This page was researched and built on my own time. Neither DBA Systems
nor Titan is responsible for the information herein. To
the best of my knowledge and ability it is accurate and available from
public sources. Any mistakes are purely my own, so, beware, I may
have been drunk, hallucinatory, hubristic, or lying through my teeth
(no, wait, that was last night!). Opinions are given in a
slightly smaller font -- think of them as whispers.
"I ain't a lawyer, I ain't an accountant, and I ain't gonna pretend
to be one. You gets what you pays for."
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Plan Comparison
100% on 1st 2% 75% on next 4% 50% on next 2% (4 years if hired before 1 July 99) |
100% on 1st 5% |
upcoming changes to DBA's plan |
Fund Comparisons
The following tables compare performance between the DBA set of funds
and the Titan set of funds. Current information may be obtained
by clicking the fund names or charts.
Information in the tables is from the
Yahoo Finance site.
I was planning on also linking to the "official" sites for each fund, but
Smith Barney
does not seem to want to be associated with its own
TRAK (aka Consulting Group Capital Markets) funds.
Vanguard has no such hesitation,
however, and (except for the "Vanguard Retirement Savings Trust") official
information on its funds is easy to find.
In each table, the DBA (Smith Barney TRAK) funds are on the left, and the equivalent Titan (Vanguard) funds are on the right. The expense ratio's for the DBA column are somewhat complex. TRAK has a quoted expense for each fund, but what they don't quote is their 1.5% annual "advisement fee", which they claim is external to the fund, and need not be included in their fee statement. So an individual investor would earn 1.5% less than the stated "total return". DBA's contract with Smith Barney negotiates a special, across the board total fee of 1.76% on all funds, so I also list this as well as the true actual return received by DBA employees. DBA investors in the Government Money fund are probably paying one of the highest fees on any money fund in the country (1.76% is way out of bounds for a reasonable fee on a money fund). Two Vanguard funds have an additional $10.00 annual fee, so if you have exactly $666.67 invested in one of these, it is equivalent to the 1.5% TRAK fee. But if you have $10,000 invested, it would only be a 0.1% fee (which at that point they wave anyway). The Vanguard Small Cap Index Fund (NAESX) has a one-time 0.5% fee paid at purchase. Since the other fees are all paid annually, I did not include this in its table. |
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VMMXX info from Jun99 Vanguard Yields
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Two ratings had been given for each fund. The best known rating is probably Morningstar, which rates funds with between one and five stars, five being best. The other rating was CDA, which rates funds numerically from 1 to 99, with 1 being best. Both systems measure composite performance of two elements. Morningstar uses return and risk, whereas CDA uses return and volatility. In both cases, return is a measure of how much the fund increased or decreased over a given interval. This includes not only price change, but also reinvested earnings from dividends and capital gains. Risk, as used by Morningstar, is a measure of how the fund performed compared to treasury bonds. This measure is then compared to other funds in the same category (large growth, domestic bond, etc.), and a relative ranking is assigned. This ranking is combined with the return ranking, and up to five stars are assigned. Volatility, as used by CDA, is a measure of how "jaggy" the price curve looks for the fund. Lots of ups and downs means high volatility, and a relatively smooth curve means low volatility. This measure is used to penalize the return ranking, with higher volatility raising the CDA rating. Since Yahoo! no longer lists the CDA ratings, I no longer include them here either.
Remember that both rating systems are calculated based on past performance.
There is no guarantee that a 5-star fund will still be rated so high two
months from now. Similarly, a fund with a CDA rating of 90 might
well improve to 37 next year.
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Get current fund info by clicking 1st part of fund name. Get current Morningstar info by clicking X. Get comparitive charts by clicking Funds. Chart info is updated daily by Yahoo!. |
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eXTReMe
Accesses since 2 March 1999
Page last updated on 19 September 1999