April 19, 2021: New And Old Useful Features | Better Financial Life -- MyPlanIQ

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 Monday May 3, 2021.

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.

New And Old Useful Features

In this newsletter, we would like to review some new and useful features that we have found many users are often unaware of. Some simple tricks to use them can be handy to many users.

The two recommended ETF model portfolios

To simplify our offerings, we began to automatically add two ETF portfolios to every subscriber’s dashboard:

Click on the portfolio table gets you to this page:

The two portfolios:

Portfolio Name	Since Inception ?	YTD ?	1 Yr AR ?	3 Yr AR ?	5 Yr AR ?	10 Yr AR ?
MPIQ ETF Fixed Income	5.2%	-0.3%	4.4%	8.1%	6%
MPIQ ETF Allocation Moderate	8.3%	7.3%	25.9%	13.6%	11.4%	9.1%

These two portfolios are featured permanently on our What We Do->Brokerage Investors and What We Do->Income Investors pages.

We believe the two model portfolios are simple and effective enough for most investors. They use low cost index ETFs and some total return bond ETFs that are now offered by almost all major brokerages commission-free.

That’s why they are by default on your dashboard.

All paying subscriber now are automatically following these two ETF portfolios, unless you decide to remove them from your followed portfolio table. The two portfolios are not counted towards your quota. For example, if you are a basic subscriber, you can follow 5 other portfolios, in addition to these two.

New portfolio and fund chart

Some might have noticed that we are using a new chart in our recent newsletters. We want to draw your attention on how to use these charts.

For a portfolio, you can access the chart in the following way:

visit a portfolio link like MPIQ ETF Fixed Income in the above.
scroll down the page and click on button ‘Click here for more portfolio details and features‘
now you are on this portfolio page, scroll down to Performance section, click on Chart tab and then click on Performance Chart button:

You can also access the chart from a fund page (scroll down and click on Historical Chart button).

Tips on the chart:

You can see the holdings of a portfolio by check ‘Holding Flags‘ box.
You can compare with another portfolio or a fund by entering a name or symbol. For a portfolio’s symbol, you can find the portfolio ID on that portfolio’s URL address bar like the following and then add P_ to the ID like (P_75045):

Bookmark: You can always bookmark in your browser a chart address like https://www.myplaniq.com/LTISystem/jsp/fundcenter/SecurityMPTChart.action?includeHeader=false&symbol=P_75045 and revisit and even change the above ‘symbol=’ with things like ‘symbol=VTI’.
Other powerful features include viewing charts in various periods and clicking on the legend of a portfolio or a fund name to reveal/disappear its chart.

As a reminder, all MyPlanIQ’s charts are total return based, i.e., they are dividend reinvested.

Play with the chart and we believe you’ll like it.

Portfolio and fund comparison

Our comparison feature is an old feature but we believe many users are not aware of or didn’t bother to use them. You can access the comparison feature through

On a portfolio page like MPIQ ETF Fixed Income
scroll down the page and click on button ‘Click here for more portfolio details and features‘
now you are on this portfolio page, click on button ‘Portfolio Compare‘
Now you can click (or add more portfolios or funds) ‘Compare’ on the lower left corner to get to the compare page

On this compare page (https://www.myplaniq.com/LTISystem/jsp/portfolio/ComparePortfolio.action?withCompare=true&portfolioString=MPIQ%20ETF%20Fixed%20Income%2CVBMFX%2C), you can compare the portfolio and fund. You can further add/delete more portfolios and funds in the text box.
Scroll down to More Performance Analytics Comparison section for more year by year return and risk data.
Bookmark!!! Again, you can always bookmark the URL in your browser for later use. This can make a comparison page like a portfolio/fund watchlist page!
You can also access the compare feature from a fund page by clicking on ‘Comparison‘ button.

Play with the compare feature. We believe you’ll find it very useful.

Market Overview

Well, with 9% of S&P 500 companies reporting their Q1 earnings, so far so good: based on Factset, the blended (actual and expected for those still yet to report) earnings growth rate for the S&P 500 is 30.2%, compared with the expected growth rate 23.8% on March 31, 2021. Stocks were again in record territory last week.

Economy wise, in addition to the rapid improvement of job market, both retail sales and industrial production in the US finally surpassed their previous numbers one year ago, indicating the economy is growing again:

However, given the current extremely high stock valuation and low bond yields, investors should be aware that stocks can’t go up forever. We are again cautiously optimistic and reiterate the following practice:

For strategic allocation (buy and hold) investors, ignore the current market behavior. Remember, as what we have emphasized numerous times, when you choose and commit to a strategic portfolio, you essentially know and commit that your investment horizon (or the time you need to utilize this capital) is 20 years or longer. As we pointed out, if your investments are those diversified (index) funds such as an S&P 500 index fund (VFINX, for example), you know your money is in some solid ‘business’ that eventually (20 years later) will deliver some reasonable returns. As long as you are comfortable with this thesis, you should sit tight and forget about the current gyration.
For tactical investors, again, you have to ignore the current market noise. Furthermore, you should follow your strategy rigorously, especially in a time like this. Human emotion, both optimistic and pessimistic, and human desire, both greedy and fearful, are your worst enemies. This has been shown to be true time and time again.

Stock valuation now reached another high. For the moment, we believe it’s prudent to be cautious while riding on market uptrend. However how serious a correction might be, we have confidence in the US economy in the long term and thus in the stocks in aggregate. We just need to manage through interim losses carefully.

We again would like to emphasize that for any new investor and new money, the best way to step into this kind of markets is through dollar cost average (DCA), i.e. invest and/or follow a model portfolio in several phases (such as 2 or 3 months) instead of the whole sum at one shot.

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