July 9, 2012: Online Community Engagement

07/10/2012 Share 0 comments

Re-balance Cycle Reminder

Based on our monthly re-balance calendar, the next re-balance time will be on Monday, August 6, 2012. You can also find the re-balance calendar of 2012 on 'My Portfolios' page.

As a reminder to expert users: advanced portfolios are still re-balanced based on their original re-balance schedules and they are not the same as those used in Strategic and Tactical Asset Allocation (SAA and TAA) portfolios of a plan.

Also please note that we now list the next re-balance date on every portfolio page.

Help Each Other, Help Yourself

The mission of MyPlanIQ has always been to provide low cost yet effective solutions to retirement investments. Since we made our first public debut in 2009, we have worked very hard to improve our services and tools. You have provided many invaluable suggestions. Best of all, many of you concur with our vision that there is absolutely a need for such a service for retirement investments. You have encouraged us to keep going along this direction. We thank you for the support!

We also feel that it is time for our users to become more active in our communities to help each other. Though it might seem obvious to some, we would like to point out the following important advantages in doing so:

• Investing is a process that requires consistency, patience and, we might add, enlightenment. It is extremely important to stay on the course that is governed by a well proven and intuitive principle (or strategy). Investing itself is a process that unfolds a series of samples that form a stochastic process. Absent from  100% winning odds, any strategy's result can only be fully realized in a sufficiently long period of time, usually a full market (or economic) bull and bear cycle. As humans are subject to emotional and impulsive reactions, it is thus very important to have fellow investors (or travellers?) to help each other in this journey. This is perhaps the most reason for you to help others and in return, to get help from others.
• In today's noisy world that is full of news, rumors and analysis 24/7, forming a community of like mind people can provide a shield that filters out much garbage. A good example is bogleheads.org, an extremely helpful community that have a group of people who believe in John Bogle's low cost indexing investment principle.
• The collective intelligence can generate a 1+1>2 effect! Based on a third party statistics, majority of users on MyPlanIQ.com are post graduate and 50+ year old fellows. Unleashing such a pool of talent and experience to help out each other is of tremendous potential and value!
• Finally, more activities will give us more feedback and insights into what you are looking for and how our system and service have been doing. 

We have recently just installed a well known community discussion tool Disqus across our plan, portfolio and article pages. We believe Disqus will make community engagement much easier. To use this, you don't have to be a registered Disqus user though that might help to consolidate your comments across the internet (i.e. your comments on other websites that implement Disqus).

So ask questions, engage with fellow users! Help others, help us and help yourself!

Portfolio Reviews

We compare tactical portfolios for our brokerage mutual fund plans:

See up to date detailed comparison>>

Overall, the mutual fund portfolios have done OK. As ETFs become more and more mainstream, we are somewhat agnostic on these brokerage mutual fund portfolios, especially due to their various redemption restrictions and/or transaction and expense fees.

Current Markets

Markets are now again entering a period of uncertainty. We made the following observations:

• US stocks (VTI) is now trending lower: it is now ranked below the total bond index (BND) again.
• Defensive sectors are still bettering cyclical sectors, as pointed out in the last week's newsletter.
• The US might have entered recession, as repeatedly insisted by John Hussman in his weekly commentaries. Though one has to be aware of that economic recession is not 100% equivalent to a bear stock market.
• The bond market is divided: 'safe haven' long term Treasury bonds are still strong while 'riskier' high yield bonds and emerging market bonds are also strong.

More details can be seen on 360° Market Overview,

We are comfortable with our current portfolio positions.

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Disclaimer:

Any investment in securities including mutual funds, ETFs, closed end funds, stocks and any other securities could lose money over any period of time. All investments involve risk. Losses may exceed the principal invested. Past performance is not an indicator of future performance. There is no guarantee for future results in your investment and any other actions based on the information provided on the website including, but not limited to, strategies, portfolios, articles, performance data and results of any tools. All rights are reserved and enforced. By accessing the website, you agree not to copy and redistribute the information provided herein without the explicit consent from MyPlanIQ.