[quote=plm]21.65% YTD is very good until you see that sp500 is doing 22.56% But its all relative, 21.56% is better than what I’m doing so far. At least I’m no longer negative like I was back in March.
I just don’t have any control of my account. Being a long term holder I don’t want to sell anything and pay the taxes on the gains. So only tiny changes from buying different stocks with the dividend payouts. So I’m a passive investor but not with an index fund.[/quote]
I think long term I can’t beat the indexes. But even so, I don’t think I want to camp out in just one or a few indexes. Indexes are great when the markets are moving up. But I’m trying to move stuff so it’s more balanced.. That said, some of my other funds have a large overlap with what’s inside the index funds.
Like some of the “income” funds invest mainly in dividend paying stock that also happens to be part of the S&P500 index or others. So my understanding is that one got to be careful that even if your goal was to allocate away from what’s contained in index funds, you got to make sure what you pick up doesn’t end up picking some of the same stocks.
Fidelity contrafund is similar, and does investments in a lot of high flyers. Contrafund is pretty popular among Fidelity 401k plans, along with the Magellan funds, which I think are now closed.
So in my 401k I have allocations to contrafunds, but since there’s so much overlap with some index funds, I’m light on indexes in those 401k accounts…I’m in a unique situation that I negotiated with Charles Schwab, so I can pretty much buy any Vanguard fund inside Charles Schwab and they’ll waive all fees they normally charge for funds not theirs….I wasn’t able to get them to waive the fees for Fidelity funds. The issue is Schwab doesn’t have access to Vanguard voyager class shares. So that’s why I still keep around a Vanguard accounts along with Fidelity and Schwab.
I guess things matter less now that everything is trying to move to an ETF. and all three are $0 commission.
