Fidelity Mutual Funds Quotes

One of the problems with a 529 plan is that you must give up an element of control. The best 529 plans available, and my second choice to an ESA, is a “flexible” plan. This type of plan allows you to move your investment around periodically within a certain family of funds. A family of funds is a brand name of mutual fund. You could pick from virtually any mutual fund in the American Funds Group or Vanguard or Fidelity. You are stuck in one brand, but you can choose the type of fund, the amount in each, and move it around if you want. This is the only type of 529 I recommend.

What does this mean in practical terms? Let’s keep things simple, ignore private equity and commercial real estate, and focus just on the broad stock and bond market. You might buy three funds: an index fund offering exposure to the entire U.S. stock market, an index fund that will give you exposure to both developed foreign stock markets and emerging stock markets, and an index fund that owns the broad U.S. bond market. Suppose we were aiming to build a classic balanced portfolio, with 60 percent in stocks and 40 percent in bonds. Here are some possible investment mixes using index funds offered by major financial firms:     40 percent Fidelity Spartan Total Market Index Fund, 20 percent Fidelity Spartan Global ex U.S. Index Fund and 40 percent Fidelity Spartan U.S. Bond Index Fund. You can purchase these mutual funds directly from Fidelity Investments (Fidelity.com).     40 percent Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, 20 percent Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Index Fund and 40 percent Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund. You can buy these mutual funds directly from Vanguard Group (Vanguard.com).     40 percent Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF, 20 percent Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US ETF and 40 percent Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF. You can purchase these ETFs, or exchange-traded funds, through a discount or full-service brokerage firm. You can learn more about each of the funds at Vanguard.com.     40 percent iShares Core S&P Total U.S. Stock Market ETF, 20 percent iShares Core MSCI Total International Stock ETF and 40 percent iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF. You can buy these ETFs through a brokerage account and find fund details at iShares.com.     40 percent SPDR Russell 3000 ETF, 20 percent SPDR MSCI ACWI ex-US ETF and 40 percent SPDR Barclays Aggregate Bond ETF. You can invest in these ETFs through a brokerage account and learn more at SPDRs.com.     40 percent Schwab Total Stock Market Index Fund, 20 percent Schwab International Index Fund and 40 percent Schwab Total Bond Market Fund. You can buy these mutual funds directly from Charles Schwab (Schwab.com). The good news: Schwab’s funds have a minimum initial investment of just $100. The bad news: Unlike the other foreign stock funds listed here, Schwab’s international index fund focuses solely on developed foreign markets. Those who want exposure to emerging markets might take a fifth of the money allocated to the international fund—equal to 4 percent of the entire portfolio—and invest it in an emerging markets stock index fund. One option: Schwab has an ETF that focuses on emerging markets.

Discount brokerage accounts are low-cost online accounts offered by firms like E*TRADE, Charles Schwab, and Fidelity. These accounts allow do-it-yourself investors to purchase a large variety of common stocks, mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs),

It’s expensive to trade small lots of convertible bonds, and diversification is impractical unless you have well over $100,000 to invest in this sector alone. Fortunately, today’s intelligent investor has the convenient recourse of buying a low-cost convertible bond fund. Fidelity and Vanguard offer mutual funds with annual expenses comfortably under 1%, while several closed-end funds are also available at a reasonable cost (and, occasionally, at discounts to net asset value).4

The Queen and I attended many of the sales calls in person, to explain these complexities. I traveled to Boston to meet with some of the top U.S. fund managers, including the managers of two of the largest emerging markets mutual funds in the world, Rob Citrone, portfolio manager at Fidelity Investments, and Mark Siegel, vice president and head of emerging markets at Putnam Investment Management. Both of them, as well as dozens of other fund managers, gave BIDS a big thumbs down. The trade was too complicated, and the fees we were charging were too large. The BIDS deal ended a failure, although it probably would have been worse if Scarecrow had been involved throughout. On the one hand, we were only able to sell $21 million of BIDS in total, mostly because we couldn’t pique the interest of U.S. investors. On the other hand, we were able to charge such an enormous fee on the BIDS we actually sold that the group still grossed half a million dollars in profits.

Michael Lipper of the fund-tracking company Lipper Analytical Services said that the warnings applied to mutual funds, too; 475 of 1,728 stock, bond, and balanced funds had invested billions in derivatives, yet such holdings “magically seem to disappear” the day funds have to file statements with shareholders. Although mutual funds are forbidden by government regulation from using leverage to buy securities with borrowed money, the Investment Company Institute, a Washington-based mutual fund trade group, announced that mutual funds not only held derivatives worth $7.5 billion (2.13 percent of total assets), they owned $1.5 billion of the special derivatives called structured notes, of which PERLS was one type. For example, Fidelity Investment’s $10 billion Asset Manager fund had $800 million invested in structured notes in the last quarter of 1993, including leveraged bets on Finnish, Swedish, and British interest rates. One note, based on Canadian rates and leveraged thirteen times, had gained 33 percent the previous year; in the first four months of 1994, that same note plunged 25 percent. What was worse, the mutual fund trade groups didn’t even seem to know about the purchases of PLUS Notes.

One of Musk’s chief assumptions had been that large shareholders would stick with Tesla, even as a private company. It was a naive belief. He learned that mutual funds, due to regulatory requirements, would be forced to trim their stake. His plan had assumed two-thirds of shareholders would follow him; if the likes of Fidelity and T. Rowe, which owned a combined 20 million shares, couldn’t go along, they’d have to be bought out at $420 a share. Or

REITs. Real Estate Investment Trusts, or REITs (pronounced “reets”), are companies that own and collect rent from commercial and residential properties.10 Bundled into real-estate mutual funds, REITs do a decent job of combating inflation. The best choice is Vanguard REIT Index Fund; other relatively low-cost choices include Cohen & Steers Realty Shares, Columbia Real Estate Equity Fund, and Fidelity Real Estate Investment Fund.11 While a REIT fund is unlikely to be a foolproof inflation-fighter, in the long run it should give you some defense against the erosion of purchasing power without hampering your overall returns. TIPS. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, or TIPS, are U.S. government bonds, first issued in 1997, that automatically go up in value when inflation rises. Because the full faith and credit of the United States

Real Estate Investment Trusts, or REITs (pronounced “reets”), are companies that own and collect rent from commercial and residential properties.10 Bundled into real-estate mutual funds, REITs do a decent job of combating inflation. The best choice is Vanguard REIT Index Fund; other relatively low-cost choices include Cohen & Steers Realty Shares, Columbia Real Estate Equity Fund, and Fidelity Real Estate Investment Fund.11 While a REIT fund is unlikely to be a foolproof inflation-fighter, in the long run it should give you some defense against the erosion of purchasing power without hampering your overall returns.

Examples of real estate mutual funds include: • Fidelity Real Estate Investment Portfolio (FRESX), a managed fund (so expect a higher expense ratio) that selects REITs with high-quality properties (mainly commercial and industrial) • Cohen & Steers Realty Shares (CSRSX), a managed fund that holds a targeted portfolio of forty to sixty commercial REITs • Vanguard Real Estate Index Fund Admiral Shares (VGSLX), a low-cost index fund that tracks a key REIT benchmark index (called the MSCI US Investable Market Real Estate 25/50 Index) • Cohen & Steers Quality Income Realty Fund (RQI), a closed-end fund that holds a variety of high-income-producing commercial REITs and real estate–related stocks