Are Target Funds Unsafe - Post Q.E.?
It's a what-if? sort of question. What if rates stay down or trend only slightly higher, despite no QE? look at other countries response to tepid economies. My experience as professional advisor (25 yrs) tells me the future is unknowable and diversity is good. Make alternative choices- they all won't work wonderfully, but some will.
"This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/25/britain-to-ban-sale-of-all-diesel-and-petrol-cars-and-vans-from-2040) reduced by 90%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; As part of a government strategy to improve air quality, Britain is to ban all new petrol and diesel cars and vans from 2040 amid fears that rising levels of nitrogen oxide pose a major risk to public health.  &gt; The government had been asked to present a new draft policy to tackle air pollution from diesel traffic before the election.  &gt; Areeba Hamid, clean air campaigner at Greenpeace, said: &amp;quot;The high court was clear that the government must bring down toxic air pollution in the UK in the shortest possible time. This plan is still miles away from that.The government cannot shy away any longer from the issue of diesel cars clogging up and polluting our cities, and must now provide real solutions, not just gimmicks. That means proper clean air zones and funding to support local authorities to tackle illegal and unsafe pollution.""   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6pkblq/britain_to_ban_sale_of_all_diesel_and_petrol_cars/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~175549 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **air**^#1 **government**^#2 **plan**^#3 **pollution**^#4 **quality**^#5" That's a bullshit strawman.  Making unsafe products is never in the manufacturers interests.  In fact it lets manufacturers off the hook.  Because if a product does turn out to be unsafe you can't sue them because they followed the arbitrary guidelines set forth by a bunch of idiot politicians, so they can't be held at fault. Let’s compare your target fund, FFFFX to a well-known ETF, SPY; SPDR S&P 500 ETF. Source: Yahoo Finance The difference in performance over a longer time-frame is significant, You can and should carefully research better funds in order to improve performance. FULL DISCLOSURE: My own IRA is at Fidelity. Less than 10% of my IRA is in Fidelity mutual funds. None is in FFFFX. "I think you are asking about actively managed funds vs. indexes and possibly also vs. diversified funds like target date funds. This is also related to the question of mutual fund vs. ETF. First, a fund can be either actively managed or it can attempt to track an index. An actively managed fund has a fund manager who tries to find the best stocks to invest in within some constraints, like ""this fund invests in large cap US companies"". An index fund tries to match as closely as possible the performance of an index like the S&P 500. A fund may also try to offer a portfolio that is suitable for someone to put their entire account into. For example, a target date fund is a fund that may invest in a mix of stocks, bonds and foreign stock in a proportion that would be appropriate to someone expecting to retire in a certain year. These are not what people tend to think of as the canonical examples of mutual funds, even though they share the same legal structure and investment mechanisms. Secondly, a fund can either be a traditional mutual fund or it can be an exchange traded fund (ETF). To invest in a traditional mutual fund, you send money to the fund, and they give you a number of shares equal to what that money would have bought of the net asset value (NAV) of the fund at the end of trading on the day they receive your deposit, possibly minus a sales charge. To invest in an ETF, you buy shares of the ETF on the stock market like any other stock. Under the covers, an ETF does have something similar to the mechanism of depositing money to get shares, but only big traders can use that, and it's not used for investing, but only for people who are making a market in the stock (if lots of people are buying VTI, Big Dealer Co will get 100,000 shares from Vanguard so that they can sell them on the market the next day). Historically and traditionally, ETFs are associated with an indexing strategy, while if not specifically mentioned, people assume that traditional mutual funds are actively managed. Many ETFs, notably all the Vanguard ETFs, are actually just a different way to hold the same underlying fund. The best way to understand this is to read the prospectus for a mutual fund and an ETF. It's all there in reasonably plain English." I won't think so. Too much trouble for the compliance and internal audit team. Unless you are moving money from Russia, Iran or those non-FATCA countries. "Stay away from leveraged or synthetic ETFs. This answer talks about why leveraged ETFs are dangerous. There are numerous articles to be found by searching for ""leveraged etf"". My answer to this question links to one of the more accessible explanations I've read." Interesting, but I don't think we are talking the same thing. This seems to say that that the fund itself doesn't have the rule applied: I.E. the MF can't get hit with the 5% commission when you buy it.  That makes sense.  What I'm asking though is that when my (say) American Fund that I own already does a rebalance, the constituent holdings change. Those securities are not exempt from the rule and thus when they are transacted can have commissions applied.  As a matter of fact the broker for those securities has no idea if the fund is eligible or not.   Where did you get this from? As I'm. It studying for a series 7 I'm probably missing some foundational sources. "The title requires shreds of evidence to justify, first what are ""machine learning funds"", and what determines ""failure"".  When I click this title, I was hoping to see a list of ""machine learning funds"", are they mutual funds, or is the author talking about private equities invested in this field? Who are they?  Nothing in the paper made this clear.  For most of which to fail, I was expecting some statistics to indicate at least 51% of the funds liquidated due to massive loss of AUM. Again, no information on that.  The takes? Finance is hard, idiots like Marcos Lopez de Prado have no chance to master."