Almost all publications have some kind of "editorial calendar" that lists (among other things) the dates by which various articles and other items are to be prepared, proofed, and published. Readers, of course, are most interested in the last of these: publication dates.
It’s been more than three years since we provided you with an overview of our SMI calendar, so for the benefit of newer Members (and veteran Members who would welcome a refresher) here is a quick summary of our target days/dates for web and print publication.
Web-only articles. Typically, we post web-only articles (i.e., "blog posts") on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. However, as events warrant, we may post a piece on a Tuesday or a Thursday — most often such additional posts will be related to a strategy update or other timely information.
(To ensure you never miss a post, go to our main page at SoundMindInvesting.com and, in the right column, click "Set Up My Email Updates." Follow the instructions, and from then on you’ll be notified via email about new articles and/or updates.)
Tracker and FPR. We update SMI’s Personal Portfolio Tracker and our complete Fund Performance Rankings report around the 10th-14th [UPDATE: 8th-11th] of each month, depending on when we receive the performance data and when weekends/holidays occur.
If you use Tracker and/or the FPR, you’re aware of how data-intensive these resources are. The FPR lists performance details for more than 1,600 no-load mutual funds and ETFs. The Tracker data is even broader, with a database of thousands of funds (including load funds) and some 20,000 share "classes" (a single fund may have multiple retail and institutional classes). Put another way, the Portfolio Tracker contains almost the entire universe of fund options!
We license the bulk of the Tracker/FPR data from the research firm Morningstar, which typically makes its month-end performance information available to us only a day or two before we post it (it takes a little while to "translate" Morningstar’s data file into usable tools for our Members — a process we have sped up considerably in recent years and which we are trying to speed up even more).
Monthly newsletter and new Upgrading recommendations. Most of the time, we post our monthly Sound Mind Investing newsletter and any new Fund Upgrading recommendations on the third trading day prior to the end of the month. (Last month, that was Wednesday, March 28. This month, it will be Thursday, April 26. Next month, because of the Memorial Day holiday, we will post a little early — Friday, May 25.) This gives Members plenty of time to make any necessary trades by month’s end.
The print edition of the SMI newsletter is mailed about a week after web posting, simply because it takes several days for the printing, addressing, and mailing process to occur.
Important information about Upgrading choices: We base any changes in our Upgrading recommendations on momentum data we receive just days before the SMI newsletter is released online. In other words, the performance information we use for Upgrading selections is typically about three weeks more current than the month-end data that was released around the 10th-14th via the Tracker/FPR.
DAA and Sector Rotation updates. We post our Dynamic Asset Allocation and Sector Rotation updates on the final trading day of the month, based on the most current data, and give our recommendations for the month ahead. So, for example, this month the DAA and Sector updates will be posted Monday, April 30, and those posts will include any recommended changes for the month of May. Next month, the updates will be issued on Thursday, May 31, and will include any recommended changes for June.
We hope this overview of our posting and publishing dates is helpful. If you have suggestions about how we might improve our monthly editorial calendar, please let us hear from you below!
This post has been updated.
