The conservative portfolio continues being our best performing portfolio, which is how you'd want a safe portfolio to do in a down market. Dragging it down are weak performance in the few stock funds in the portfolio. We are concerned about the future of bonds given that we see little room for rates to go anywhere but up from these levels. We are underexposed to the type of bonds most likely to fall from these levels, namely intermediate Treasuries, so we are not overly concerned about this. If the stock market falls to extremely low levels, say Dow 5 - 6,000 range, we would consider shifting more of this safe portfolios assets to high dividend yielding stocks, even though it would raise the risk level a bit.
The Artisan International Small cap fund has done well for us, and we've seen asset levels rise which should lower the sky high expense ratio of this fund a bit. In general we like our international focus in this portfolio, and expect to continue to outperform the US stock market with our mix of funds.
Our high risk Gabelli Global Telecom fund still shows no signs of a comeback, as the underlying telecom issues are still suffering from late 90's excess that may not be fully gone until half the companies in the area vanish. We still like this contrarian call for this high risk portfolio.
September 2002 performance review
The conservative portfolio continues being our best performing portfolio, which is how you'd want a safe portfolio to do in a down market. Dragging it down are weak performance in the few stock funds in the portfolio. We are concerned about the future of bonds given that we see little room for rates to go anywhere but up from these levels. We are underexposed to the type of bonds most likely to fall from these levels, namely intermediate Treasuries, so we are not overly concerned about this. If the stock market falls to extremely low levels, say Dow 5 - 6,000 range, we would consider shifting more of this safe portfolios assets to high dividend yielding stocks, even though it would raise the risk level a bit.
The Artisan International Small cap fund has done well for us, and we've seen asset levels rise which should lower the sky high expense ratio of this fund a bit. In general we like our international focus in this portfolio, and expect to continue to outperform the US stock market with our mix of funds.
Our high risk Gabelli Global Telecom fund still shows no signs of a comeback, as the underlying telecom issues are still suffering from late 90's excess that may not be fully gone until half the companies in the area vanish. We still like this contrarian call for this high risk portfolio.