Good news: The US stock indexes are at, or quite near, all-time highs!
Bad news: The US stock indexes are at, or quite near, all-time highs.
Good news: the 3rd quarter of 2018 had the highest returns over any quarter in over five years!
Bad news: the 3rd quarter of 2018 had the highest returns over any quarter in over five years.
Good news: the advance in Continue reading
Before funds can be offered to the public, they’ve got to be submitted to the SEC which has 70 days to review the application. That means that funds hopeful of launching by December 30th need to be filed by October 15th. This month’s 15 new funds, including offerings from both DoubleLine and T. Rowe Price, represent the first part of that year-end wave. Continue reading
The imminence of Halloween reveals itself in the deadened thud as the walking dead move toward the graveyard. Summer saw a curious lull in fund liquidations and manager changes both, but the end of summer is ending that reprieve. Our mid-September and October issues recount 70 obituaries, the vast majority of which were announced in the past 30 days. A precious few were high-performing funds that couldn’t attract attention. There seems to be a pattern in the remainder: lots of funds designed to Continue reading
Dear friends,
Welcome to the mid-September issue of Mutual Fund Observer. And thanks for your patience in waiting for it. It has been a rare summer.
In some ways, this summer ended much as last summer did. Our September 2017 issue started with news of Continue reading
Investors are forever willing to panic themselves at the prospect that their managers have taken Stupid Pillstm. The presumed signs of ingestion: any period of relative underperformance, pretty much without regard to absolute performance, the brevity of the period, its cause or the appropriateness of the peer group.
The automatic urge: running away, either to cash or to an investment with eye-catching recent returns.
Which is, by Continue reading
The imminence of Halloween reveals itself in the deadened thud as the walking dead move toward the graveyard. Summer saw a curious lull in fund liquidations and manager changes both, but the end of summer is ending that reprieve. We’ve tracked 33 obituaries for this issue. A few were high-performing funds that couldn’t attract attention. There seems to be a pattern in the remainder: lots of funds designed to hedge against market volatility, lots of funds designed to hedge against rising prices and a few more funds with exposure to emerging markets. A fusty old curmudgeon might note that liquidations in a category peak at the moment of maximum Continue reading
Dear friends,
Thanks for your patience. The end of July and beginning of August brought a bunch of challenges.
This month’s issue has a lot of interesting content; just not quite so much as we’d planned. With luck, we’ll shift the vast bulk of it to September.
MFO Premium offers a ridiculous wealth of information for a Continue reading
On May 30, 2018, AMG launched AMG TimesSquare Global Small Cap (TSYNX / TSYIX), the fifth AMG fund sub-advised by TimesSquare Capital Management. TimesSquare is a growth-equity firm that works primarily with institutional clients. They manage about $18 billion in assets.
The fund is managed by Continue reading
We’ve got Coke Zero. We’ve got Pepsi Zero. I guess it’s reasonable to wonder, why not Fidelity Zero?
Wait, we don’t have Coke Zero or Pepsi Zero. They both failed in the marketplace and had to be reformulated, renamed and relaunched.
But we do have Fido Zero.
On August 3, 2018, Fidelity launched two zero/zero index funds sporting zero Continue reading
It’s sensible to think, in advance, about the best responses to a market that is expensive, increasingly volatile and beset by external shocks, from tariffs to rising interest rates and policy instability.
An unauthored piece in ETF Trends recently weighed in with this advice: look at buying inverse or levered inverse ETFs.
With the heightened Continue reading