ikkyu2 (99.46)

Tightening Back Up

November 15, 2011 – Comments (1) | RELATED TICKERS: EEM , INTC

In my little retirement portfolio, I manage the US stock part of the fund (although a lot of it is in companies that do a lot of business overseas.)

But for the overseas - world stock - part of the fund, I have two positions:  EEM, an MSCI emerging markets tracker; and a Fidelity fund that tracks the MSCI EAFE. 

I am not very impressed with these index-based funds.  For instance, in return for my 0.75% annual management fee on EEM (for a fund tracker - seriously), and for holding it for a year, I have been treated to a 2% loss.   I feel like I could probably pick foreign stocks to do better than that, at the cost of a bit of diversification.  Say what you will, but I am an excellent stock picker - alpha is between 20 and 30% for each of the past six years (still lost a little money in 2008, but a lot less than the broad market did.) 

In other news, I see that Buffett, or more likely his protegé Todd Combs, saw the same thing I did in INTC.  He picked up a $200m stake.  Total no-brainer, in my opinion.  The stock is up another percent today, probably on that news.