Re-balance Cycle Reminder All MyPlanIQ’s newsletters are archived here.

For regular SAA and TAA portfolios, the next re-balance will be on Monday, June 11, 2017. You can also find the re-balance calendar for 2017 on ‘Dashboard‘ page once you log in.

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.

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

PIMCO D Share Fund Issue

We addressed this issue in March 26, 2018: Total Return Bond Update. Apparently, judging from many emails we received, we believe there are still many confused users, especially in the context of the latest rebalances with respect to Fidelity and Schwab Core Mutual Fund portfolios.  In the latest rebalance, the portfolios were involved with buying PSPDX (PIMCO StocksPLUS D) and PCRDX (PIMCO Commodity Real Ret Strat D)

Since these D share funds were effectively merged with their A share fund on March 23, 2018, these D share funds no longer exist. In fact, you wouldn’t be able to quote the above D share fund symbols anymore from other websites. However, as stated in the above newsletter, because of a technical convenience, MyPlanIQ still retains these symbols and they are just made to represent their A share funds. 

Both A share funds PSPAX (PIMCO StocksPLUS A) and PCRAX (PIMCO Commodity Real Ret Strat A) are available to the brokerages as no transaction fee and no load (or load waived) funds. So users should consider purchase these funds instead.

We will eliminate D share fund symbols eventually. We apologize for any confusion. 

Newsletter Collection Update

Latest update: 5/14/2018

Highlighted are the recent articles

We have published numerous newsletters over the years and many readers have asked us to categorize and summarize our previous newsletters as they tend to cover various topics. We believe this is a good idea as many of them provide useful information that can be useful for both new and old users. We highly encourage users to read these newsletters as understanding many issues and our methodology is an inherent part of using our service. In the following, we select and list some newsletters in each category.

Portfolio Management

Asset Allocation and Other Investment Strategies

Strategic: 

Tactical

Asset Behavior

Strategic and Timing

Fund Selection

Core Satellite and Multiple Strategies

Momentum Strategies and their behavior. How various asset allocation strategies work in different market cycles

Strategy and Portfolio Evaluation
Risk Parity, Four Pillar and Permanent Portfolios

More newsletters can be found in these articles:

Portfolio Rebalance & Daily Management
Risk Management & Investor Behavior

Portfolio risk management techniques and issues. 

Investment Philosophy
Fixed Income, Dividend, Total Return Bond Funds & Conservative Allocation

The following newsletters address many concerns for retiree, conservative and income investors. 

Fund Review

Financial Planning & Retirement

Cash Management

Features & System Q&As

These newsletters address new features and how to for our system usage. 

Existing Portfolio Performance Reviews

In general, we review various portfolio performance in each newsletter. However, you can get latest up to date  performance result and comparison by clicking on links below portfolio comparison tables listed in our quarterly or annual review newsletters: 

Portfolios suggested by advisors and brokerages

Market Overview

Q1 2018 earnings report was pretty much set to be one of the highest since 2010: as of last Friday, 91% of the 500 companies have reported earnings. The blended earnings growth is 24.9%, much higher than 17.1% expected on December 31, 2017. Stocks, however, continued to wobble, most likely affected by geopolitical and trade events. Though there have been several sayings to support the argument that corporate profit margin can still sustain at the current high level (see this Financial Times article, for example), we however would like to point out that even if it’s possible to sustain the current historically high corporate profit margin for a while, it’s hard to argue against the assertion that a free capital market will eventually force profit margin to revert to a long term mean that is much lower than today’s figure. Regardless, we recognize an overvalued and overextended market is subject to some sudden violent decline induced by various seemingly small perturbations. 

As always, we call for prudent risk management and stay the course. 

For more detailed asset trend scores, please refer to 360° Market Overview

Now that the Trump administration has been in the office for more than a year, the economy and financial markets are in general still in a good shape. Whether the economy will continue to benefit from the supposedly trickle down of the tax cut, the deregulation, and the promised infrastructure spending remains to be seen.  On the other hand, stocks continued to ascend, regardless of the progress. Looking ahead, however, we remain convinced that markets will experience more volatilities at some point when reality finally sets in. 

In terms of investments, U.S. stock valuation is at a historically high level. It is thus not a good time to take excessive risk. However, we remain optimistic about U.S. economy in the long term and believe much better investment opportunities will arise in the future. 

We again would like to stress 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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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.