Lazy Man and Money

ETFs vs. Mutual Funds – Who Ya Got?

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Happy Tuesday everyone. I was going to write this yesterday, but I woke to a text from my wife saying, “Call me. We need to talk about deployment to Puerto Rico.” In the past 4-6 weeks she has been back and forth between being deployed to Houston, Florida, and now Puerto Rico at least a dozen times. Ross and Rachel had fewer twists and turns.

I listened to all the reasons why this time is different, but I’ll just wait and see.

I hang up the phone and scroll through my alerts. Twitter sent me something about an active shooter. I expand that story and… well you know the rest by now.

Writing an article about ETFs and mutual funds didn’t feel right… not that anything did.

So, let’s try again, today, shall we?

A couple of weeks ago, one of my personal finance blogger friends, Revanche from A Gai Shan Life Tweeted out a pretty innocent question:

I answered with, “ETFs. Lots of commission-free index options with Schwab too.”

What I didn’t do is explain “Why?” Why not say “why?” Why, I don’t know why I didn’t say why. Confused? Good, me too!

I had mutual funds in the early 90s, but I moved onto ETFs as soon as they became broadly available. And I never looked back. I think the reason why I went with ETFs is that they have slightly lower expense ratios. However, I could also understand the tax treatment better. It was easy for me to know that selling shares for a long-term capital will be taxed at whatever that rate is. With mutual funds, I’d get tax bills which depended on what the fund manager decided to do that year.

Overall, I never considered the difference between the two to be that big of a deal. As long as you focus on the expenses of the index investment it shouldn’t matter whether it is an ETF or a mutual fund.

Back in those days, the lowest expense ratios belonged to Vanguard and no one else was even close. Times change. Fidelity became very competitive with expense ratios several years ago. I think Schwab became competitive with them soon after that.

Again, back in my day (Cue SNL’s Grumpy Old Man), you’d have to pay a brokerage commission to companies like Datek and E-Trade to buy or sell the ETF. They were usually around $10 for each trade. (And we loved it!)

Today’s kids have it made. Fidelity has 70 index ETFs that trade commission-free, most with those competitive expense ratios. Vanguard is also competitive. However, Schwab seems to edge them out with more commission-free options and expense ratios that are a drop below the others.

Another of my blogger friends, Joe from Joe Taxpayer, chimed in:

This is exactly what I had been thinking, but didn’t have the data to back it up while in my phone’s Twitter app. The Schwab US Broad Market index covers a lot more than the S&P 500 and with that .03% expense ratio. If you are investing a million dollars, are you really going to be concerned about $300 a year? There used to be time when people paid 1% or more to invest. That’s more than $10,000 a year to invest if you have a million dollars. If you are going to take $9700 of my money, you have give me a lot of value for it. That buys a lot of coke prostitutes Patriots tickets.

What’s particularly great about many of these options is that there aren’t any commissions to trade. That means that you can rebalance your portfolio without being burdened by trade costs. When I went with ETFs years ago, I was concerned about spending the commissions to cash them out. Silly me! With commission-free trading of a bunch of these ETFs you can make some significant asset allocation changes and still end up paying probably an average of .07% in expenses. It makes me wonder why anyone would want to invest a large sum of money any other way.

All three companies are close enough that it probably doesn’t matter too much. If you’ve got your money at any of those three it’s probably more work than it’s worth to move it. However, if you are looking to start fresh or move some money from some expensive option, I’d choose Schwab. (Note: Schwab isn’t paying me to write this. I’m not even putting an affiliate link for you to go sign up with them.)

Isn’t it amazing when competition actually works to make things better for consumers. Don’t you wish your cable and internet providers were the same way? (Sorry, I couldn’t resist the tangent. That’s a rant for another day.)

It’s your turn now. As Revanche wrote, “Mutual funds or ETFs, and why?” Let me know in the comments.

Thoughts on the Best Ways to Invest $1000

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Nearly a couple of years ago I asked the readers, what’s the best place to invest around $1000?.

Earlier this week, Jim Wang asked 24 experts and a wannabe (myself) about the best ways for newbie to invest $1000. I figured he’d get the same two answers from everyone:

1. Vanguard Mutual Funds or ETFs
2. or a Robo-Advisor

And of course those were the two things I mentioned. (I may have cheated by giving two ideas.)

In fact a number of people echoed those thoughts. Since I expected those two, I’ll give you some thoughts on the other ideas mentioned. Those ideas were largely thinking outside the box. Everyone has their opinion and that’s what makes us (and life) exciting. So here are my thoughts on a few of the suggestions (for what it’s worth):

  • Spend the money by Marginal Revolution – Simply because rates on investments are low right now. It’s an interesting thought as much of the year the markets have been flat and interest rates are very low.
  • Pay down debt by The White Coat Investor – Love this, but I’d say pay down bad debt. There’s a difference between Good Debt and Bad Debt
  • What’s your goal by Investor Junkie – This was probably the best of the non-standard advice I had read.
  • Invest in yourself by Nerd’s Eye View financial planning blog – I’ve never been a fan of Invest in Yourself, because there are a lot of investments that give you no return and suck up your time and energy. It’s really hard to know which are good investments… and if you did, you’d probably have already invested in them, right?
  • Invest in what you know by John Paul Engel – Not a huge fan of Peter Lynch’s buy what you know as I mentioned before. I knew that everyone would carry internet phones in their pockets back in 2004 and bought Palm stock. How do you think that worked out for me? I’ll cover another company that went similarly bad for me in a few days. There’s a big difference between the idea and the execution of the company. It can be almost impossible to know how a particular company is going to execute, right Enron investors?
  • Save it in an Emergency Fund by Cashville Skyline – I kind of thought this went without saying, but when you assume that, you can get in trouble. Good idea on Kate for saying it.
  • Depends on the person by Three Nine Financial – This is almost like me cheating and offering a couple different options. Yes it does indeed depend.
  • Don’t be emotional by Hylland Capital – Once again, this is a great suggestion and the kind of thing that I simply would have glossed over.

So what do you think? How would you invest $1000? Let me know in the comments below.

Invest in Russian ETFs Now?

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Last week, Twitter stock was up 25% after announcing some very impressive quarterly earnings. I had been buying Twitter since the start of May. Thanks to the awesome power of dollar cost averaging, I was about break-even on the day before the earnings announcement. I sold 40% of my shares covering almost 70% of my original investment, leaving me with 60% of the shares at 30% of the price.

In gambling terms this would be called “playing with the house money”, except that some of it is still my money.

This leaves me with a good problem… cash on the sidelines. I can’t convince myself that having cash doing nothing is a good thing. I try to rationalize it by saying, “Cash is king” and “The market valuations are simply too high right now.” While, I believe both of those things, I have a belief that there should be always a good way to use cash. In this case, the cash is in a retirement brokerage account, so my options are limited to the securities markets.

I’ve never been a big fan of bonds, they’ve never felt like a good fit for my aggressive investing style and relatively young age. So that typically leaves me looking for the best stock opportunity out there. One thing I should note, is that this is a small allocation of my overall portfolio that dedicate to active investing… the overwhelming majority of my money is in very broad-based ETFs. So with this money, I’m looking for a bargain. The approach has been worked for me, but of course I’m aided by a strong macro-economic environment.

Because of that strong macro-economic environment, I don’t see many stocks that I’d consider a bargain. I decided to use an ETF screener to see what has lost money in the past year. ETFs that were invested in Russian have been some of the biggest losers. I’m guilty of not always following current events, but it’s even obvious to me that there are a ton of political issues there.

It got me thinking, “Are things likely to get worse or better? Is Russia going away anytime soon?” Many countries have their ups and downs. Greece notably was in a terrible financial situation a couple of years ago. The GREK Greece ETF has performed really well over the last couple of years.

When I look at the Market Vector Russia ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:RSX), I see it as near its 5 year low. I think to myself, “This clearly is a downtime for the country. At some point, it seems reasonable that they will resolve the conflicts and the dark cloud that has followed them will go away.” If this is true, the economy should recover and I’ll be able to sell at a nice gain.

I talked with a friend who follows all the markets and she made a great point that some economic sanctions have just begun. It might take awhile for them to filter through and the results be seen. In fact, an article a couple of days ago pointed out that some of the Russian ETFs are looking to drop some of their holdings that might be largely affected by the sanctions.

In some ways it is really risky, but in other ways, a whole country’s ETF should carry a lot less volatility and risk than my previous Twitter investment. Let me know what you think in the comments.

SigFig – The Best Way to Track Your Investments

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With a title like that, combined with what I’m going to write in the review, you probably are thinking that this is a sponsored post or that Sigfig has paid me. They haven’t. They just blew me away with a great product/service.

What is Sigfig? They are like Mint for investments, but built for the serious investor. I know that Mint does investments, but it is very basic. SigFig gives you a lot more data and to analyze your total portfolio.

The easiest way to show you is to give you a little tour. For this I set up my retirement accounts, so this post does double-duty… you get a view into my retirement savings and investments as well. SigFig has four areas of focus, Analytics, News, Holdings, Recommendations. A fifth area, the default view, is an overview of the other areas.

SigFig Analytics View

Here’s what the Analytic’s View looks like (click for larger view):

Sigfig Analytics View
Sigfig Analytics View

As you can see on the left side, I have $148,713 in my retirement accounts and I made $367 today (woo hoo!). It then shows my brokerages: Fidelity (my SEP-IRA), TD Ameritrade (my Roth IRA), and USAA (my Rollover IRA from previous 401k plans). In the center, I get a total performance view where I can see that my investment decisions are under-performing compared with the S&P 500 (there are other benchmarks to compare to against if that’s your thing).

Below the performance, you can see my asset allocation. In my opinion, this is the single most valuable section of SigFig. A couple of things stand out here. One of them is the large cash holding. That’s a relatively recent development. I worry that the markets are going head down with the Dow Jones crossing 13,000 while the national debt is at astronomical levels. You may also note the foreign equities. I’m a big believer in diversifying beyond the United States. It is increasingly a global economy and if we fall on tough times in the United States, I’m going to want my investments elsewhere to help me through that. You’ll also note the commodities. I’ve written more than a few times that I’m hedging food and gas prices with ETFs.

I can’t tell you what the 7% Other category is. I wish SigFig would allow me to look inside it and see what investments make up the percentages.

It looks like my dividend yield is 2.0%. I’m not making investment choices based on dividends, so I’m not interested in this information. Others will find it helpful though.

The Geographical Allocation map doesn’t really look like much to me. However, when I click on the “Table” instead of “Map”, I get a much more helpful view. Specifically, I find that my allocations are:

United States59.05%
Europe20.68%
Japan6.38%
China, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore5.42%
Australia2.53%
Canada2.22%
South America1.79%
Africa0.65%
India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh0.57%
Russia0.40%
Middle East0.32%

Now, I know not only what I’m invested in, but I also know where I’m invested. This is chock full of “Epic”-ness, “Winning” or any other outdated way to express greatness.

The last part of the middle column is the Risk section. I think this area requires more explanation. It says that my equities are 9% more volatile than the S&P 500. That might be if you look at them individually. For example, I realize that the Foreign Equities part of my portfolio may carry more risk. However, look at the portfolio as a whole, with a balance in U.S. equities, foreign equities, cash, and commodities. Are you really going to tell me that I’d have less risk if I sold off all that diversification and just plunked my money in 500 U.S. stocks? Something is wrong with SigFig’s analysis here.

The right column gives some key stats against other SigFig users. I’m not sure what to make of it. Maybe if there were bell curves the ranges and if an age range was provided, I could see how I stack up to my peers.

SigFig News View

The News area isn’t unique or exciting. In fact it is so unexciting that I’m not even going to give you an image. You can get this information from just about any financial site. It is convenient to have it one place. In SigFig’s defense, there isn’t much you can do with news other than just display articles for people to read.

For me the News view is particularly useless. It doesn’t seem to include mutual funds. This left me with a view of Google news as that is the only individual stock I own.

SigFig Holdings View

Here is the SigFig Holdings View (click for larger view):

Sigfig Holdings View
Sigfig Holdings View

The holdings view gives you what you’d think, a list of all your investments in one place. One thing you’ll see is that I have Vanguard’s Total Market Index VTI as a core holding in all my accounts. That’s my default “invest in the US” equity. Vanguard has very low expenses and this particular ETF follows the Wilshare 5000 giving it more diversity than the S&P 500.

The other investment I should talk about is Google. It is the only thing that isn’t a mutual fund. However, in a lot of ways it is a mutual fund. I realize that Google is just a single company and much of its financial welfare is dependent on its advertising business. However, in buying Google, I feel that you get dominance in many areas: mapping, email, search, mobile and probably a few dozen areas that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

What I’m not showing in this holding view, is the tabs at the top. If I click on the Performance tab, I get information like, day’s gain, total gain, number of shares, and basis. I’m excited about the basis, because I always have to hunt for it in my brokerage’s website.

The Fundamental tab shows you things like Price/Earnings, Price/Book, Revenue Growth, etc. Since most of my investments are mutual funds and ETFs, this information isn’t available. However, it does show up for my Google holding.

Perhaps the most interesting thing in this view will get overlooked by most users. The Add a Tab section gives you the ability to customize a view of various attributes from the Stock Summary, Positions Summary, Valuation (12 months), Income Statement (12 months), and Balance Sheet (recent quarter).

You also get a Watchlist, which is an extra nice touch.

SigFig Recommendations View

Here is the SigFig Recommendations View (click for larger view):

Sigfig Recommendations View
Sigfig Recommendations View

SigFig does more than just aggregate and categorize your investment portfolio. It gives recommendations on what you can do. Of course the recommendations come with the Doublethink-ish disclaimer bar at the top that says that it shouldn’t impact your investment decision.

As you can see it gives you information on underperforming investments, hidden fees, and trading fees.

The underperforming investment area is interesting. I won’t get into the specifics of top suggestion because that is going to be the focus of tomorrow’s article. The second example criticizes my choice of Fidelity Spartan (FSIIX) and suggests PowerShares International Dividend (PID). This is similar in its international focus, but it isn’t the same. Also, since it is my Fidelity account, I don’t believe I pay the fees that it thinks I do (I need to double check this). The rationale of PID outperforming FSIIX is that it had a 7.7% better return over the last three years. SigFig seems to be suggesting that past performance is indicative of future results and that is dangerous ground to trend. It also suggested Vanguard International Equity (VEU), which I hold in other positions. Again, my decision to go with FSIIX was based on the Fidelity account (which was based on the ease of opening a SEP-IRA and low expenses), so I politely reject their recommendation.

The hidden fees area is pretty straight-forward. It makes me want to call up Fidelity and ask them for my $10 for that late settlement. Sigfig is right, that’s their own bad execution. Kudos to SigFig the watchdog (errr… pig)

The eliminating trading fees area isn’t very helpful. It says that I have a couple of holdings (VEU, VTI) that I could eliminate trading fees if I traded elsewhere like TD Ameritrade. Ironically, I own both those holdings in my TD Ameritrade account. I presume they suggest that I shouldn’t do business with USAA, but this is an area where their recommendations need updating. I perform very few trades as evidence from the holding screen. The account had $86,000 making $27 a drop in the bucket. Lastly, USAA’s exceptional and unparalleled customer support should earn it an exemption.

Realistically, I’m too rough on the recommendations. For the average person, there’s probably quite a few actionable items. I like to think that a personal finance blogger probably looked into many of the things they would suggest and chose not to take them for good reason.

Conclusion

It isn’t all rainbows and puppy dogs with SigFig. I found I have to be careful to not look at it too much. In the time it took me to write up this review I went from making $367 on the day to losing $969. It’s easy to get caught up in those kind of fluctuations when they are in big numbers right in front of you. Also, if I could make one more suggestion for SigFig, it would be to have a tool that looks at the individual holdings in a mutual fund. This could be used to report overlaps in equities due to mutual funds that are just too similar.

In the end, this is just me being nit-picky with a great product. SigFig has become my one-stop source for investing. As long as you are fine with the typical privacy concerns of allowing third parties access to your financial information (same as Mint and/or other services), I think SigFig should be at the center of your investment universe, too.

Now for the bad news. SigFig is in beta and it is invite only at this stage. However, I didn’t use any special personal finance blogger connections with them to get my invite. Maybe if you request an invest, you’ll get a response right away.

Understanding and Avoiding Mutual Fund Fees

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Every now and again, I wonder if I’m writing at either a level that is too personal. One one hand, I believe that some of the reason people ready Lazy Man and Money is because of the personal focus. On the other hand, even I have to admit that my life isn’t that exciting. It feels like I’m walking a fine line sometimes.

I’ve also been wondering if I’ve presumed too much financial knowledge of my readers. I was looking through some of my old posts and I realized that I have no “mutual fund” category. I couldn’t believe that in over 5 and half years of personal finance posts I haven’t written one post around mutual funds. It doesn’t feel like it can be true, but unless I miscategorized a bunch of posts (which is always possible), it is. It’s a little like teaching someone the fundamentals of quartberbacking in the NFL and excluding the screen pass.

I think the reason why I haven’t touched on mutual funds in the past is that I focus most of my investing in exchange traded funds (ETFs). In many ways, they are like mutual funds, but they are traded on stock exchanges, and in many cases, but not all, have lower fees. Also, they are relatively easy to understand. You typically pay a broker commission (usually under $10) to buy the ETF. The rest of the fees are built into the stock price and you can look up the expense ratio information for that. That’s information for another article. Today I’d like to talk about mutual fund fees…. particularly understanding and avoiding them. It’s time to cover some of the basics. Please bare with me, I’m not in the financial industry and I may gloss over minor details.

One of the differences with mutual funds is that the terminology is a little more difficult – at least for me. For example, you have load and no-load funds. A load in the mutual fund context is another word for fee. Typically, there are front-end loads, which means that you pay when you buy the fund. Sometimes they are just a percent or two, but when you are investing $10,000 (as in rolling over a 401K to an IRA) that translates to “just” a $100 or $200. It’s not so minor a detail now is it? Additionally some mutual funds charge back-end loads, or to make it more confusing, something that is often called a deferred sales load. These are fees that are charged will you sell the mutual fund. Sometimes if you hold the fund long enough, the fees are waived.

If that last paragraph was confusing, you can simply do what I do, look for mutual funds that are marked “No-load.” There are a lot of them available. Since basic index funds (an automated average of a large group of funds) typically outperform a majority of mutual funds, I really don’t believe in investing in any mutual funds that charge a load.

Just because you’ve avoided paying a load doesn’t mean that you’ve escaped paying fees. The mutual fund companies have to make money somehow, right? And we know most of the people Wall Street aren’t exactly poor. The other major form of mutual fund fees is called an expense ratio. Just like the ETF version, this is a percentage of money that is used to run the fund. This includes paying fund managers as well as advertising the fund, and probably a bunch of other small things in there that aren’t really important for you or I to understand. Just like the load, this is a percentage and in our mythical $10,000 investment the 1% or 2% comes out to $100 or $200… but it’s charged every year. It’s really important to keep this fee in check.

Expense ratios can vary widely. In my wife’s Thrift Savings Plan (like a 401k for the military folks) the expense ratio is 0.025% or $2.50 for a $10,000 investment. That’s as good as you can get. On the other of the spectrum, it took me about an hour of searching, but I think the highest expense ratio is the 9.72% one from Giordano Fund. That will cost you nearly a thousand dollars of your 10,000 investment – each year. This is an extreme case that you typically won’t find.

I’ll leave it up to you to do find the mutual funds that fit your goals. To push you in the right direction, I’ll offer you this stock screener from Yahoo.