Mutual fund
Investing in My SEP-IRA Account
Before the April 15th tax deadline, I opened and funded a SEP-IRA account with Fidelity. The reason I chose Fidelity is that it is also the custodian of my 401(k) and my daughter’s 529 account (I am using the Fidelity UNIQUE plan which is tied to the Fidelity 529 Rewards Card). In addition, I also [...]
Index Mutual Funds Are Still Not Popular, But
Are you investing in equity mutual funds? If so, are you using index funds or actively managed funds?
I have mentioned a few times in the past that even though I use all index funds in my retirement savings accounts, I have nothing but actively managed funds in taxable accounts. The reason isn’t that I don’t [...]
Target-Date Funds Aren’t That Safe
One of the main advantages of target-date funds, or lifecycle funds, is that the asset allocation of these funds is automatically adjusted as the target date approaches, going from aggressive (more stocks, less bonds) in the early stage to conservative (more bonds, less stocks). With target-date funds, investors leave the the job of adjusting and [...]
Treasury Extended Money Market Funds Guarantee
Last September, shortly after The Reserve Primary Fund broke the buck, the Treasury Department introduced a plan to provide temporary guarantee to money market mutual funds. The original plan was to use $50 billion from the Exchange Stabilization Fund to guarantee principal in money market mutual funds, which by design has the NAV of $1, [...]
Are Vanguard Mutual Funds Getting Expensive?
Early this year, I compared performance of actively managed funds in my portfolio against some Vanguard index funds. In addition to the fund returns in 2008, which are all quite different between the two group of funds (four out ten funds beat Vanguard while the other six lagged), another thing I noticed from the comparison [...]
Load up More Third Avenue Real Estate Value (TAREX)
One of the two funds in my mutual fund portfolio that I don’t buy regularly is Third Avenue Estate Value Fund (TAREX), though I have owned this fund for years (the other one is Tocqueville Gold (TGLDX), but I bought TGLDX more often). When I first bought TAREX, the initial minimum investment was something like [...]
Actively Managed Funds vs. Vanguard Index Funds Update
It has been more than a year since I last ran a comparison between my actively managed funds and low-cost Vanguard index funds. After the huge losses in stock markets last year, I am more interested in seeing how my funds have performed in 2008 and how they compared against Vanguard funds. To compare, I [...]
20 Largest Stock Funds 2008 Performance: Nowhere to Hide
If you are a stock/mutual fund investor, you probably already felt the pain of putting your money in the stock markets in 2008. I did when I saw the 22% year-over-year decline in our net worth, even with all the new contributions we made throughout the year.
As I mentioned in the past, all our mutual [...]
CGM Focus Fund: The Extreme Makeover
A couple of days ago when I reviewed our 2008 passive income, I mentioned that CGM Focus Fund (CGMFX), which used to generate a large amount of annual capital gain/dividend in the past, only brought in this year a fraction the dividend it brought in a year ago. And that’s not the only part that [...]
Fidelity to Reopen Contrafund and Low–Priced Stock Fund
Nowadays, you can buy lot of quality stocks such as GE (GE), Alcoa (AA), Microsoft (MSFT), or eBay (EBAY) at very low price after relentless selling on the Wall Street all year long, if you have the stomach for short term volatility. For these stocks, you will have to go back 10 or even 20 [...]
