Next WylieMoney Slowly Fund: MIOFX Marsico International Opportunities

As we move into June, it is time to add the 14th fund to the WylieMoney Slowly portfolio. The 14th category I picked was Foreign Large Cap Growth. My original pick was JAOSX Janus Overseas My Post. Unfortunately, this fund is closed to new investors. The options available all have significantly higher expenses and have not come close to the performance of JAOSX over 1 year, 3 years or 5 years.

That said, this has still been a strong category. There appear to be three top options based on one year and 5 year records.


The top three all have pretty high turnover which is not great for a taxable portfolio and have a lot of their portfolio invested in their top 10 holdings which means there is less diversity than one might hope.


Etrade lists one of the funds expense ratio at 15.14%.


Wondering if this is bad information, I looked up the fund on Morningstar and find that the expense ratio is actually 1.5%. Much more reasonable, but still not great.
I then checked the other two top performing funds in my list and Etrade has a different expense ratio for both of those funds as well. The top performing funds' expenses appear to be 1.37%, not 1.42%.

Harbor International Growth's expenses were only off by .01%, but it is still odd that Etrade appears to have this wrong.


I already picked a Harbor International fund for the Foreign Large Value category My Post so I am going to go with MIOFX Marsico International Opportunities. So the first day in June that Equities take a beating, I'll add MIOFX to the WylieMoney Slowly Portfolio.

Fund of the Week: TWCVX American Century Vista

The strongest fund last week, of the funds I track, was TWCVX American Century Vista. I own this in an IRA. Mid and Small Cap Growth and Small Cap Blend funds were the only categories represented in the top 10.


Inflation protected Bonds and Tips made up the bottom 10, along with DJP iPath Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index Total Return ETN, which continues to be the most volatile fund I track, showing up in the top 10 or bottom 10, almost every week.

Who knew soybeans and coffee could be so exciting?

Portfolio Update 5/30/08: Comin Back

The portfolios look like they're comin' back, but they have work to do to make up for last week's brutality.


WylieMoney rose half as much as the S&P 500. My IRAs had a good week despite a rough Friday.

WylieMoney 20 Mostly Managed

WylieMoney Slowly

Lazy 20 Mostly Index
Three Fund Index

ETF 20

S&P 500

Fund of the Week: DJP iPath Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Idx TR ETN

For the second time this month, DJP iPath Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Idx TR ETN had the best one week performance, up 1.60%. It was the only fund up more than 1% and was up more than twice as much as the second best fund, BTTRX American Century Target Mat 2025 My Post , which was up 0.71%.

The rest of the funds in positive territory for the week were bond funds.

DJP also has the best year to date performance of the 90+ funds I track.

Most of the funds were down with SSREX SSgA Tuckerman Active. REIT My Post suffering the biggest loss at -5.09%. All the Real Estate Funds in my portfolios were in the bottom 10 for the wee.

Portfolio Update 5/23/08: Driven to Tears

When the best performing portfolio in my experiment is down over 2% in 5 days, I'm almost driven to tears.

This is the first week out of the last 52+ updates when the best performng and worst performing portfolios were the same for Friday's performance, the previous week's performance, performance since May 1st, 2007, and year-to-date.


And no surprise to me, the best performing was the WylieMoney 20 Mostly Managed portfolio and the worst performing portfolio was the S&P 500 as represented by an investment in SPY. Not that the WylieMoney 20 portfolio only beat the Lazy 20 portfolio by .01%.

WylieMoney 20 Mostly Managed

WylieMoney Slowly

Lazy 20 Mostly Index

Three Fund Index

ETF 20

S&P 500

Fund of the Week: PRNEX T. Rowe Price New Era

Year to date, Emerging Markets funds have struggled after a very strong run, but they had a good week placing 4th, 3rd and 2nd in weekly performance. The top performing fund of the week was PRNEX T. Rowe Price New Era.

I hold PRNEX in my IRA. I did not choose it for the WylieMoney slowly portfolio since I did not choose Natural Resources as one of the Categories for my experiment. Also it is not a no fee fund so one could not add small amounts to it on a regular basis, efficently.

Real Estate also had a good week as did Mid Cap Growth.

Top 10

Bonds struggled a bit as did DJP a "Natural Resource" ETN I added to my IRA this year. How can funds investing in Natural Resources be in the top 10 and bottom 10 at the same time?

DJP is a pure commodites play with a significant sector weighting in food. PRNEX is more of a energy/industrial materials play (scroll down to sector weightings). I added DJP to my IRA because it is different, but it is loosly lumped in the "Natural Resources" category.

Bottom 10

Portfolio Update 5/16/08: I'm On Fire

The WylieMoney 20 Mostly Managed portfolio caught spring fever in March and stated "I'm on Fire."

Remember how things looked back on March 7th, 2008?:


Back then, the WylieMoney Mostly Managed portfolio was -4.05% since May 1, 2007 and -7.35% year to date. This Friday, the WylieMoney portfolio was up 5.39% since May 1, 2007 and up 1.62% year to date. I'm not tracking from the lowest point to the highest only comparing the values I documented in these weekly updates (scroll to the bottom).

Trying to time the market is impossible. Who would have thought with oil spiking to $126 a barrel, continued trouble in housing, news reports about financial aid for college drying up, and personal credit issues coming to the forefront, that diversified portfolios would gain about 10% in just over 2 months?

Despite the weakest 1 week performance of the bunch, The WylieMoney 20 Mostly Managed portfolio has the highest return since this experiment began and the best return year-to-date.

It is interesting to note that the WylieMoney Slowly portfolio which invested in many of its funds when the markets were lower than May 1st, 2007 is still underperforming the WylieMoney 20. It would have been better to invest all $50,000 on May 1st 2007, despite the ugly ups and downs of the past 13 months, then try to dollar cost average into the same funds over that same period...

At least using these funds, over this time period, both indexing and dollar cost averaging have proven less successful than picking a group of mostly managed funds, and riding out the storm.

WylieMoney 20 Mostly Managed

WylieMoney Slowly

Lazy 20 Mostly Index

Three Fund Index

ETF 20

S&P 500