Vanguard Windsor

[ps56k]

I've held Vanguard Windsor for years - it was my first mutual fund.
I've sliced a little off every so often and invested in other funds,
but still have a sizeable chunk of cash with Windsor.
And - every so often - after staring at the entries in Quciken,
I ask myself.... why am I still holding so much in Windsor ?

--
----------------------------------
"If everything seems to be going well,
you have obviously overlooked something." - Steven Wright

[Steven L.]

ps56k wrote:
> I've held Vanguard Windsor for years - it was my first mutual fund.
> I've sliced a little off every so often and invested in other funds,
> but still have a sizeable chunk of cash with Windsor.
> And - every so often - after staring at the entries in Quciken,
> I ask myself.... why am I still holding so much in Windsor ?

Don't make any decisions based solely on the fund's performance in the
last couple of years. We've been in a bear market decline. In the
current decline, the only things that have beaten the market are natural
resources and metals. I wouldn't have expected Windsor to do much
better than it has in fact done.

Even great funds like Selected American Shares and Dodge & Cox Stock
Fund have gotten hammered. Bear markets just drag down everything,
except whatever asset classes may have been involved in causing the bear
market! (In the last couple of years, the market was spooked by rising
oil prices; and sure enough, energy stocks have done well. Nothing else
has.)

--
Steven L.
Email: sdli...@earthlinkNOSPAM.net
Remove the NOSPAM before replying to me.

[ps56k]

last year, I mapped out some of my top mutual funds -
VIMSX, FFIDX, VWNDX, FDGRX, FEQIX, VTSMX
and looked at their top holdings....
Several had 3 or 4 of the troubled financial banks.
Several had 5 or more of overlapping stocks - energy, tech, financials

So much for my diversity -
they were all buying the same companies, but for different reasons.

[Steven L.]

Yep. The overweighting in financials must have come as a very
unpleasant surprise to investors with shares in so-called "balanced" or
"value" funds. We usually think of such funds as less risky in a market
downturn. But such funds tended to invest in financial stocks, which as
you know have gotten hammered over the past year.

For index funds like VTSMX, you can't really blame the fund manager
though. Financials really do make up a significant part of the broader
indexes, and index funds have to track that. While energy and metals
have done well, the size of the financial market in America dwarfs the
size of the metals market, and so any index fund has to be weighted that
way too.

[FrediFizzx]

"Steven L." <sdli...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:9t-dnRXpSaCMCx_V...@earthlink.com...

Because the financials have been hit so hard, their weighting is not
nearly as big now. I shifted a bunch of stuff over to AMAGX in Jan.
2007. No financials. Glad I did.

Fred