All of you are familiar with 12b-1 fees (being clients of mine). Last month, we sent an email to Kiplinger’s editor and the author of their article on how great American Funds are.  Our email complained that American Funds was essentially shifting $2.7-2.8B/yr from the investing public to the brokerage industry via their 12b-1 fees.
It could [...]

We have always maintained larger non-US positions in client portfolios than most asset managers. Clients have benefitted as a result of the slide in the value of the US Dollar. Recently, the dollar made a small gain in value against it’s major trading partners. We do not anticipate a continued rally in the US dollar [...]

Sales of new homes have plunged nearly 60% from their 2005 levels, and are stabilizing. Sales of existing homes stabilized last fall. From comparison to previous housing cycles, we should be at the bottom, but we may be bounce along the bottom for a while. Previous cycles have housing peaking at 5.5% of GDP, then [...]

The US auto manufacturers are playing the “me-too” card with Washington. They are expecting to be bailed out just as banks and brokerages have over the past year. Fair logic. A bad idea though.
                        
It is no secret that American auto manufacturers have been losing market share for decades. It may also not come as news [...]

Last month’s issue contained an article on Fannie & Freddie. Well, their stock continues to get pummeled – down 22-24% on Aug 18th alone.  This brings their past 12 month stock performance to a loss approaching 95%. There are now reports that existing share-holders will be wiped out as the odds are increasing that Fannie [...]

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Recently you were sent an email about Merrill “being in danger of failure”. The non-remote  chance of this is pummeling Merrill’s stock, which in-turn hurts the company since they have to pay penalty payments to their new shareholders (that helped bail the company out in the spring of [...]

We began writing this article a week prior to the conflict between Russia & Georgia. Our view of Russia has obviously not improved… In general, mutual funds with large Russian exposure have done very well over the past 10 years. This is in no small part to the rise in Russian GDP from their wealth in petroleum [...]

We read an interesting article in this month’s Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine about the investment giant – American Funds.
 
disclosure note: of the 25+ ETFs & mutual funds we have used, one is from American Funds: Growth Fund of America (AGTHX.lw). The lw stands for load waived (no commission). It falls in asset class: US Large Cap Growth. Unfortunately, it [...]