I agree. But FLATX has lived up to it's name !!!
"flat" for the last ten years. COBYX has 50% Latin America and is doing much better

So far, people who started as Bogle's personal assistants have eventually landed at the top.
At 55 and only 6 years at the top, did Tim Buckley quit or was pushed out? He may have perfected the race to the bottom ER at the expense of everything else and possibly damaging the Vanguard brand. If Vanguard wants to move forward in advisory business again (it ditched its old advisory business for the robo-advisors/PAS), it had to change the horse. We may have to wait for juicy details of the drama.
MY IRAs remain at Vanguard, but other accounts are elsewhere.

There have been many complaints regarding Vanguard customer service and technical glitches over the years.
Tim Buckley was Vanguard's Chief Information Officer from 2001 to 2006.
Mr. Buckley should therefore be well-versed in technology.
In 2019, he stated the company was spending more than a billion dollars on technology.
Was this technology funding well spent?

@BaluBalu, I am now at around 70% equity in the IRA after living at 75% for years. The main change has been switching cash to bonds. I haven't noticed any major change since last October. I suppose some part of it must have to do with increased returns on cash and floating rate funds since last summer,
I added JAAA to my bond watch list. But I doubt I'll get into anything to do with CLO's.

Sure, anything can happen but I have been reading that this time, really, is the right time..for years already.
I also read in 2008, 2020, 2022, that the Fed hands are tight and...here we are.
I always believed in investing in the market you have, not the one you may or anticipate you have.
And for some, like me, volatility matters.

BTW, you can also create a ladder of US Treasuries extending out 10-20 years that now yields well over 4%. Treasuries are call-protected, and you can easily sell them if you need cash sooner than maturity dates. Treasury income is exempt from state and local taxes, further boosting yields if held in taxable accounts. They also are available as floating rate notes and TIPS.
None of the many bond funds (including intermediate and multisector) that I track have returns exceeding 4% over the past 5 and 10 years, and very few over 15 years.
Furthermore, 4% is often cited as a sustainable annual withdrawal rate for a retirement portfolio. So, you can now achieve that rate with Treasuries for at least the bond portion of a portfolio, presumably using stocks to account for inflation.

@MikeM - You seem to be missing the point about CDs. I don’t recall anyone advocating investing all of your money in CDs, or even a substantial portion. The great thing about CDs right now are the relatively high yields with predictable, stable returns. I have highly rated bond funds that have lost money over the past 3 years, with pitiful returns over the past 5, 10 years.
Now that I am approaching the age for required minimum distributions, it’s nice to know that I can put a portion of my portfolio in an investment with a guaranteed return. Using a ladder, I can create a guaranteed income stream up to 5 years or longer. My CD ladders are yielding 5% plus. Who knows what bond funds will return over the next 1, 3, 5 years? Nobody. BTW, I still own bond funds, and their returns still suck despite the dead-cat bounce in late 2023.

Great post that IMO should be required reading for all of the CD detractors on this forum.
We have maintained a CD ladder for ~15 years. But when CD rates crossed over our % hurdle in 2022, we SOLD all of our remaining dedicated bond funds that weren't SOLD when the great bond crash occurred.
We did NOT reduce our stock exposure, we only reduced our bond exposure which currently (and happily!) sits at its lowest point since retiring in 2012. (Our only bond exposure is via PRWCX and FBALX. Period.) We effectively replaced our bond sleeve with a larger CD ladder sleeve and are enjoying every minute of it.
It's really all about a couple of pretty simple questions:
What does an investor (NOT a trader) expect as LT, annual TRs on bond OEFs?
If your answer to that question is ~4%-5% or lower, then why in the freaking world would you NOT instead have invested those monies in a fixed rate, Call Protected, FDIC'd CD that GUARANTEES that same or better rate? (Aside: If it's higher than that, please pass me what you're smokin'!)
FWIW, ridding ourselves of the nuisances of owning bond funds and managing a bond portfolio allowed us SO much more time to concentrate on our stock portfolio and take on MORE RISK given the elimination of bond fund related risk. And since that transition our stock portfolio performance has significantly improved.

@MikeM - You seem to be missing the point about CDs. I don’t recall anyone advocating investing all of your money in CDs, or even a substantial portion. The great thing about CDs right now are the relatively high yields with predictable, stable returns. I have highly rated bond funds that have lost money over the past 3 years, with pitiful returns over the past 5, 10 years.
Now that I am approaching the age for required minimum distributions, it’s nice to know that I can put a portion of my portfolio in an investment with a guaranteed return. Using a ladder, I can create a guaranteed income stream up to 5 years or longer. My CD ladders are yielding 5% plus. Who knows what bond funds will return over the next 1, 3, 5 years? Nobody. BTW, I still own bond funds, and their returns still suck despite the dead-cat bounce in late 2023.

@MikeM. The equity portion is covered with swaps. From the prospectus:

The Fund expects to use only a small percentage of its assets to attain the desired exposure to the Index because of the structure of the derivatives the Fund expects to use.

The bond portfolio is collateral for the swaps. That's the way I remember it being described when I first bought it several years ago. These days they say that the bonds "seek to provide additional long-term total return." But yeah, it's also there for redemptions IMHO.
Duration on the fund is currently 1.32 according to Doubleline. Doubleline does not cooperate with M*. So I would take their coverage with a tsp of salt.

Nothing on Turbotax
MASS dept revenue services doesn't list it. There is a table that is ten years old

vanguard has been the same for many years, with 2 main PDFs. its up to individuals to track down the federal and state gov related income and distributions that may be relevant to tax filing.
TRPRice has online tables that need be parsed.

I have heard why not EM....this time for about 15 years, and usually diversification is mentioned too .
In the last 15 years, it has been one of the easiest time to make money since the easiest most common category, US LC, has been at the top, but that didn't stop the background noice for Value, SC, international, utilities, gold, the market is overvalued.
It's amazing how much effort investors making to be in the wrong categories year after year.

FWIW, not that it's a valid comparison, but since such a comparison was mentioned, our CD ladder with its just below 4% APY, outperformed GQGPX with its 3.4% average annual return over the past 3-yr period.
;-)

It’s good you limited the GQGPX vs CD ladder comparison to 3 years, since at 5 years you’d be facing an 10.68% annualized bogey for GQGPX. So yes, it’s not a valid comparison.

"or when line falls"
That type of automatic shutoff switch has been around for many years. With respect to PG&E here in Northern CA they were set to shut off when sensing abnormal conditions, then automatically retry a couple of times to see if perhaps the problem had cleared. After it was determined that this procedure had resulted in a number of large fires the switches were reprogrammed to shut off as quickly as possible and then stay off until manually reset.

I-Bonds can only be bought and sold online through Treasury Direct.
You can still get paper bonds with your 1040 refund (up to $5,000 per year). But you have to hope that they don't get lost in the mail (one of mine did). Then to cash them in you either have to mail them to TreasuryDirect or try to cash them at a bank.
Here's Rob Copeland talking with Kai Ryssdal (Marketplace) about the problems he had doing just that.
"what’s happened over the past few years is a lot of banks are starting to reject [savings bonds]. ... when a bank does that transaction [cashes bonds] for you, they make exactly zero cents. And in many cases, these banks just don’t want to do it anymore."
https://www.marketplace.org/2023/10/12/got-old-savings-bonds-lying-around-good-luck-cashing-them/
And the full NYTimes article that Copeland wrote:
When Did Cashing Savings Bonds Become So Impossible?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/07/business/cashing-savings-bonds.html

Most of our very old Savings Bonds have matured. We held then in the paper form and never bothered to convert them into electronic form. So, when we cashed them on maturity at our local bank, we got 1099 from the bank.
For the new I-Bonds that I bought a couple of years ago, I won't be around when they mature, so my heirs will have to deal with Treasury Direct (TD). (-:)
Treasury does what it feels like. I think it should also mail 1099 for transactions, i.e. just putting the info on the TD website shouldn't be enough. After all, if one gets locked out of TD, it may be months before the access may be restored. And the semi-public USPS needs more business.
A few years ago, the SEC fined Gabelli BECAUSE it had posted some info only on its website, and didn't bother to provide that info by mail. After paying the fine, Gabelli now knows better.
But who would dare to fine Treasury?

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/1099/

Every fund in my portfolio fills a niche. I have owned the Wellington funds for more than 25 years but WBALX for example has a bond duration of 1.8 yrs vs the almost 7 years in the Wellington funds. Its bond ratings are also higher ,so again it fits the more conservative part of a portfolio.

IMO Bitcoin is the new forex for retail investors, probably small fries, looking to constantly trade. And I agree w/Balu that once these ETFs came out, it became normalized for the 'EveryWo/Man' and not something only for the rich to play with. But they did legitimize BTC as a trading vehicle ... and perhaps as a *potential* de-worse-ifier for longer-term global investors.
On the upside, they're more liquid and 'valuable' than NFTs, which were a total scam to begin with.
I dabbled in some miners a few years ago, played with some free BTC I got when I opened a crypto trading account, but that's the limit of my crypto forray. Woudl I consider COIN as an indirect play like Yogi? Perhaps. Would I invest in BTC directly or hold it via funds? No....don't need it.

And now Franklin Templeton is changing its micro cap value fund to a small-mid cap value fund which I have owned for numerous years. I don't need another small-mid cap value fund so I guess it is time to sell it.
I used to own Pinnacle Value Fund, but I sold it a couple of years back as well.

@David_Snowball,
Grateful for the time and effort you took to indulge me.
The mantras you laid out match my expectations and is consistent with the PVCMX objectives i remember reading in their fund literature, though i never owned it. I know some Absolute Return funds which do not strictly follow the mantra and with losing years. PVFIX and PVCMX seem to ty to strictly follow the mantra and I hope they succeed. I think it is important for us that funds follow their stated objectives, whatever they are.
I do not pay attention to investor's ridicule. I see myself investing in Absolute Return mandates, and that is the reason why I remember PVCMX. Not PSPTX!
Thanks, @Old_Joe. Now I know and hopefully I will remember why my search results are always limited.