Looking Up

This month's issue features the finale of our Bonds 101 feature, with a Funds Focus on Vanguard's tax-exempt bond funds and ETFs. As with all our Funds Focus articles, we'll tell the potential risks and the potential rewards of each fund and boil them down to a simple buy/sell/hold rating—and usually try and steer you to a better option if we know of one. You'll also find some changes afoot at Vanguard that we'll go into in depth: A brand new ETF-of-ETFs the fund family is introducing that seems more or less redundant with one of its own components, a manager change that threatens to bog another actively managed Vanguard fund with boring index-like performance (without low index-like fees), and a change at three Vanguard bond funds that pits man against bond index in one of the most liquid and efficient parts of the capital markets. And to round things out, we'll also list out September quarterly distributions and review the typical effects on the market and the economy of a natural disaster like the one that affected the Gulf Coast this week. Read More »