Interview in Bloomberg today. Active stockpickers. The first one profiled has a holding period of at least ten years, preferably forever!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-27/some-stock-pickers-show-active-can-still-beat-passive-investing?srnd=homepage-americas&sref=OzMbRRMQ
"Rajiv Jain, co-founder of GQG Partners in Florida, has taken a similar approach, making concentrated bets on just a handful of stocks. His biggest fund, a $42 billion vehicle distributed by Goldman Sachs that includes old-guard energy companies such as TotalEnergies SE and tech superstar Nvidia, has returned 13% annually since its inception in 2016, double the gain of its benchmark.
Last year, Jain scooped up shares of Adani Group companies as others fled amid a short seller’s accusation of accounting fraud. The contrarian bet paid off, with the value of his investment growing fivefold when Adani weathered the crisis. “We are a business of taking risks,” Jain says. “You have to be uncomfortable sometimes. If you look like an index all the time, guess what? You get indexlike returns.”
Jain, who moved to the US in 1990 from India, makes outsize bets on companies with strong balance sheets and decent earnings growth. Unlike Rizk, though, he is liable to change his mind quickly when market conditions shift, and he has no qualms about liquidating his position if he sours on a company’s prospects. “Our job is to make money for our clients,” Jain says. “It’s not an ideological exercise. We are not trying to change the world.”

PVCMX quacks like an allocation fund to me. The fund has never held more than 17% stocks.
The stock sleeve just happens to be in SCV. The bonds are in T-Bills, and then there is a MMF and some gold and silver. So it came through 2022 in the green. For my money, so did IYK and FSUTX.
If standard deviation is your thing, PVCMX rocks at 3.26 for the last three years. RSIVX has outperformed it with an SD of 2.72. But you would have lost money in 2022.

In the last 15 years now, US LC are dominant, why investors MUST diversify more and/or invest in lagging categories and keep missing performance and in many cases have higher risk/volatility?
US LC is the easiest, most common investment category, this is not a small unknown unique one.
BTW, if you have any good analysis where to invest please share it.

They cost $145 to $199 a year
I assume you do not have to also have a M* premium membership but I am just guessing
I have subscribed to most of them of andon over the years but never found them particularly useful
They did have model portfolios that were reasonable but I don't remember being super excited about their results

Hi, yugo.
In general, I invest with people who've earned my trust. That generally has two components: (1) this isn't their first rodeo and (2) I've talked with them and came away impressed. As you'll note from my annual portfolio review, my typical holding period is decades.
I've written often about how I define "winning" when it comes to investing. First, winning is not "beating" anyone or anything else. You made more than me? Excellent!! The next round of drinks is on you. The market made more than me? That's nice. Second, winning for me is simple: "if the sum of your resources exceeds the sum of your needs, you've won." In that world, winning is driven by steadily accumulating resources (invest regularly and prudently, avoid losing money) and minimizing needs (my home is modest, my clothes last a long time, eating out is usually a celebration rather than a routine, in 45 years of driving I've owned one new car). Those two habits frees up a lot of brainspace for things that bring me joy.
To your "who" question: Mr. Romick, Mr. Foster, Mr. Sherman, Messrs Cinnamond and Wiggins, plus some collection of low-profile professionals at T. Rowe Price and Leuthold.
In general, Artisan is entirely a collection of stars who grew dissatisfied with their old haunts and were offered support and independence as Artisan Partners. Their misses as a firm are relatively few.
David

Two years of rather dismal performance. 2023 and now well into 2024. We are moving out of BRUFX. Years ago, it soared near the top of its performance category. Respectable profit for shareholders. No more. We have a long time horizon, and a couple of middling years is OK. But nothing like the current dismal track record. So, we are moving on. Reducing risk into WBALX, and it pays twice a year, in June and December.

Different is great when your fund have better performance or at least better risk-adjusted performance, the rest are just excuses, such as diversification, SC, EM, Value looks great based on indicators that have been inaccurate for years, you can't compare a fund to any benchmark, others.

I looked at four GQG funds and they all have high turnover ratios, although not as high as 200%. Jain seems to be able to make active management work, whereas others cannot. In global growth a few years ago, Kristian Heugh could do no wrong; unfortunately results for MGGIX in 2021 and 2022 put him at the bottom of the heap during a time when Jain's GQRPX shone.

Thoughtful piece by that title in the WSJ, 3/16-17/2024. One bullish argument for stocks is that there's an ocean of cash "on the sidelines" that might flood the market in the face of a dip.
Telis Demos, writing for the Journal, argues "not so much." Two reasons. First, while money is pouring into money market funds, it seems mostly to be moving from savings or checking accounts with negative real returns (the average yield on sweep accounts is 0.05% he claims, while my credit union is doling out a rich 0.01% on savings) to liquidity fund that are yielding 5% or so.
Second, when the money flows back out of money market funds, it usually flows into income investments rather than equity investments.
(I also suspect that the folks most desperate to buy Nvidia or DJT on a dip are not necessarily folks which huge cash reserves and vice versa, the folks like me who structure a 50% income sleeve into their portfolios are not apt to suddenly become memesters.)
Money markets hold $6.5 trillion currently, up $150 billion in two months. "[A]nalysts at Barclays estimate that ... what appears poised to possibly move into riskier assets is about $400 billion to $600 billion," including both equity and income investments. JP Morgan Chase strategists report that "companies with huge cash piles are still opting to be weighted toward money funds ... S&P 500 nonfinancial companies' cash investment portfolios hit a historical high of57% allocated to cash" at the end of 2023.
See "Market Bulls Won't Get a 'Wall of Cash,'" March 16-17, 2024, p.B12. The article is online but behind a paywall.
Palm Valley Capital Fund continues to putt along with about 80% cash and short bonds which implies that its microcap value stocks have been returning something like 15% a year for the past three years. (I'm assuming a 2% annual returns on the cash portion of the portfolio.) Stocks in the only microcap ETF (First Trust Dow Jones Select MicroCap ETF FDM), which is also value-oriented, 2.92% annually for the same period. Translation: the fully invested microcap ETF returned 2.9% while Palm Valley, with only 20% invested, returned 4.3%.

Hi, yugo.
A lot depends on what qualifies as "left and came back." There are relatively few managers who liquidated their funds and took a sabbatical. Michael Fasciano comes to mind, but his second act was short.
If you think, instead, about managers who left a behemoth, waiting out their non-compete agreements then launched, the list is ... well, about half of the funds we're profiled. Seafarer, GQG, Grandeur Peak, Rondure, Prospector, Poplar Forest, Centerstone, Bretton, Moerus, Seven Canyons, and Towpath are all the products of star managers turned entrepreneurs. One of the reasons that we tracked manager changes and funds in registration so assiduously for years was to track to discontent and departure of first-tier managers.
David

Covered-call funds, about which Devesh has written a series of essays (two more will appear in our April issue), are artificially and temporarily suppressing volatility, if Charley Grant and the WSJ are to be believed:

The stock market is calmer than it has been in years. Some worry that a popular strategy is contributing to the tranquility.
Measures of market volatility have fallen to levels last seen in 2018 ...
Investors are seeking protection from potential losses by pour money into [covered-call ETFs] ... assets in such funds has topped $67 billion, up from $7 billion at the end of 2020."

Their argument is that this sort of herd trade (in volatility ETFs) "blew up in spectacular fashion six years ago." The options trade now exceed stocks in value, with ever covered-call position necessarily matched over an opposite position in "call overwrites." The concern is that this is a complex, leveraged structure that might be catastrophically vulnerable to an external shock that causes a cascading rush to the exits.
To be clear, Devesh and the Journal are competent to comment on the risks. I'm not. Mostly I wanted to highlight the prospect that your hedges might become your anchors. (See Charley Grant, "Popular bet weighs on volatility," WSJ, 3/26/2024, B1. It's online with a paywall and a slightly different title.)
Curious for them to repeat a story unless their anxiety is growing. (Might call for Zoloft.)

What is the best bond fund total return one can HOPE for in the next twelve months? Assume dividends are irrelevant because they will be reinvested,,, assume low default rate because you have chosen a fund with high quality portfolio. And said fund has a duration of 5.8 years. And let us imagine that in the next twelve months interest rates are cut 1%. More specifically 4 cuts of .25%. So what would be the best possible total return under this scenario? Just wondering.

FCNVX is an ultra-short-term bond. Its retail class was eliminated a few years ago, and the ER was also lowered for the remaining class. Besides the Fido m-mkt funds, it's the only Fido fund without any frequent-trading restrictions; it settles T+1.
Competing ETFs are USFR, ICSH. JPST.
These are all inv-grade.

GQG Partners gets a lot of comments here. Them seem favorable. The institutional version of GQEPX frequently turns up in my screens at MFO Premium as a "Great Owl." I have it on a watch list. The expense ratio is reasonable. It's available at Fido; I could add it to my IRA.
So? What's my problem? With GQEPX, that is . . .
The turnover. M* says it's 211%. That's a lot of turnover. So I look at the investment strategy in the prospectus:

the Adviser typically pursues a “growth style” of investing as it seeks to capture market inefficiencies which the Adviser believes are driven by investors’ propensity to be short-sighted and overly focused on quarter-to-quarter price movements rather than on a company’s fundamentals over a longer time horizon (5 years or more). The Adviser believes that this market inefficiency tends to lead investors to underappreciate (sic) the compounding potential of quality, growing companies. To identify this subset of companies, the Adviser generates investment ideas from a variety of sources, ranging from institutional knowledge and industry contacts, to the Adviser’s proprietary screening process that seeks to identify suitable companies based on several quality factors such as rates of return on equity and total capital, margin stability and profitability. Ideas are then subject to rigorous fundamental analysis as the Adviser seeks to identify and invest in companies that it believes reflect higher quality opportunities on a forward-looking basis. Specifically, the Adviser seeks to buy companies that it believes are reasonably priced and have strong fundamental business characteristics and sustainable and durable earnings growth. The Adviser seeks to outperform peers over a full market cycle by seeking to capture market upside while limiting downside risk. For these purposes, a full market cycle can be measured from a point in the market cycle (e.g., a peak or trough) to the corresponding point in the next market cycle

That doesn't read to me like "And the only way we can do all that good stuff is to turn this sucker completely over twice a durn burn year! Yeehaw!"
The strategy reads more like an argument for a sedate rate of turnover to enjoy those "sustainable and durable earnings" over "a full market cycle" with tea and biscuits in an old, well-upholstered leather chair, on a Persian rug, by a crackling fire.
Am I missing something with this? Are we just hoping the team is that good at selling and buying stocks at that pace? And can keep it up over some period of time?

Finance Professor:
First, a piece of advice. Don’t believe much that you read (including what I write), especially about buybacks. The mythology on buybacks is staggering, including the claims that they are funded mostly with debt, that they come at the expense of value creating investments and that they are primarily to cover stock-based compensation. The truth is that stock-based compensation is not only a much smaller amount than the buybacks, but the companies that are the biggest buyback players are not the ones where stock compensation is a large percent of expenses. ... The truth is that the buybacks, for the most part, are cash infusions to investors, and much of that cash gets reinvested back into the market.

Let's start with that last part, and for simplicity say that all (rather than much) of the cash is reinvested back into the market. Let's also assume that the cash for buybacks comes from profits. not from debt.
Then from the individual investor's perspective, there's little difference between distributing the cash in the form of (qualified) dividend distributions and using it the cash buy back shares. In the former case, investors pay cap gains rate tax and reinvest back into the market. In the latter case, share price is boosted. And by assumption investors extract the gain (paying cap gains tax), reinvest the gain back into the market.
Same net result, same tax consequences.
One difference between distributing profits via divs and via buybacks is the effect of dilution when options are exercised. However, if the move is toward RSUs w/o voting rights, the dilution effect is somewhat mooted (by being muted).
Another difference is the effect on stock performance based compensation. Buybacks benefit C-level employees by boosting the value of their options (or RSUs). Also by enhancing their reputations as skilled managers.
If one changes an assumption, saying instead that many people do not reinvest (redeploy) profits in the market, then buybacks have the potential to benefit mom and pop investors. They don't have to pay taxes on the profits until they cash them out years later. But that would be an instance of tax code distorting investor (and company) behavior.

At the end of my non-profit career, I worked for an e-recycler; reuse being the highest form of recycling.
I have had my hand on lots of different hardware, including vintage McIntosh; but that's another story.
Apple operating systems are sound. But they don't keep people like my wife from getting into difficult situations that derail her work until Number 2 child helps her out. She listens to him. :) Before going into consultancy, she was regularly talking to her tech support people over an entire career in Apple land. Just the usual stuff I've seen everywhere tech is in use.
Apple hardware is notorious for built-in obsolescence. They are notorious for making it more and more difficult for anyone but them to repair their products. I believe these are two of the issues that now have them under investigation in the EU.
Apple isn't the only company churning out crappy hardware. But at least the rest of the industry relies on standard connectors, rather than inventing proprietary ones every two-three years. Well, the EU has already weighed in on that practice.
I use an Apple iPhone. It's wearing out too soon, but Android always feels like the worst Linux desktop anyone could think of. I'm typing on a used Latitude laptop running Xubuntu Linux. And I have a used Windows 10 PC, on which I can run a virtual machine in which Linux is running for my current main hobby that relies on tech.
I'm pretty much agnostic about all of the hardware/OS stuff. But I am always tickled by the fervor some feel for one thing or another, as if they were the hometown team.

@BaluBalu, PEY & SCHD look back 10 years. FDL (M*) looks back 5 years. Those are just a few that made it through to my watch lists that are based on looking back.
Wisdom Tree has some interesting dividend strategies that aren't reliant on looking back at fixed periods of time.

Two days ago - to my sadness and delight - I had learned via MFO that Eric Cinnamond, one of my all-time favorite managers with ARIVX/ICMAX was back in the mutual funds world with Palm Valley Capital Fund (PVCMX). ('Sadness' because I have missed almost 5 years of exploiting his financial acumen for a modest management fee and 'delight' because I have now been able to put a sizable investment into his new vehicle.)
This got me thinking, are there any other great/good managers who came back to manage a mutual fund or an ETF after being away for some time in the last, say, 20 years that I might be missing on?
(No knock on Bill Nygren, who's done an admirable job at the Oakmark Fund (OAKMX), but I am still hoping for the day that Robert Sanborn comes back with a publicly available investment offering.)

The notion that because you or I invest in a Blackrock ETF, we give our proxy to Larry Fink is absurd. And its anti-democratic.
The notion that because you or I invest in virtually any mutual fund, we give our proxy to ISS or Glass-Lewis is absurd. That's the elephant in the room, more so because this duopoly advises nearly all (90%) fund sponsors on how they should vote their proxies.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2023/01/30/the-controversy-over-proxy-voting-the-role-of-asset-managers-and-proxy-advisors/
Anti-democratic? The corporate world was never democratic. Dollars, not people (dēmos - "common people") hold the power. If you don't like the way Blackrock funds are being run, vote your fund's of directors out of office. See how much sway your paltry dollars have. Or mine.

ESG means different things to different people, in no small part due to the marketing efforts of financial management companies to muddy the waters. On one end of the spectrum is impact investing, where one invests in companies and technologies specifically to improve the state of the environment. On the other end of the spectrum is what Blackrock and others call ESG integration - considering risk factors like increased exposure to flooding due to a changing environment - among all the risk factors considered when deciding whether to invest in a company.
https://www.blackrock.com/lu/intermediaries/themes/sustainable-investing/esg-integration
That's just prudent investing. And good marketing - slapping a label like ESG (popular until recently) onto something that is standard operating procedure. Failure to consider all significant risk factors could be considered investment malpractice.
For example, last year Texas proposed SB 1446 that would have prohibited state pensions from investing with any management company that considered ESG factors.

Despite declaring that [Texas County & District Retirement System] TCDRS “has never had an ESG policy,” and does not intend to have one, [Executive Director] Bishop said that the bill “would keep us from partnering with some of the best investment managers in the world.” Bishop added:
“If we had to adjust our asset allocation, we estimated it could cost us over $6 billion over the next 10 years. And this would cause our employers cost to more than double.”

https://www.esgtoday.com/texas-anti-esg-investing-bill-faces-pushback-over-6-billion-cost-to-pensions/

I'm unclear how MDD management would increase outsourcing of Boeing? The MDD acquisition occured in 1997. That's 25 years ago. Strange it would take so long for these changes to manifest defects/problems.
As the acquirer, presumably, legacy Boeing management dictated what decisions were made as regards outsourcing. The acquired management team is usually not in a position to dictate how a business is run. If they were unhappy with any pre-merger MDD outsourcing, it would have been in their purview to bring outsourced functions back 'in house', no?
Anytime a process gets outsourced, its still encumbent on current management to ensure they have sufficient QC controls over the outsourced process. -- You can outsource a function, but you cannot outsource responsiblity!
Is the current BA CEO an engineer or a finance dude? I believe the latter. Perhaps too much current management emphasis on stroking Wall Street, not enough on getting the engineering right?
Every hour spent on DEI training is thousands of man-hours which could have been devoted to something else. Like QC.