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birb_cromble  6d ago (text post)   887 thread views

Weekly Finance Thread - 2026-08-08

A weekly thread to discuss financial matters - from personal all the way up to global.

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I have a portion of my portfolio that I would like to be highly liquid and effectively zero risk. Currently, my approach is to buy Blackrock money market ETFs, but these present a problem in that a) my broker does not have good tools for daily cash sweeps, so getting compounding interest requires too much micro-managing and b) the gains are subject to income tax.

Do you guys have approaches to the risk-free parts of your portfolios that are brainless and optimized? I'd strongly, strongly prefer for it to be accessible through Merrill so I can keep high status.

I have a portion of my portfolio that I would like to be highly liquid and effectively zero risk. Currently, my approach is to buy Blackrock money market ETFs, but these present a problem in that a) my broker does not have good tools for daily cash sweeps, so getting compounding interest requires too much micro-managing and b) the gains are subject to income tax.

Do you guys have approaches to the risk-free parts of your portfolios that are brainless and optimized? I'd strongly, strongly prefer for it to be accessible through Merrill so I can keep high status.

I don't know a thing about Merrill Lynch, but I keep a portion of my portfolio in VMSXX which is the Vanguard Municipal Bond Money Market Fund. From what I understand, they invest only in municipal bonds which are close to maturity. So that the price per share won't change even if interest rates fluctuate. And in fact, if I understand things correctly, VMSXX has traded at $1 per share for many years. I use VMSXX for (1) money I am putting aside for tax payments; (2) an emergency fund of a few hundred thousand dollars.

I am not an expert on taxes, but from what I understand the interest payments are exempt from federal tax. I also read somewhere that if you live in a high tax state like California or New York, there are similar funds which invest only in the municipal bonds of that state, getting you out of state taxes as well.

Also, when I buy into VMSXX, the system asks me if I want to automatically reinvest dividends. Even if your platform doesn't do this, I'm pretty sure the dividends are paid out once a month so it may not be too cumbersome to reinvest manually.

Last, I am able to buy into VMSXX even from other trading platforms. So perhaps it's available from Merrill. Or perhaps Merrill has something similar.

So if you are looking for something which is (1) highly liquid; (2) very low risk; (3) largely tax exempt; and (4) automatically reinvests, I would consider a municipal bond money market fund.

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