier. Plus you’ll get better gains. I’m sure you can combine a lot of those funds and stock you hold into one long-term investment.

Great Job for 2006. Here’s to big gains in 07!