http://www.indextown.com Personal finance and investing in mutual funds and ETFs Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:24:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My portfolio gained 1.82% in May 2008, bringing the year-to-date (YTD) return to 2.52%. This is one of the lowest May YTD return in recent years. The YTD return of the benchmark, a 50:50 split between the Vanguard LifeStrategy Moderate Growth fund and the Vanguard LifeStrategy Gowth fund, is still ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/06/15/portfolio-return-for-may-2008/ Tfb's recent post "A Business That Punishes Its Largest Customers" prompted me to write this post to relate my experience with a magazine subscription. I have been a subscriber of PC World for a few years. It came up for renewal last month but I didn't renew it immediately because I ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/05/08/a-business-that-penalizes-its-loyal-customers/ Over the weekend, I spent some time to upgrade the hard disk drive in my notebook computer to one with a larger capacity. This hard disk is the system disk, containing the Windows XP operating system installation. In previous upgrades that involved the system disk, I would do a complete ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/05/07/cloned-my-hard-disk-drive/ After five months of negative or zero returns, the equity markets rebounded in April. My portfolio of 70% equity / 30% fixed income gained 4.61%, ahead of the target benchmark's 4.01%. With this gain, the portfolio is up 0.69% year-to-date. (The target benchmark is a 50:50 split between the Vanguard ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/05/06/portfolio-return-for-april-2008/ I just added the "My Portfolio Asset Allocation" page. This can be accessed directly from the link listed on the rightmost column, under the "Author", "Pages" heading. The intention for this page is for it to be a good introduction to my portfolio. It will also link to my monthly and ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/04/25/my-portfolio-asset-allocation-page-added/ Background Many investors are aware that when they sell a mutual fund or stock with a gain, they have to pay capital gains taxes for it. On the other hand, if they sell with a loss, they can claim a tax loss on it, as long as the transaction does not ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/04/22/specific-share-identification-mutual-fund-redemption-at-vanguard/ For various reasons already discussed (Should I convert...? and Is it worthwhile to pay the ETF conversion fee?), I recently converted my Vanguard Emerging Markets Index mutual fund holding (VEIEX) to the ETF class of the fund (VWO). The following is a review of the conversion process. Prior to conversion My VEIEX ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/04/18/review-of-veiex-to-vwo-etf-conversion-at-vbs/ With the new CPI index numbers released today, Ed from the Bogleheads forum has computed that the new composite rate for I Bonds purchased between now and April 30 is 6.06%. The current composite rate is 4.28%. As Mel noted, this is huge compared to 2.5% Prime MM 4.2% ST Bond 4.25% Total ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/04/16/i-bond-composite-rate-estimated-at-606/ I just completed the site upgrade to Wordpress 2.5. I thought it was a good time to get updated with the latest features and security fixes. The last site upgrade was to Wordpress 2.1, and it was done more than a year ago. I am pleased that the upgrade does not ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/04/15/site-upgraded-to-wordpress-25/ I transferred out from my Sogoinvest account, or Sogotrade as it is known now, last year. I was full of hope when I opened the account in 2006 but it didn't turn out as well as I had wished. You can see some of the problems which I highlighted ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/04/15/my-last-words-on-sogoinvest/ Based on my previous post on whether to convert my VEIEX (Vanguard Emerging Market Index Fund) holding to VWO (ETF class), I thought it would be a good exercise for me to try to build a simple calculator to compute the breakeven investment amount for investors who need to pay ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/04/12/is-it-worthwhile-to-pay-the-etf-conversion-fee/ Vanguard has been offering ETF classes of several of their conventional mutual shares for some time now. One of the most interesting feature, which is unique to Vanguard as far as I know, is the ability for an investor to convert shares in the mutual fund to ETF shares for ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/04/12/should-i-convert-veiex-to-vwo-etf/ My portfolio posted a negative 0.2% for the the month of March. This is pretty much in line with the target benchmark return of -0.39%, which is a 50:50 split between the Vanguard LifeStrategy Moderate Growth fund and the Vanguard LifeStrategy Gowth fund. There were a few dividend distributions in March ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/04/09/portfolio-return-for-march-2008/ After the abnormal behavior of muni funds near the end of Feb 2008, I had reservations about the recommendation of using muni funds as the safety anchor of a portfolio. It appears that because muni bonds are relatively illiquid, their prices (NAV) could be quite volatile, as evidenced by the ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/03/26/munis-as-safety-anchor-in-portfolio/ There are two rather enlightening posts on the Bogleheads forum today. Both dealt with the risk of holding individual stocks but from different angles: one from the employee viewpoint, the other from the "mad" or "fun" money viewpoint. (1) The danger of holding company stock - by Taylor Larimore Last year investment ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/03/17/the-risk-of-individual-stocks/ Despite the generally bad showing in the equity markets in February 2008, my portfolio managed to eke out a small positive gain of 0.17%. As we can see from the figure below, it was held up mostly by my allocation to precious metal and mining equity (up 12%) and emerging markets ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/03/14/portfolio-return-for-february-2008/ In an earlier post, I noted that Russell's Institutional Money Market Fund (RMMXX) is available as a NTF under WellsTrade's free trade program. Today, DaveTH posted an alert on the Boglehead's forum: Wells Fargo seems to have a real problem with paying decent returns on idle cash. Last July they switched from ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/02/28/rmmxx-no-longer-ntf-at-wellstrade/ Just two weeks ago, I noted that taxable MMFs have better after-tax yields than the tax-exempt versions, even for investors in the highest tax brackets. Today, a post on the Bogleheads forum seems to indicate that this yield anomaly is over. The yield of the Vanguard CA tax-exempt MMF (VCTXX) has ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/02/27/update-on-tax-exempt-mmf-yields/ I have a 5% allocation to the healthcare sector. This is currently divided into 2 ETFs: IHI (iShares DJ Healthcare Devices) and IHF (iShares DJ Healthcare Providers). Shares of IHF have fallen quite a bit since the beginning of the year. Last month, I noticed that part of it could be ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/02/26/completed-tax-loss-harvesting/ I have been looking at some houses recently. In my area (San Francisco bay area), houses are sitting longer in the market. I noticed that several houses, upon reaching 60 ~ 70 days in the market were re-listed. The ironic thing is that some listing agents would add "Hot listing! ... http://www.indextown.com/archives/2008/02/21/re-listing-houses/