Sunday, March 30, 2008

Mutual Fund picks for Roth and Brokerage account

I recently made a Roth IRA contribution for my wife and myself. Over the past several years, all these contributions have gone to broad market mutual funds maintaining my asset allocation of 10% bonds, 90% stock (with stock being split between international, emerging market and US). However this time, I decided to get a little bit more adventurous. I purchased $4000 worth of KBE in my wife's Roth account. Banks have been hammered in the last several months and this ETF is yielding around 6% in dividends alone. Of course the situation could get worse but in the long term I think the banks are likely to rebound.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=KBE.

In my Roth IRA I continued building my holding in VASGX (Vanguard Life Strategy Growth Fund) http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=VASGX. This one is an asset allocation fund with investments in US, International, emerging stock market indices and 10% in bonds.

This time I also got a good amount of refund in taxes (need to adjust my tax withholding for 2008) and I also expect to get a check due to President Bush's stimulus package in May). A friend of mine told me about this Oakmark mutual fund that seems to have had spectacular performance since inception. OAKBX (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=oakbx) has around 60% in equity and has performed well. I wanted to pick this up in my Roth account, however Oakmark allows new investors to invest in them only through them directly. I did not want to open a different Roth account. So my tax refund and the economic stimulus package check are going into that fund.

I also considering bolstering up the REITs (Real Estate Investment Trust). I have VGSIX http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=VGSIX in my portfolio that has also been hammered with the real estate prices dropping. However, I will wait a little bit before adding to REITs (I believe the real estate market might get impacted further with the financial crisis).

2 comments:

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Unknown said...

Hi Tarun,

Restart blogging. Very much awaiting more posts.

Roger