Subject: Re: Target Maturity Funds (TMFs)
Hi, MisterFungi,

Finally have some time to look closer at what you and Charlie, et al, are saying on this board.
I have been buying 4-week treasuries every tuesday to build a ladder or something, that revolves my cash a bit better than I have. These are teensy baby steps, I know, but I want to understand the mechanism and this is about what I can handle.
I will go to Schwab, or call them, and find out what a WFC/PRL is because I have $1,151 in it and just got my first dividend of 18.75.
I'm down .17% from when I bought it 3 months ago, but if i get four of these dividends per year, at today's price, that's 6.52%. So what is the downside of buying more of that?

My concern is, the market is going up a lot and while I put a bit into Brk every month, I'd like to put more in and make up for what I took out during covid. I kind of freaked out and took half my money out of the market. Well, I'm 72 and got scared.
So, I don't want to put a lot in at the top of the market. Mungofitch made a rec a while back about the WFC/PRL and I thought I'd buy a piece and see what it was. So, that's where my question comes from. Would Schwab bond desk explain that to me???

Thanks.

Meanwhile I'm reading the Intelligent Investor, again, and getting more out of it than I did 20 years ago, when I knew even less than I do now.
I'm trying to keep it simple but I need to understand what "simple" is!

I read a blog by Benjamin Graham's granddaughter the other day, recommended by BreckHutHigh on the Berkshire Board, Beyond Ben Graham. #4 With a Little Help from Ben was especially touching and distilled for me the source of his art in security analysis:

"A boyhood of financial hardship made a lifelong impact on the adult man. Benjamin Graham grew up to be a man who chose the subway over taxis, 'alleging to myself that [the subway] as quicker' but knowing well that I wanted to save the dollar or so involved.' He also admitted his habit'as a millionaire'of ordering the least expensive entrée on a menu. More profoundly, he never forgot how it felt to lose everything. He knew first-hand the struggle of trying to get by on too little. These experiences kindled his creativity on Wall Street. He invented security analysis and value investing for people like himself and his mother, who wanted their investments to make gains with minimal risk. His essential principle of margin of safety, detailed in The Intelligent Investor, sprang from a boy's ardent wish to be safe, not sorry, after witnessing his mother's lost investment in U.S. Steel.
The margin of safety principle guides investors to choose only stocks that they can buy at a price significantly below their intrinsic value. To determine margin of safety, an investor calculates the difference between a stock's market price and its intrinsic value, as determined by Benjamin Graham's formula. The larger the margin of safety, the greater the cushion that protects the investor from loss. Countless children, and their parents, shop for bargains, but only this exceptional 'small boy''who bought a baseball and used tennis balls at prices well below their value'grew up to devise a timeless investment principle based on this practice. I'm struck with how elegantly margin of safety distills the lessons of fiscal caution Ben Graham learned in his youth."

Even though security analysis is about money, it stemmed from a deep need to be safe. I understand that far better than the quest for "money."