March 30, 2020: How Did Bond ETFs And Mutual Funds Fare In The Current Crisis?
by MyPlanIQ | Mar 31, 2020 | Asset-Allocation, Bonds, Economy, Feature, Gold, Headline, Income, Inv, Investments, IRA, Markets, Mutual-Funds, newsletter, Portfolios, Retirement
Re-balance Cycle Reminder All MyPlanIQ’s newsletters are archived here.
Regular AAC (Asset Allocation Composite), SAA and TAA portfolios are always rebalanced on the first trading day of a month. the next re-balance will be on Wednesday April 1, 2020.
Please note: As of March 1, 2020, we officially phased out our old rebalance calendar for both SAA and TAA. They are now always rebalanced on the first trading day of a month.
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.
Brokerage Plans Phased Out
For years, we have established various ‘plans’ based on list of ETFs or mutual funds suggested by brokerages. For example, Schwab featured its OneSource mutual fund list to its clients. To accommodate these customers who have accounts in Schwab, we have created public plans like Schwab OneSource Mutual Fund so that these users can follow model portfolios generated from this list of funds.
However, it has come to a point where we now believe most of these brokerage plans are not necessary and we now decide to gradually phase them out. Here are the several reasons:
- Too many brokerage plans of ETFs or mutual funds are confusing to users. Many average (basic) subscribers have been frustrated with too many choices and aren’t sure which one to pick for.
- We now advocate universal ETFs model portfolios based on MPIQ Core ETFs Asset Allocation Composite Moderate (a user can customize based on his/her own risk profile). These ETFs are either broad base highly liquid stock index ETFs (mostly from Vanguard) or a combination of liquid enough active and index bond ETFs. They can be accessed from any brokerage account. Furthermore, for those who really prefer mutual funds, we advocate using a combination of stock ETFs and total return bond mutual funds such as Stock ETFs And Bond Mutual Funds Moderate Schwab. For those who want to use mutual funds exclusively, since our stock funds are all low cost index funds, we believe users can easily find substitutes in their brokerages.
- We also want to avoid legal issues such as using a proprietary Schwab OneSource mutual fund list.
- Finally, frankly, those proprietary mutual funds suggested by brokerages don’t really fit to our philosophy: only use ultra low cost stock index funds, ultra low cost bond index funds and some excellent total return bond mutual funds.
Over times, you will find our web pages will not feature these plans/portfolios anymore. However, we will continue to update those existing portfolios but do encourage users to switch to the portfolios listed on Brokerage Investors and Fixed Income Investors pages.
