Originally Posted by krotoole
.... He did have creative and interesting investment options that I would never have thought of or even known about.....
Care to share what they were? (unless they are unique to you)
Sure. I'm basically an index investor. He gave me three interesting fund ideas that I'm using to round out my portfolio:
JSVAX Janus Contrarian; 0.76% Exp Ratio
Fund has an R^2 of 79, so the managers are actually doing something rather than just moving in lock stop with the indices. Strongly outperformed the indices over a 10 year period.
HIINX Harbor Intl Fund; 1.11% Exp Ratio (High range of my tolerance)
Good Upside & Downside capture ratios and strong outperformance of indices over a 10 year period
LIGSZ Loomis Investment Grade Bond Fund; 0.83% Exp Ratio
4.2% yield; 4.3 Duration. Compared to a total market bond index which is yielding about 2.3% on a 5.0 Duration. More yield, less rate exposure. OK Expense ratio. High Quality instruments.
The other thing he introduced me to are personally managed portfolios. For example, if you can commit a wad of cash ($100K - $250K), they've struck a deal where PIMCO will build a bond ladder for you in your own account leveraging their volume buying for their funds to get you better bond prices. You get the scale benefits of a mutual fund (buying power, research) but the buy-and-hold-to-maturity control of individual bonds in your own account. Since they are individual bonds, however, you do retain the ability to just sell them if you need the liquidity. And he claims they'll do this for 0.3% mgmt fee.
I didn't do the PIMCO thing b/c I'm not ready to commit that big of a chunk to a bond ladder but it seems darn appealing. Pretty cheap, properly managed and you can isolate yourself from herd and ride the bonds to the maturity if a bunch of selling pressure appears in the market.
Very intriguing...but in fairness I didn't take it far enough to read the fine print... so who knows what traps lurk below the surface...
Hope that's helpful.
