Glad to see several others recognize the high risks of debit cards.
Bottom Line per my nephew who was a VP of a local bank:
"The riskiest card by far you will likely ever carry in your wallet is a bank debit card."
Along with ONLY using a debit card for ATM transactions, one very effective control we've used for them for many years (and I HIGHLY recommend to all readers here) is an email (or text I would guess) notification of ALL debit card transactions immediately upon occurrence. The bank we use allows customers to set a dollar limit for that control, which we set at $1. It has been our experience that our bank has never missed one of these notifications - I go to an ATM and w/d $200, an email pops into my Inbox. After the fact, but at least immediate notification!

Is it reasonable to call PVCMX a tactical allocation fund, rather than an equity fund?
I have liked HFSAX in the tactical allocation category for a while. I spoke with the fund personnel a few years ago but never got around to pulling the trigger because I was not sure how long the manager will work in asset management (single manager fund). Does anyone here by any chance know? He does not need work. I am not sure anyone else can replicate his skill. I think 2022 and 2023 performance is an anomaly relative to the fund's long history.

In reading all of the above commentary I still find myself wondering what payment method is really "safe"?
We have never used a debit card, except on European vacations for local cash withdrawal. Lucky there- never had a problem.
All credit card debt is paid in full each month. Over the years we have had a couple of instances of credit-card fraud/theft, which were caught quickly and caused no loss on our part.
Some entities have recurring permission to bill to a credit card account. No entities have permission to withdraw directly from a bank account.
Being very old-fashioned, my wife still pays virtually everything by credit card or checks, mailed directly from within the post office. If a check was stolen, at would have to be at the delivery end, which at least cuts the theft location opportunity in half. Checks are written with gel pen, as recommended by security organizations. The checks themselves, from Schwab Bank, have a security indicator which changes color if exposed to at least some types of tampering.
Given the fact that the value of the checks can vary so dramatically from month-to-month, I need to keep a substantial amount of money in the Schwab checking account, which would seem to be our most vulnerable point for fraud/theft. Not too sure what can be done about that, though. I do check the Schwab checking account balance every few days just to keep an eye on things.
It seems as if every permutation of payment systems has some sort of potential weakness.

Taking dividends is a lot easier than figuring out total return. The money just shows up if you aren't reinvesting. No doubt there's lots of academic arguments over this.

Not really.
Example: you can use a simple index = SP500 = FXAIX at Fidelity to sell shares every month for a specific amount ($2-4K) on a certain day and let it run for years, problem solved and you know exactly how much you get every month.
The only thing that matters is total returns which include the distributions.

@hank
You noted: Seriously … I’m convinced that moving from TRP to a Fido brokerage account several years ago took 2-3 years off my life. Horrendous experience.
Horrendous regarding which organization? Thank you.

-
Thanks for the ”catch” Catch. Some may remember the episode from about 3 years ago. In fact, you were one of the members who answered technical questions and provided encouragement.
- In the first half of 2021 I initiated a transfer of assets from TRP to Fidelity (cash method).
- A paper check from TRP arrived at Fido after about 2-3 weeks.
- Fido opened an account and deposited credited the proceeds from this check.
- I than purchased several different funds.
- 1-2 days later TRP cancelled the check (refused to pay).
- I learned of this only after Fido had sold the funds I’d purchased (at a loss to me).
- Fido notified me I was in violation of SEC rules (“free-riding”) and their own policies as well.
- I struggled for answers with a number TRP’s (mostly inept) phone reps over several days.
- 15-20 minute phone “holds” in the middle of discussions were common over this period.
- TRP admitted error, apologized and said they would rectify it.
- After 7-10 days another check from TRP arrived at Fidelity.
- All 4 of my accounts (Roth, Trad, 2 TOD) were placed on 90 day probation.
- Being on probation prevents using / reinvesting / proceeds from sales of investments for a number of days (until after Fido receives the funds). Further “infractions” could lead to being bared from trading.
Arrrgh!

@hank
You noted: Seriously … I’m convinced that moving from TRP to a Fido brokerage account several years ago took 2-3 years off my life. Horrendous experience.
Horrendous regarding which organization? Thank you.

I seldom write checks anymore.
My average annual number of checks has been ~6 the past few years (property tax, vehicle registration, dentist).
An online bill payment platform is used to make the vast majority of payments.
I purchased Uniball "207" gel pens several years ago but am disappointed with their performance -
they do not write as smoothly as I would like.
I've already implemented most of the practices suggested in the article with the primary exception
being taking pictures of checks.

Have a drink & lean back!
Seriously … I’m convinced that moving from TRP to a Fido brokerage account several years ago took 2-3 years off my life. Horrendous experience.

I moved all of my TRP funds to my Fidelity account a couple years ago since all of the funds are NTF at Fido. This has made my life so much simpler. I have kept the TRP funds that have been good performers, but sold the laggards and reinvested in Fidelity funds. I’ve invested with TRP for about 30 years but their customer service has steadily declined.

I invested with Eric Cinammond (ICMAX) several months years ago around 2009-10 and sold when markets started to fly, his analysis looks great when markets crash but then he holds too much cash for too long and misses a lot of performance.
Deep VALUE investing usually = trouble LT, because markets are going up most times, based on momo, and can go up much longer than you think. The best I have seen in the last two decades is PRWCX managed by David R. Giroux. It has been a "perfect" fund for anyone who loves a great risk-adjusted performance fund.

@hank
Eric Cinammond ( PVCMX) calls it "the art of looking stupid" . This is a good read.
( BTW PVCMX was ahead of SP500 last three years until October with lot smoother ride!
https://www.palmvalleycapital.com/post/the-art-of-looking-stupid
"In our opinion, current equity valuations do not justify aggressive positioning. However, as we witnessed in Q4 2023, valuations alone have not deterred investors from chasing asset prices higher during the current market cycle. With small caps soaring into the end of the year, we're sure our patient positioning didn’t look very bright. But this isn’t new for us. Patient positioning almost always looks unintelligent during periods of sharply rising asset prices. And while we can’t predict the future, we expect we’ll continue to experience periods of looking stupid, and maybe even smart, but rarely will our paths look the same."
I would think the worst thing to do is to be forced to go 109% in equities because your staff ( or investors) don't like bonds.
Individual investors do not suffer from GMO's career risk where they can be fired for underperformance, unless your partner pays much more attention to the bottom line than mine does.
We just have to answer to ourselves and be able to sleep at night

@sma3 - Thanks. Taleb sounds fascinating. Next on my audible listening list. Currently still listening to Howard Marks, who likes Taleb and quotes him in some of his chapters.
Marks tells a funny story about a (fictional) fund manager who, after a 10 year sizzling hot bull market in stocks, writes a letter of apology to his clients for having lagged the S&P over that time. He and his staff have been trying to “uncover” the reason for why some manager years ago decided the fund needed to own bonds. It’s a real mystery to the current staff. Apparently the decision was based on some unfounded “archaic tradition”. So, he’s been gradually selling off the bond holdings over recent years. Now, finally, his fund is rid of its bonds and 100% invested in equities. No more of this bond nonsense. :)

Quite honestly I have not been successful with alternatives in the last few years. I move on to short bonds and T bills. Much less expensive to own.

Fido makes you wait an extra day to complete a fund-to-fund trade. I can live with that. Agree sooner would be better.

Once upon a time Fido let you reinvest a portion, up to 90% of anticipated sale proceeds as of the last closing price as I recall, during the same trading day. But that ended many years ago.
Their current policy was a source of great frustration for me in early April 2020 when I sold shares an OEF on the day the market bottomed but couldn't finalize buying shares of the replacement OEF until the next trading day. Several % were lost on that trade. That is one of the benefits of investing in ETFs rather that OEFs at Fidelity.

Clearly it's important to know the precise definition of terms when reading statistics. Even back when M* was using 1 year maturities as the cutoff for cash equivalents for analyzing portfolios (i.e. before 2017), it also used the 3 month definition in other contexts. Here's an excerpt from a 2014 M* glossary:

Generally, only investments with original maturities of three months or less qualify under this definition. Original maturity means original maturity to the entity holding the investment. For example, both a three-month US Treasury bill and a three year Treasury note purchased three months from maturity qualify as cash equivalents. However, a Treasury note purchased three years ago does not become a cash equivalent when its remaining maturity is three months

https://morningstardirect.morningstar.com/clientcomm/DataDefinitions-EquityandExecutive_201408.pdf
This restriction of cash equivalents to securities with original (time of purchase) maturities of three months is lifted straight from the official definition of cash equivalents as given by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) Accounting Standards Codification® (ASC) 230-10-20. That's what reporting entities, like mutual funds, corporations, etc. use:

Cash equivalents are short-term, highly liquid investments that have both of the following characteristics:

a. Readily convertible to known amounts of cash
b. So near their maturity that they present insignificant risk of changes in value because of changes in interest rates.

Generally, only investments with original maturities of three months or less qualify under that definition. Original maturity means original maturity to the entity holding the investment. For example, both a three-month U.S. Treasury bill and a three-year U.S. Treasury note purchased three months from maturity qualify as cash equivalents. However, a Treasury note purchased three years ago does not become a cash equivalent when its remaining maturity is three months

ASC 230 July 2023
For completeness and wonks: FASB defines GAAP.

The FASB Accounting Standards Codification® is the source of authoritative generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) recognized by the FASB to be applied by nongovernmental entities.

FASB cash flow update
Personally, I consider Treasuries and CDs with just weeks until they mature to be equivalent to cash regardless of when I acquired them. I consider no penalty CDs to be cash regardless of maturity length.
Suppose I have a 2 year T-note that I acquired at auction and it has 6 weeks until maturity. GAAP says that's not a cash equivalent. But if you and I swap the same T-notes, then they become cash equivalents because we just acquired them. I'm sure the accountants know what they're doing, but by my kitchen-table bookkeeping those two T-notes are the same.

I've been contemplating down markets as we make new highs in some areas of the market.
[snip]
Long term treasuries have historically appreciated during periods of equity down turns. This was not the case most recently as we witnessed both equities and bond move down in unison.
Have we returned to more normal times where bond (especially LT bonds) will balance out our portfolio performance by acting as the opposite weight (barbell) to our equities?
[snip]

Intermediate-Term Treasuries have historically provided ballast for stocks during downturns without the duration risk of Long-Term Treasuries. I don't believe 2022 bond market performance will be repeated anytime soon. Starting yields were very low and the Fed funds rate increased significantly thoroughout 2022.
We have returned to more normal times.
This doesn't preclude Treasuries or investment-grade bonds from experiencing potential losses in 2024.
However, I think high-quality bonds are much more attractive today compared to a few years ago.

I retain an old school perspective that my parents -- who were products of the great depression and dust bowl -- taught me.

Ditto. Parents were in their “formative” years during the Depression. Stocks were a dirty word. I gifted them a money market fund in the 70s once into which I’d deposited $500. MM funds paid double-digest interest then. But they didn’t trust it and moved the $$ to the local bank they could actually see driving by every day. :)

I never understood "I need cash for an emergency".
It's been already over 30 years since I needed lots of cash. Just in the last 1.5 years, we had the following unpredictable expenses:
1) My wife totaled a vehicle and we bought a new one. I took a small loan and paid it in full in 2 weeks because the dealer gave me a $500 discount. He also agreed to charge my Visa 2% cash back for another $10K. I still owed close to $10K which we paid by check because the dealer was willing to wait 4-5 days.
2) First time in my life we just went to see the possibility of replacing the other old vehicle one Saturday, and found a great cheaper option than expected and just bought it. That dealer only allowed me $3K on my Visa 2% cash, the rest was expected in 2 business days. I sold a fund at my broker account on Monday and wired the money on Tuesday.
3) The roof started leaking heavily. First, we covered the hole with a blue tarp. Then, we found a roofer I liked. For the initial pay of just $2K, I used the same Visa again. He charged me 3% (lost 1%) but I did it so I can dispute something in the future while you can't do it with checks. The work was amazing and I paid with a check.
4) The deck suddenly was wobbly and could not be used. Same process as above.
All were "must do/fix it quickly".
We just keep several thousand in the bank and the rest is invested in brokerage accounts in the market. Most retirees have safer, short-duration bonds they can always sell. In the last year, MM pay over 5%, again not a problem, but MM will not do that for a long time. I don't invest in anything I think can't generate 6+% annually.
BTW, while I was working I was laid off 4 times, when I needed more money, I just sold 1-2 of my mutual fund. Again no need to hold months of available cash.
All our credit cards and loans over the years were paid in full every month and why we have a very good credit score.
I'm still looking for a logical reason why I need an emergency fund and can't find one...wait, I got 2 needs = illegal drugs or ransom.

Quote - On the essence of value investing:
In their fiscal year 2000 Annual Letter to Shareholders, Leucadia National Corporation’s former chairman, Ian Cumming, and former president, Joseph Steinberg, spoke to this dynamic, likening themselves to groundhogs:
“We pop out of our holes each and every morning and look around the marketplace for investment opportunities. The first question we ask is, ‘Do we see anything that can earn more than the risk-free rate, adjusted for risk?’ When the markets are as high as they have been in the last many years, we saw very little of interest and went back down in our holes…Patience is required for this process, but it is not complicated.”
My 2 cents:
I appreciated this quote. But here is the dilemma for investment managers (IMs)- they have to put committed funds to work in order to justify their annual fees. Investors demand it. Waiting long periods for opps to materialize (essentially, market timing) is often a no-no. It's rare to find IMs with the chutzpah to sit in cash if they don't like the current market conditions. Probably more acceptable for "sophisticated investors", but even then...their patience will wear thin if the IM's guess wrong.

@Derf - Not a bad idea, except mortgage interest rates have rocketed up over past couple years. I actually have a small 3% refi mortgage taken out 5-6 years ago for some remodeling. Hell can freeze over before I’d pay it off. Today you’re probably looking at around 7-8% 6% on any kind of mortgage refinance.* Not an attractive risk / reward proposition IMHO.
* One source I checked shows 15 year fixed refi loans (national average) currently at around 6%.
Umm … maybe. Proceed at own risk! :)