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The Badlands
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The Badlands a little closer.
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An old bank in Custer City that was or will be a coffee house.
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A farm near Custer State Park.
We also visited with the Wall, SD fire department, traded shirts and patches and got a look at their fleet which was very impressive. The trucks are slightly different from what we are used to as their wildifres are typically grass fires as opposed to forest fires; their trucks had much beefier hardware to pump and roll. One other different thing is that in Arizona and many other places in the Mountain time zone there are national forests. Coming out of the Badlands we drove past the Buffalo Gap National Grassland.
12 comments:
Isn't it amazing how different the landscape is by just traveling 100 miles or so. I did a bike ride from Seattle to Washington DC, and South Dakota was my favorite state as far as terrain, people, and food.
Very cool story, it is very neat here but it was over 100 degrees yesterday in the Badlands and in Wall too; 105 in Wall. Who knew it could get that hot here?
105 in Wall just means you can enjoy the free ice water more. They do that, right?
Thanks for sharing the photos, Roger.
Sam
Free ice water at Wall Drug yes! and five cent coffee too
Enjoying the new old page format on my iPad, Roger.
Thank you.
I was very much looking forward to investing in RRGR. Then I saw that your expenses are in my opinion outlandish. For example 1.4% plus IYW fee of .47% yields a feee of 1.87% for that portion of your fund! Similarly you are 12% in cash for which you are charging 1.47%. In the prospectus you state that you will cap your fees @ 1.25% but then you throw in another fee of .!5% for whatever acquired fund fee is.
After reading you wonderful blog for many years I was excited to be able to invest with you, but I think your fees are avaricious. Especially as you feel comfortable going on vacation as soon as you start things up.
Responding to 8:20, then a question for Roger. The fees are high by the standards of an index ETF, but actually on the low side for actively managed ETFs; I am OK with the fees because I think Roger can add sufficient value to overcome this headwind. My concern is the volume, or more correctly, the lack thereof; low volume means selling can be difficult; really need to get more shares out into the hands of retail investors. Roger, I appreciate that you may be constrained in what you can say, but is anything being done to address this concern? A possible action might be for AdvisorShares to offer shares at a penny or so below the IIV (just a suggestion that you probably cannot implement on your own). Thank you.
8:20, Per the prospectus we are the subadvisor and are paid 0.35% for managing the fund. There are things like legal fees, reporting fees and fees for things like printing the IIV every 15 seconds that must be paid. Further Bank of New York, the custodian, does more work than you can imagine which they do not do for free and finally the fund provider has taken a risk giving us this shot and is entitled to benefit if the fund ends up doing well.
As for the ETFs in the fund, anyone hiring an active manager who includes ETFs with stocks faces the same thing.
That may work out to be too expensive for you, fair enough but avaricious is not correct.
10:08 where ETFs are concerned, volatility does not equal liquidity. Our lead market maker is Knight. Doing a good job for us will mean committing capital to facilitate volume and doing so with out an excessive spread. Knight will either do a good job or they won't, it is too early yet but I have confidence in them and hopefully that will be justified.
"...lead market maker is Knight." Do you mean Knight Capital Group (KCG)? If so that was a pretty major IT glitch they had this Weds.
yes it was quite a glitch, see the comments of my subsequent post for more info.
Roger, just wanted to clarify, I wasn't concerned: The problem may have temporarily affected one name I trade but Knight immediately did the right thing, redirecting traffic towards other market venues, so as a tactical matter it was not a big deal.
Bigger picture it only highlighted what we already knew: The role and influence of computer systems has become dominant and potentially destabilizing. My own view is that it is probably time (possibly past time) that the search for greater efficiency and speed take a back seat to greater systems redundancy and more robust circuit breakers. YMMD
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