Reddit Posts
Mentions
Re: PBLAX - please see the annual sticky on this topic - [https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/1pefkce/its\_that\_time\_mutual\_fund\_divsdistns\_are\_going\_to/](https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/1pefkce/its_that_time_mutual_fund_divsdistns_are_going_to/) Thanks.
I would be glad too. >Ahhh... very good question. >Dumb 24 year old Soldier making 5k a month with literally no bills just looking up mutual funds Give yourself some credit, you were smart enough to invest for the long term. That's better than a lot of 24 year olds. Just so you know, under IRS rules mutual funds are required to make distributions to the owners of the fund on a regular basis. Uncle Sam wants his money--which then goes to pay your salary. If you have dividend reinvestment, the fund value went down, but the number of shares you own went up, so your financial position after the distribution was exactly the same as before. I [wrote](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bogleheads/comments/1pdlssz/the_latest_morningstar_report_shows_how_to_invest/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) this recently about how to invest in 2025, and it's had almost 200K views, and lots of upvotes. I think you would find it useful. However, I'll cut to the chase. I'd suggest you sell PBLAX and buy the Vanguard ETF VTI or the mutual fund equivalent. The costs are substantially less, you own the whole US market, and over time as the Morningstar numbers show passive investments like index funds do better than the majority of all mutual funds. The last thing I'll say is the tortoise wins the investment race,and starting early helps. I suggest you buy VTI, or the Fidelity or Schwab total market equivalent, and invest regularly when you can. If you do that, you'll do better than about 90% of all investors, and there is nothing dumb about that.
The capital gains distribution isn't new money, it's just the fund realizing gains and paying them out. When that $1,766 got distributed, the fund's price dropped by roughly the same amount per share. So you reinvested at the lower price, but your total value stayed about the same. Your "red" is probably just the price drop from the distribution plus whatever the market did that week. The real issue is that 5.5% load and the expense ratio on PBLAX. You're paying a lot for active management that historically doesn't beat a simple index fund. Might be worth looking at something like VTI or a growth index fund if you want similar exposure without the fees eating your returns over time.
PBLAX benchmarks to the Russell 1000 Growth Index. It has a 5.5% upfront sales charge, a 1.00% deferred sales charge and a 0.96% expense ratio. This is a very high cost mutual fund and if you want to track the Russell 1000 Growth Index then you should go with the Vanguard VWGRX which doesn't have sales charges and an expense ratio of only 0.06% PBLAX had a long term capital gain distribution on 12/11/2025 of $8.3248. The day before, 12/11 if you had $8,500 in the fund you would have had 175.511 shares @ $48.43 which generated a distribution of $1,461.09 (175.511 * 8.3248). The distribution would have been reinvested buying 36.382 shares @ $40.27. This leaves you with 211.793 (175.511+36.382) shares @ $40.27 for a total investment of $8,528.90. Dividends are not free money.
PBLAX paid an $8.32 cap gain. That money comes out of the NAV, so the price drops by that amount. If by "my investments go into the red" you are referring to the price dropping this week, that's why. When the dividend gets reinvested, the total value of your account will probably be about the same as it was the day before the dividend.
FOCPX's holdings are in the 30% range tech according to morningstar. Same with PBLAX. So that's 8k of your 16k, not to mention your market accounts will hold tech as well. It's just a question of what you want to do and what kind of investor you want to be. If you don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about it, and you have a long time until retirement (23 so sure), then starting to put more into VTI is a decent approach to get diversification.
Hi all, I thought I'd post since I feel like I'm pretty confused with my Roth IRA. I started adding money to it when I was 23 and didn't realize it was supposed to invest manually in things until about two years ago, I'm 28 now. Medium risk is fine, no debt, I make around 115k so retiring early could be nice but for now I'm assuming that's not going to happen. I have 4k in FOCPX 2k in FTBFX 3k in PBLAX and 4K in VTSAX. 3K unallocated. I honestly just chose these based off a few articles & guides and my personal finance app tells me I'm slightly over-concentrated on tech, but in good shape? A lot of the threads I've been reading, folks just invest in 1-2 funds, including VTI. I don't have that and was wondering if I should funnel the rest there?