A New Leader in the Clubhouse

Tyler Linsten Investing, Personal Finance, Sarcasm

When winning is losing.


An exciting part of helping people with their portfolios is seeing what kind of BS they’ve been stuck with, and then reversing it immediately. Usually, the most common culprits are high-fee funds with fancy names. This week produced an all-time worst.

Behold, Legg Mason’s QS Global Market Neutral Fund. Ticker: LNFIX.

This particular younger client was stuck with this fund comprising 100% of two different IRAs they own, likely because it was very profitable for someone to do so, and the expense ratio is, get ready for it…

No, I don’t think you’re ready yet…

Have you grabbed a paper bag in anticipation of hyperventilating?…

Get one.

Take a deep breath…

Grip the bag and put it up to your mouth.

The expense ratio is…

THREE.

POINT.

SIX.

FIVE.

PERCENT.

3.65%!

Three hundred and sixty-five basis points!

Treat it like a solar eclipse – use eye protection if you must look.

 

LNFIX is over 91 times more expensive than Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index ETF, which costs only .04% per year. This is by far the worst fund I’ve ever seen in someone’s portfolio. Usually you only hear about these kinds of wealth evaporators second hand through some guy you knew back in the day, or on archived internet forums from the 90s.

I can only imagine that those who willingly buy products like this have a strategy of investing only in funds whose ticker symbols were written on bathroom stalls in gas stations in the middle of nowhere. A market neutral strategy — making some bets for securities to go up, with other bets for things to go down, resulting in only exposure to the manager’s potential skill, or lack thereof — is a painfully inappropriate strategy for a young person, with decades to invest, to put all of their account into. The worst part of it all was this client had to pay a 5.75% sales charge before even getting their money invested. This also means the fund has to not only earn more than the inflation rate, but the inflation rate PLUS 3.65% every year in order to show a real appreciation. Also laughable: They compare the fund to US T-Bills on the website, as if to boldly imply it can be considered to be in the same ballpark as a risk-free asset like Treasuries.

I joke and endlessly lay on the sarcasm, but this is a damn shame. We need a true fiduciary rule applying to the entire investing industry.

Q1 Client Letter

Tyler Linsten Client Letters, Investing

Let’s chat about stock market volatility.


You’re in for a treat — there’s only one Mariners reference in this version.

[gview file=”https://aldercovecapital.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Q1-2018-Letter.pdf”]

Fintech Saved Me from a Huge Headache Today

Tyler Linsten Personal Finance

Financial technology isn’t so bad, after all. 


Earlier this morning my phone buzzed, as it tends to do excessively. This notification, however, wasn’t just another headline about another Mariners player hitting the DL. This time it was a heads up from the app of my credit card company that a $0.99 transaction had been made on my card. The source of that charge was a big red flag: It was from iTunes.

If you know me at all then you’ll know I’m a huge Google Kool-Aid drinker so something from iTunes rings all kind of alarm bells. I quickly logged into my account and disputed the charge and put a freeze on the account. I then notified Citi who recommended I close the account and get a new card, which I promptly did. After I looked again at the transactions I saw that the fraudsters had already snuck in two more $0.99 transactions before I managed to hit “freeze.”

Now, for all the unnecessary stuff we can be driven to do thanks to financial technology (see: cryptocurrency, Robin Hood, Acorns, etc), I want to recognize some of the good. If I hadn’t turned on push notifications for all transactions on my card, which is something I definitely recommend everyone do, I would have never shut this down in time. If this were, say, ten years ago, I would have been lucky to notice the charge within a few days since the only way to patrol a credit card account was manually logging in. The bad guys would have seen that the card worked, and cranked up either their volume of purchases or the price of what they bought.

Score one for fintech.

Let’s Play an Annuity Game, Payout Start Date Edition

Tyler Linsten Investing, Personal Finance

Not to be confused with Let’s Needlessly Tinker with and Damage the Global Economy with Random Tariffs game. 


QUICK: You have 20 seconds to read the Payout Start Date description below while assuming you yourself have owned the annuity since the 1990s.

QUESTION: Can you begin payout now?

Good luck, sucker.

3…

2…

1…

Pencils Down.

Stumped, like I was? Now, maybe I’m just a little dense, but this passage seems extremely confusing and hard to understand. I had to read it multiple times to get a handle on what was possible. To be honest, I’m still only about 95% sure what it’s saying. I can’t get over how hilariously sad (sadly hilarious?) the phrase “on or before the later of” is. How are regular people, the owners stuck with this stuff, supposed to know what to do?

This example shows one reason why you won’t hear me speaking very kindly about annuities in these parts. There are certain times and places for these products, but they’re few and far between because of the layers of complexity they tend to add. Not to mention the all-too-common, insane upfront commissions attached to annuities.

I tend to think of annuities and the Seattle Mariners in the same vein: They always tend to disappoint, you wonder how you got tied up with them, and they never get any better.

 

Let’s Critique Another Seattle Times Money Makeover

Tyler Linsten Investing, Personal Finance

The Bad CD Advice Edition.

This violation isn’t as bad as the last one, so it’s got that going for it (which is nice). 


This week’s “Money Makeover” in the Seattle Times is, overall, pretty harmless. I think the planners provided reasonable recommendations and the subject will likely be better off if she abides by the prescription.

But there’s just that one part. It’s like when you see a single small chunk of your car that you missed when you washed it in the driveway. Once you notice it you can’t look away, and you must blog about it.

This week’s subject was Morgan, a unicorn, er, a Millennial with no debt, no credit card, and lives within her means. She wanted to know if she was on the right path.  Here are the following recommendations supplied by the featured planners:

  • Increase savings rate from 3% to 15% in order to fund retirement. VERDICT: Solid.
  • Get a credit card to build up credit and to be able to spend when traveling. VERDICT: Solid.
  • Start an emergency fund to cover four months’ worth of living expenses. VERDICT: Solid.
  • Take $5,000 (from her $12,700 in the bank) and invest in two- and five-year CDs yielding 2% and 2.5%, respectively. VERDICT: SAY WHAAAAT?

Whether the planners suggested she make this move to jumpstart her emergency fund, or if it was to begin “investing,” it’s pretty lame. The whole point of an emergency fund is to be able to have quick access to cash when you need it in a bind. And a 27 year-old has no business investing in CDs if they’re intended to be seeding a long-term investment account. So either way, this recommendation doesn’t add up.

Here’s the specific passage regarding the CDs:

At Allison and Kirwin’s urging, Denno also moved $5,000 from her bank savings account into two certificates of deposit with higher interest rates. One CD, with a term length of 24 months, has an annual percentage yield, or APY, of 2 percent. The other CD comes with a 60-month term and an APY of 2.5 percent.

Tyler here: An emergency fund should be liquid (easily spent) – and CDs are most certainly not liquid. CDs are notoriously cumbersome when you want to access them, especially if you want to do so before their stated maturity dates. They also carry steep “early withdrawl” penalties. Here is Capital One’s policy, for example:

Early Withdrawal Penalty – If you redeem a Certificate of Deposit (CD) prior to maturity, you will incur an early withdrawal penalty.

  • For a CD with a twelve (12) month or shorter term, the penalty is three (3) months interest, regardless of when you redeem the account prior to maturity.
  • For a CD with a term greater than twelve (12) months, the penalty is six (6) months of interest regardless of when you redeem the account prior to maturity.
  • Depending on how early you redeem your CD, the penalty for early redemption may be greater than the interest you have earned on your account.

Another dopey rule from Capital One, prevalent with most CD providers, showing that it’s all-or-nothing when trying to access the principal value:

Withdrawals – We will not permit partial withdrawals of principal during the term of the account. Withdrawals are only permitted during grace period (10 days from deposit).

Let’s say Morgan has an emergency after five months and needs to spend $4,000 of the $5,000 she put in CDs. Uh-oh: She’s facing the steeper penalty of forfeiting SIX months’ worth of interest since her CD terms are greater than 12 months. Even worse, according to the rules above, Morgan will have to pay more in penalties than interest earned on both CDs and, therefore, she will get less than her principal $5,000 back. And she has to take the whole thing out! Ouch.

This is a staggering unforced error. Morgan can easily open a high-yield, FDIC-insured savings account yielding 1.50% or greater, is complexity-free, has no minimums, and gives her fee-free access to her money at any interval she pleases.

The lesson: Don’t put your short-term reserves in CDs. That’s a really silly thing to do. The extra yield you think you’re getting is probably not worth it.

Deeper lesson: Double-check the advice you read in the newspaper or online (including this site). Small details like Morgan’s CD issue can result in big headaches down the line, defeating the whole purpose of an account like an emergency fund.