The Sun's Financial Diary

Back in last October, Morningstar started to offer a new gauge to measure how average investors fared over a certain period of time when investing in open-end mutual funds or ETFs. The new gauge is called Investor Return, also known as dollar-weighted return, which takes into account the total cash inflows and outflows. Before, Morningstar [...]

According to Morningstar.com, small-cap specialist Wasatch is to opened several closed funds on January 31st, 2007. If you are looking to add small-cap funds to your portfolio, this may be a chance. However, there are restrictions. Wasatch Fund website says the following three funds will be available to existing investors:

Wasatch Small Cap Value Fund (WAAEX) [...]

In the past couple of days, I did some further study on VFINX after I took a look at the market value and shares owned at the beginning of 2007 if I started investment in January 1988 with four different investment schemes (here’s the previous post). In this study, I use VFINX as a dollar-cost [...]

If you are mutual fund investors that focus on value investment, chances are you have heard about Dodge & Cox Funds even if you may not own them. Unlike mutual fund powerhouses such as Vanguard and Fidelity which each offers a full line of funds, Dodge & Cox only operates four funds, Stock Fund (DODGX), [...]

First of all, I am a believer of dollar-cost-averaging (DCA) and have been taking this approach ($100 every month) ever since I started investing in mutual funds. The reasons I do DCA are, 1) conventional wisdom tells me that by spreading the investments throughout the year, I don’t have to guess when is the right [...]

Here's a complete list of my mutual fund year-end distributions:

Symbol
Date
Dividend
Short-termcapital gain
Long-termcapital gain
Total

CSVFX
09/20/06
$0.12
$0.13
$2.51
$2.76

OAKBX
12/14/06
$0.5013
$0
$1.3081
$1.8094

TGLDX
12/15/06
$0.217
$1.122
$3.93
$5.269

PRSVX
12/18/06
$0.27
$0.25
$1.16
$1.68

PRNEX
12/18/06
$0.57
$0.34
$1.21
$2.12

TREMX
12/18/06
$0.42
$0
$1.06
$1.46

TAREX
12/20/06
$0.893
$0.062
$2.568
$3.523

DODGX
12/28/06
$0.54
$0.247
$6.405
$7.192

DODFX
12/28/06
$0.565
$0.144
$0.349
$1.18

CGMFX
12/28/06
$0.81
$0
$2.92
$3.73

Most of the funds I own distribute annually (except DODGX which distributes every quarter), with more payouts in the forms of dividend and long-term capital gain rather than short-term capital gain. The benefit of dividend and long-term gain is that they have [...]

Legg Mason's Bill Miller, the manager of Legg Mason Value Trust (LMVTX), has beaten S&P 500 for 15 consecutive years since 1991. His winning streak, however, is about to come to an end as LMVTX returns only 6.71% as of yesterday compared to the 16.5% gain of S&P 500. According to a Bloomberg.com article, the [...]

Early this month, I posted an entry on my mutual fund portfolio. I also mentioned in the post that all the mutual funds I have in the taxable account are actively managed funds.  A reader asked me the question why I chose actively managed funds instead of index funds which, by common sense, have low [...]

As we entered the final weeks of 2006, mutual fund companies start to make year-end distributions. Yesterday, another fund in my mutual fund portfolio, Oakmark Equity and Income Fund (OAKBX), paid out annual dividend and capital gain. So far, two of my mutual funds distributed dividend and capital gain (CSVFX distributed on September 20th):

Symbol
Date
Dividend
Short-term
capital gain
Long-term
capital [...]

Yesterday, when I was visiting InvestorTrip, I was asked what mutual funds I hold. Actually, my mutual fund portfolio currently has 12 holdings, all of them are actively managed funds. The reason I don’t have any index funds in my taxable account is that when I started investing in mutual funds, I didn’t really expect [...]