Well, the United Rentals tender offer that I participated in went through successfully. As expected, the offer was oversubscribed (press release), which means that more shares were offered than they were looking to buy. Only an estimated 34% of shares tendered will be bought, which left many would-be arbitrageurs holding shares of URI they didn’t really want. The stock price dropped to $16.83 as of the end of Friday.

Most Larger Investors Didn’t Do So Well
This means that even if you bought more than 100 shares at the lowest price available after the tender offer was announced ($18.95), sold whatever you could at $22 and sold the rest for the best price available afterwards ($17), you wouldn’t have made any profit. In fact, you would have lost about 4%. While you can always hold onto the stock and hope for a rebound, that leaves you as a stock investor, not an arbitrageur.

In practice, trying to game one of these tender offers on a large scale is very difficult. Even if you have confidence the offer will not be revoked, there are too many smart people playing. If the offer price is close to the current share price, the expected profit would be so low that the risk wouldn’t be worth it. If the offer price is significantly above the share price, then everyone will rush will tender their shares, ironically resulting in nobody being able to sell their shares.

Better Opportunity For Smaller Investors
However, if you bought an odd lot of 99 shares, which are given priority in many cases including this one, you would have gotten all your shares cashed out. Buying perfectly at $18.95 and selling at $22 would be a 16.1% gain in about a month’s time. Of course, your actual profit before commissions and fees would have only been $301.95. $300 is the cost of a schmoozing business lunch with a few martinis on Wall Street. Therefore, this is a great chance for small-time investors to have an edge.

My timing wasn’t quite perfect – I bought at $19.81 per share, resulting in a profit after fees of $191.91 (9.8%) in less than a month. Annualized return is likely to be north of 100%. Even after taxes, that will be buy me over 25 meals from the lunch carts. 😉

I’m pretty picky about which of these offers I decide to jump into, so we’ll have to see if any other interesting ones pop up.

Yesterday, I bought 99 shares of United Rentals (ticker URI) stock for $19.81 per share, in the hopes that the company will buy it back from me next week for $22. Huh?

Quick Background
Sometimes companies choose to buy back their own shares for a variety of reasons. Often this is done via a Dutch auction process where each shareholder will indicate at what price they wish to sell (“tender”) their shares. The company will then start buying back starting with the cheapest price and going up until they get enough shares. If you indicate a higher price, you balance getting more money with the risk of having them not be sold.

United Rentals Details
URI is the largest equipment rental company in the world. In early June, United Rentals told shareholders that they wanted to buy back 27 million shares using a Dutch auction with a range of $22 to $25 per share. The offer period ends on July 16th. At the time, the stock price was only $19.50. You can find more in their Letter to Shareholders, part of a larger SEC Filing.

Risks and Rewards
The price of URI stock has been wavering recently between $18 and $21. Given that the $22 minimum offer price is currently a ~10% premium over the current market price, one risk is that too many people will tender their shares for $22, which means URI will only buy a partial amount of your shares. Your remaining shares may then drop below the price at which you bought. This risk is alleviated if you buy an odd lot of 99 shares, because according to their stated buying process your shares will be bought first.

Another related risk is that this tender offer will be canceled or amended. The company might lower it’s offered price. So then it becomes a fuzzy skill to “read between the lines” and make an educated guess as to how the management will handle this.

I am not an expert at this process by any means and am not recommending that anyone else follow my example, but here is why I think it will still happen:

• The day before the tender offer came out, the share price was only $19.50. With less than a week to go, the stock price is around $20. The stock has not plummeted or anything, but has been moving up and down with the overall market a bit. The picture remains about the same, so there is no new reason for them to change their minds if they haven’t already.
• The company had the ability to back out on this offer on July 1st (and technically every other day so far) based on one out-clause, but declined to do so.
• The current P/E ratio of the stock is only 6. It is not an overpriced growth stock, although it does have some debt issues. Most examples of fundamental analysis that I found have reported this company to be at least somewhat fairly valued.
• The financing for this deal appears to be taken care of already. So they don’t need to find anyone to lend them the money for this.

Again, I am primarily a passive index fund investor; I am not an expert in this area (not even average) and I do not consider this stock part of my portfolio. This more of a calculated gamble with a short-term resolution (offer expires July 16th), with the added bonus of learning more about stock markets in the process. I am always interested in learning more, and have been waiting for a good opportunity to try another one of these. (Kaizen!) Besides, you tend pay more attention when you have some skin in the game. 😉

Personal Details
I bought my shares yesterday for $19.81 with a limit order set at $20 before market open. Upside: If all goes well, I will gain $216.91 (minus $25 in fees) with an initial investment of $1961.19. Basically I’m trying to make $200 while putting up $2,000. That is a return of 10% over what should take a few months. Annualized that’s still over 30%. Downside: The tender offer is canceled, and I am left with 99 shares of URI. I can either keep them and hope for positive return down the road, or I can sell them. If I really want to minimize potential losses, I can set a sell stop order.

Although I have an account with Zecco Trading (review) for my other fun money plays that has free trades, I decided to buy these with my Scottrade (review) account because I have used them for similar arbitrage transactions in the past and I have a few free trades left over from their referral program. I will need to contact Scottrade today and let them know that I wish to participate in this tender offer. I will be subject to an additional $25 fee for “non-mandatory reorganizations”. In cases like this, I like having a local branch to talk to so I can make sure things are done in a timely manner.

More References
» Fat Pitch Financials Contributor’s Corner – An excellent resource for such arbitrage deals, but requires a paid subscription of $125/year (or $15/month). I recently bought a year’s subscription when it was still $100/year.
» Stable Boy Selections – His 7/8 post reminded me about this offer, which I had actually forgotten about.
» New York Times DealBook Blog – More discussion on the probabilities of this offer going through.

A co-worker of mine disclosed today that she moved her entire 401k to cash and bonds last week. She is older than me and has what must be a sizable balance because her reasoning was “I couldn’t stand it anymore, all my contributions for the last year have disappeared! Why did I bother?”

I thought that it was an interesting – albeit dangerous – way of measuring returns. I can see how it can be depressing if you start with $100,000 at the beginning of the year, keep putting away $1,000 every month for a year, and then at the end of year… you still have only $100,000 due to market drops. It can be easy to view it as simply throwing money away. I miss the safety of cash!

But this is dangerous because comparing absolute changes in your entire account to your current contributions would seem to greatly magnify any gains or losses in your account. For example, if you start with $100,000 put in $1,000/month for a year in a bull market, you might end up with $124,000 at the end of the year. You put in $12,000, but your balance grew by $24,000! Feels great, maybe I need more stocks! But in reality this is basically the above scenario in reverse, and nowhere near a 100% return.

This way of framing losses reminded me of the popular behavioral finance book Your Money & Your Brain. Are our brains just wired poorly to deal with the swings of investing?

On the other hand, perhaps this should also serve as a reminder to properly assess your appetite for risk. Going back and forth between lots of stocks and zero stocks is highly unlikely to return in better overall returns. Numerous academic studies have shown that even professional money managers don’t do market timing well at all. Simply picking something in the middle and sticking with it actually turns out better. We can try to use these gloomy times to try and find that balance where we won’t be tempted to go either way in both good times and bad.

Via Bogleheads, yesterday Vanguard started the trading of a new investment that attempts to track the entire global stock market in just one fund. Dubbed the Vanguard Total World Stock Index Fund, here are some details from an older press release:

The new fund will seek to track the performance of the FTSE All-World Index, a float-adjusted, market capitalization weighted index designed to measure the equity market performance of large- and mid-capitalization stocks worldwide. The fund will invest in a broadly diversified sampling of securities from the target benchmark, which comprises more than 2,800 large- and mid-cap stocks of companies in 48 countries.

The current balance is about 41% US and 59% International. The ETF version (VT) features an expense ratio of 0.25% but has to be bought in a brokerage account. The mutual fund version (VTWSX) can be bought and sold for free at Vanguard ($3k minimum) and has an expense ratio of 0.45%, along with a 0.25% purchase fee and a 2% redemption fee on shares redeemed within 2 months of purchase.

Although you could basically replicate this fund with the proper mix of the Total US Stock Market ETF (VTI) and FTSE All-World except-US ETF (VEU) funds at a lower expense ratio, you’d also be subject to double the commissions when buying and selling. Besides, I think it’s just cool that you can now passively invest in the entire world with one ETF. For example, if China eventually becomes 25% of the world’s stock market value, then 25% of this fund would be invested in China without you having to lift a finger. If somehow India or Russia explodes instead, then you’ll still hold their share.

How could this fit in to your investment plan? More posts about asset allocation information here.

I’m always flattered when anyone (online or offline) asks me for investing advice, but at the same time I’m very cautious about giving it out. And it’s not just the usual *I’m not a financial professional* legal concerns, but the fact that it’s hard to give useful advice in a few paragraphs or a 5 minute chat. Over time, I’ve been refining my “amateur, informal financial advice over coffee” speech. My goal is to give specific ideas but to keep it simple. Let me know what you think.

1. Put your money in a Vanguard Target Retirement Fund. These mutual funds are an all-in-one basket of different low-cost index funds. You get some US stocks, some international stocks, and some bonds. The mix is automatically adjusted for you. No, they might not be perfect, but they are pretty darn good and very simple to hold. I have specifically have told my own mother to open an account at Vanguard. I withhold any theory talk about passive investing because this is when most people’s eyes seem to glaze over.

Just buy the fund with the date closest to when you want to start making withdrawals. All lifecycle or dated funds are not made the same. The ones in my 401k stink, and I don’t even like the Fidelity Freedom 20XX funds.

The Vanguard funds do have a $3,000 minimum initial investment. Until you have $3,000, just stick your money in an savings account paying decent interest and with an automatic deposit system. I know it sounds nice to “start investing with $100” (and here are some ways to do that), but honestly, if you don’t have $3,000, your focus should be more on saving money by spending less/earning rather than investing at this point. There is no need to rush.

2. Read a good investing book
Websites and blogs are great, but it is still very hard to replace a good book. They tend to be professionally edited, better organized, cover all the bases, and are easy to refer back to. I think the following books are great and are definitely worth the $10-$20 cost:

• Four Pillars of Investing – Most detail, for those with longer attention spans
• Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing – Somewhere in the middle
• Coffeehouse Investor – Least detail, short and easier to read

If you’re not convinced (perfectly understandable), first borrow it from the local library and then buy a copy if you like it. Read as much as you can!

3. Hey, no skipping ahead. Please do #2.
My friends ask me for advice. I say to read a book. Months later, most of them (not all) haven’t read any books but still want advice. Yes, I know, this involves effort. (Gasp!) Please, spend a weekend doing something that will dramatically increase your net worth in the future. If you don’t, then at least if you did #1, you’ll be ahead of most investors who pay too much money chasing hot stock tips or pay other people to chase hot stock tips for them.

4. Pay someone to do it for you
If it’s been years and you still haven’t read a darn book and don’t plan to, go to NAPFA.org and find yourself a fee-only financial advisor that you click with. Pay that person to keep you on track. If they are fee-only they are less apt to be biased on what investments they recommend. But remember, the person who will care most about your money is still you.

Have you ever considered becoming a professional financial advisor? You can read about one man’s story in this article Evolution of an Investor from Conde Nast Portfolio. Blaine Lourd started out as a stockbroker, and found out he was really good churning accounts for his own profit:

“It was amazing, the gullibility of the investor,” he says. “When you got a new customer, all you needed to do was get three trades out of him. Because one of them is going to work. But you have to get the second one done before the first one goes bad.” […]

It wasn’t exactly the career he’d hoped for. Once, he confessed to his boss his misgivings about the performance of his customers’ portfolios. His boss told him point-blank, “Blaine, you’re confused about your job.” A fellow broker added, “Your job is to turn your clients’ net worth into your own.” Blaine wrote that down in his journal.

Although he kept at it and became rich and successful, Lourd eventually got tired of picking investments for his clients based on whether it made him richer and not them. When he tried to change his investment recommendations in a manner that followed his conscience, the large brokerage firm he worked for fired him. (A.G. Edwards, now Wachovia Securities) Now, he is a fee-only financial planner who makes less money advocating passive investing, but sleeps better at night. (I doubt he’s eating Top Ramen, however.)

His job, as he now defines it, is to tell investors that the smartest thing they can do is nothing. He acts as a brake on, rather than an accelerator for, their emotions. For that, he takes between one-half of a percent and 1 percent annually, which is more than they’d pay if they simply bought index funds on their own. “I tell them, ‘Look, if you can control your own emotions and you want to go to Vanguard, you should do it.’ And every now and then, someone asks the question, ‘Why do I need you, Blaine? What are you doing?’ And I say, ‘Howard, be careful or I’m going to send you back to Smith Barney.’ And they laugh. But they know exactly what I mean.”

The comments on the article seems to focus primarily on the whole active vs. passive investing debate, which is valid but I think misses the bigger point mentioned above that one way happened to make him a lot more money. Even if you believed in active investing, you could still avoid things like promoting high-cost, in-house mutual funds, trading in and out excessively to generate commissions, and selling unnecessary insurance products.

I also enjoyed this article because it reminded me of my idle fantasies of becoming a financial planner. Wouldn’t it be cool to help people manage their money better on a 1-on-1 basis? Unfortunately the reality seems to be that most people starting in this field have to put in at least a few years in a commission-based brokerage firm making cold calls and aggressively pushing whatever products they say to push. Otherwise, with no experience and no big recognizable company name behind you, it will be impossible to get any clients.

My own idea was to join some firm with low entry requirements like Ameriprise or Edward Jones, but only sell products that I felt were appropriate like index funds or term life insurance. I wonder what would happen? I suppose that I would be fired quickly for not meeting quotas. Even Mr. Lourd, who was still making lots of money for his old company even while advocating index funds, got fired for not following the company line. Still, it would be fun to try.

529 plans have become a very popular tool for saving for college for those that choose to help out their kids (or simply funding some continuing education for yourself). Most states have their own 529 plans, sometimes even multiple choices within those plans. They are very flexible – anybody can invest in any state’s 529 plan, and that money can pay for college expenses in any other state. Beneficiaries are also easily changed between relatives.

Conventional Advice
The standard advice for picking a plan is to first check if your state has a good tax deduction for using your state’s plan. Something like 32 states offer some sort of benefit. If so, then consider going with that plan. If not, then go with the “best” out of state plan since many state plans have poor investment choices and higher fees. If somehow you have a really horrendous state plan with high fees, then you might even forgo the tax deduction and go with an out-of-state plan.

But… Why not do both?
Most 529 plans allow both partial and complete rollovers into another state’s 529 plan. So, why not first take any tax breaks available to you by contributing to the in-state 529, and then see if you are able to quickly roll over those funds into a better out-of-state plan. Keep the in-state plan open if you intend to make future contributions. I checked out a sampling of various state plans and they all offered partial rollovers.

This way, you get both the upfront tax benefit, and the long-term low-fee benefit. Seems plausible, no?

Some states might have a tax-deduction recapture rule. In that case, I might consider contributing only up to the tax deduction and then opening up another better 529 for additional contributions. You can have multiple 529s.

My Experience – Oregon, New Hampshire, and California 529s
You may be wondering why I have a 529 plan listed in my net worth, even though I don’t even have any kids. In fact, I have opened 529 plans from three different states! About five years ago, the California 529 was giving away $50-$100 gift cards for opening a plan and depositing $100. I figured, why not, that’s a pretty nice return on investment. We might use it, and if not you can always withdraw principal without penalty. So I opened up an account for me and one for my wife, with us as the beneficiaries.

Then, while in Oregon, they offered a state tax deduction on $2,000 of contributions each year (now $4,000 for a married couple). So I contributed to that. Finally, there was a Fidelity College Rewards 529 credit card that paid 2% back into a Fidelity 529 plan (it now only pays 1.5% back to new applicants). 2% back on everything was great, so I opened up a 529 from New Hampshire that Fidelity ran.

Long story short, I have since rolled everything into the New Hampshire 529 plan with no fees from anyone. The paperwork was easy, although you do want to track your contributions in case you make a non-qualified withdrawal. The New Hampshire plan is not bad, with a 0.50% expense ratio for their index fund portfolios including all management fees, and no maintenance fee, and only a $50 minimum to start.

Best Out-of-State Plans To Consider
I haven’t done exhaustive research on this topic, but if you believe in low-cost index funds then one of the best plans is definitely the Ohio CollegeAdvantage 529 plan. The have Vanguard mutual funds with a 0.18-0.23% management fee on top of fund expenses. The total annual asset-based fees can be as low as 0.21%, but the age-based portfolios are about 0.30%-0.35%. No maintenance fees.

If you believe there is a performance benefit to investing in several asset classes, there is also the more-expensive West Virginia SMART529 Select plan which offers mutual funds from Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA). Total asset-based fees are 0.65% – 0.88%, plus a possible $25 maintenance fee for non-WV residents.

Since I still have my credit card relationship and my balances are low, I don’t bother moving away myself. I don’t actively contribute anything except my credit card rebates, so saving 0.15% in fees on my $3,000 would be less than $5 a year. But for folks with larger balances and held over longer periods of time, the performance advantage of lower fees can definitely be significant.

For those of you who have been using Zecco and their free stock trades, no longer will you have to endure a paper trade confirmation being mailed to your home for every single trade. Here’s how to switch:

How do I sign up for Paperless?
Just sign into the trading center with your trading key. Select the “Account Statements” link in the “Account Records” section on the left-hand menu. Then click on the corresponding button for electronic confirmations or statements (or both). When signing up for Paperless, please check “myInfo” in your account to make sure you have a valid email address in our records. Click on “Submit” and you’re done! Your next account statement and/or trade confirmation will be available for viewing online. You will be notified of new documents available for viewing via email.

Even if you aren’t as excited about this as I am, be sure to switch over to electronic statements anyway by May 30th. Because after that, they are going to start charging $1.50 per paper trade confirmation and $2 per paper statement mailed to you.

Active Trading Confessions…
Why do I care? Well, despite my belief in passive investing for the vast part of my portfolio, I’ve continued to dink around with my free trades from Zecco for the last several months, and have actually been “beating the market” and am currently up over 10% this year – ha! Of course, I’ve also been down as much as -20%. Let me tell you, this sadly generated a lot of paper!

But don’t worry, we’re only talking about $500 worth of stocks or so – I don’t consider this really part of my investing portfolio. Instead, I consider it entertainment that is cheaper than buying video games or playing online poker. I’m looking to learn more about options trading next.

For those unfamiliar with Zecco, here’s the quick rundown. You can get 10 free trades per month if you reach $2,500 in account equity. Otherwise, it is $4.50 per trade. “Account equity” means value of stocks + cash. So $1,500 in cash and $1,000 in stock positions would qualify. As long as you reach $2,500 total any time during the month, you will get 10 free trades for the rest of that month.

Although they have improved their customer service (toll-free phone number, shorter hold times) and stock quote systems since their beginnings, at the heart this is still a discount brokerage firm. (Duh.) Don’t expect too much hand-holding. No minimum balances or account fees for regular taxable accounts. $30 annual fee for IRAs. For more details, see my Zecco Review.