Recent posts by John Ameriks
John Ameriks leads Vanguard's Investment Counseling & Research group, which provides portfolio recommendations along with topical commentary and investment counseling.
There’s been a lot of back and forth about the differences between the posted performance of a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) and the returns actually realized by investors taking into account cash flow.
Reading the discussion around this, you might come away with the impression that differences in these two ways of measuring returns are entirely the result of the timing (good or poor) of investors in terms of buying and selling. But what is often being ignored in such analyses is that differences between standard fund returns (so-called time weighted or lump-sum returns) and investor returns (a.k.a. internal rates of return or dollar-weighted returns) can be as much a function of the timing of returns as it is the timing of investors’ purchases or redemptions.
Just saw this—Linda Stern punches holes in some of the more common misconceptions about retirement:
Stern Advice: Busting retirement myths
What she has to say lines up well with my own observations and thoughts. What about you?
In my February 4 post, I complained about what I perceived as mischaracterization of the performance of target date funds because of reporting that focused on the spectacularly poor results of a few small, unusual outlying target date funds (TDFs).
Well, last week a Government Accountability Office report on TDFs was released, and I’m starting to get a whiff of similarly slanted reporting on a different subject: accusations that these funds are charging “outrageous fees.”
With a new year well underway, at Vanguard our attention is turning to IRAs, 401(k)s, and tax planning. This year, I, like a lot of others, seem to have Roth IRAs on the brain.
Sigh … How many more times are we going to see articles like this, involving great wailing and gnashing of teeth over target date fund performance … in 2008?
Below you’ll see a summary of unvarnished data from Morningstar, showing the 3-year cumulative performance of all share classes of target date funds for which Morningstar has published 3-year returns and current assets.