Damn Roth IRA

I’ve spent the entire rest of my evening trying to figure out a decent mutual fund to transfer my IRA into, since the management of my old fund is retiring at the end of the year. (As we all know, the managers—and not the name of the fund—are the ones who make the returns.)

I still haven’t found anything.

 

4 Responses to Damn Roth IRA

 
  1. You could:
    – move the funds to the trusty Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, either standard (vtsmx) or exchange traded (vti) shares
    – invest in a few stocks that you’d feel comfortable holding over the extreme long term
    – diversify and spice up your portfolio with some international index ETFs (http://www.ishares.com)
    – cash out and let the funds sit in your broker’s money market account while you decide what to do next. There’s no need to rush headlong into a new fund, and if/when there is, you can do so with a few keystrokes.
    – any combination of the above.
    Whatever you do, you might want to update the brentarweb code base to preserve what one has typed when one submits a comment without completing every field on comment page. Having to retype an entire comment when all that’s needed is an email address is more than a little annoying.

  2. Brian says:

    This twelve-year-old viewer would like to offer a second vote for the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund. Ideally you should wait until March 11, 2003 to buy in, though.
    Or: think that America is in a handbasket or even the crapper? Go for some of those international index funds. Instead of losing your shirt, you could lose your cheongsam, kimono, or kurta.

  3. Brent says:

    Hmm; the “12-year old viewer” has discovered a longstanding weakness of my blog’s comment system. You might note that there’s no “preview” option available for your posts–that was because, when I first installed Movable Type, the darn thing just couldn’t remember text for previews and whatnot. Rather than trying to figure that out (on top of everything else) I just hacked out the code, and it’s been that way ever since. That said, I’ll try to figure out what went wrong, when I get some time. (haha!) Until then, I’ve added notes about what fields are required and which are not. Well, except the name. But still.
    As for stocks: I’m already in the popular Vanguard TSMI (wasn’t I the one pimping that to you guys, BITD?), and (humorously, to me) I was looking at the international index ETFs last night. I’m inclined to leave the trading of those, as well as any individual stock picks, to my regular brokerage account…
    Mostly I was just whining about the PITA of wading through prospectuses and trying to match decent returns with lower expenses, though… Still, thanks for the advice.

  4. an arrogant graduate student says:

    It’s my informed opinion that the 12-year old viewer is way off the mark. Brent should implement a dynamic trading strategy to synthesize a portfolio of options on three (three because it’s the closest integer to pi) randomly chosen volatile stocks. This will exploit the fact that the price evolution of a stock follows a stochastic Wiener process with deterministic drift.

 

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