@catch22 - Why not hold on to your technology marbles and wait for SpaceX to go public?
Perhaps as early as 2024
In keeping with the football motif here, were I inclined to play this one I’d probably employ an ”End-around” (indirect route) and invest instead in mushrooms which should benefit from all the IPO publicity and are far less likely to explode.
Really, the possibilities here are endless …
- Reverse play - Sell the stock short which would pay off big if the first rocket blows up.
- Punt - Hang on to for a few days as IPO attracts buyers and soars in price and than sell all.
- Double reverse - Try driving the price down with a massive short position; than switch directions and buy in “on the cheap” after panicked investors have fled.
- “Hail Mary” - Go for broke. Double-down using leverage.
My own low key ”ground game” has never been interested much in high-tech. I’ve have made more money over the years - potentially anyway. But the big swings in valuation would have led to many sleepless nights. Those kinds of swings can also lead to making dumb decisions like jumping ship at the worst possible moment. However, I did own some PRMTX for a few months in late ‘08 - early ‘09 when valuations were at rock bottom.

Truth! They are gambling with lives. No one can say it's a mix-up, like the Air Canada plane that ran out of gas and had to do an emergency landing at a retired military airstrip in Manitoba, which was by then being used for drag-racing at the time. Why? it was a mistake regarding the switch from Imperial gallons to liters as the new standard measurement. 40 years ago.
https://www.cbc.ca/archives/when-a-metric-mix-up-led-to-the-gimli-glider-emergency-1.4754039

@yogibearbull — I’ve purchased numerous third party funds through Fidelity over the years, and I’ve never had a transaction take so long to settle. This was a cash purchase, not an exchange. In other cases, if I placed an order before 4 pm, the purchase price was the fund’s closing value on that day.

... when I bought Fidelity’s TIPs index fund several years ago. I thought it would protect a portion of my portfolio from inflation spikes. It did just the opposite. It was my worst performing bond fund when the Fed started raising interest rates.

Even worse, speaking of deep dumminess, I knew well (he said) that STIP would not be particularly protective, and I also knew it would fare meh or worse than meh with rate raises ... but I did not anticipate how much it would punk out and take time to get back to breakeven. Still better than BND, BSV, VGIT, which turned out to be amazingly bad. No selling of any of these yet, though.

Not all investors will hold to maturity; not all notes and bonds mature at the same time within that year; and then there are the potential defaults (corporates of course). The portfolio would need to continue buying additional corporate notes/bonds, perhaps at lower rates.
Consider just two investors and a single CUSIP. Investor 1 buys in now, investor 2 in a year.
We'll start off as simple as possible. Let's say the current market rate on a 3 year Treasury is 4%, and the underlying Treasury bonds, maturing in 3 years have 4% coupons. So they trade at par. Let's also say that the ETF shares are $100/share.
Investor 1 comes in an invests $10,000. That's 100 shares, buying 10 bonds at par in the underlying portfolio.
A year goes by. We'll assume that the yield at that moment on 2 year treasuries is 3.5%. Shorter term bonds typically have lower yields, or perhaps all rates dropped over that year. The reason doesn't really matter.
A two year bond with a 4% coupon and a YTM of 3.5% is priced at 100.9577. You can find that with a calculator, e.g. Fidelity's, and you can verify it with EXCEL:
EXCEL function: YIELD(DATE(2024,1,1), DATE(2026,1,1), 4%, 100.9577, 100, 2)
Because the underlying bonds have appreciated from 100 to 100.9577, the share price has likewise appreciated from $100 to $100.9577.
Investor 2 comes in and buys 100 shares for $10,095.77. Keep in mind that the YTM at the time is 3.5%. Now each investor owns 100 shares.
At maturity, Investor 1 has received three years worth of coupons at a rate of 4% and gets back the original $10,000 investment when the bonds mature and the fund is liquidated. That's your basic 4% yield. The fact that Investor 2 bought additional shares at a higher price (lower yield) had no effect.
At maturity, Investor 2 has received two years worth of coupons at a rate of 4%, but gets back $95.77 less than the original investment. That's because the investor bought the bonds at a premium.
The YTM that Investor 2 received was 3.5% - just what the market rate on two year bonds was when the investment was made. See the EXCEL expression above. In short, having to buy or sell bonds shouldn't affect the fund's behavior. That's unlike "normal" Treasury bond funds where trading can alter the portfolio's average maturity. (In corporate bond funds, trading can also affect credit quality and risk.)
The fact that the bonds mature over a period of a year can somewhat reduce yield. In that last year, as bonds mature their proceeds are held as cash (think 3 mo Treasuries) which should yield somewhat less than 12 mo Treasuries. Or as the prospectus puts it:

Declining Yield Risk. During the six months prior to the Fund’s planned termination date, the Fund’s yield will generally tend to move toward prevailing money market rates and may be lower than the yields of the bonds previously held by the Fund and lower than prevailing yields for bonds in the market.

@Old_Joe — Oftentimes it pays to acknowledge your ignorance. When I first started buying CDs last winter, I was ignorant of some important details— such as whether they are callable. Some more knowledgeable posters pointed that out to me, and I restricted all of my later purchases to noncallable CDs.
I wish I had sought input, like you, when I bought Fidelity’s TIPs index fund several years ago. I thought it would protect a portion of my portfolio from inflation spikes. It did just the opposite. It was my worst performing bond fund when the Fed started raising interest rates. Ended up selling it for a big loss.

My M* Watchlists were also Exported. It was a while back, so I don't remember exact steps (Edit - Actually, the transport from old M* Portfolio to new M* Investor was automatic after login).
Edit/Add. I checked M* Investor after a long while.
So, basically, things updated in old M* Portfolio are automatically reflected in new M* Investor; I am not sure about the reverse*. This is a big help for those who are already familiar with old M* Portfolio Editing/Updating.
*Edit/Add2. The buy/sell/delete are automatically updated both ways. But dividends can only be auto-refreshed in the old M* Portfolio, and are then automatically reflected in the new M* Investor. There is no way to auto-update dividends directly in the new M* Investor - those can be entered manually, or it can get those from the linked-account, and it treats old M* Portfolio as linked-account. This is a big help for those who are already familiar with old M* Portfolio Editing/Updating.
Performance tabs for portfolios look almost the same as "My Performance" pages in the old M* Portfolio. So, the information is provided on Total Returns, Personal Returns (i.e., including any personal transactions), and index returns annually for up to 10 years, and then monthly for last 12 months (the Menu tab says Trailing 12 Months, but it means PAST 12 Months). This is followed by similar information for each holding (it seems to be open always; the old M* Portfolio had a click to Hide/Show these holding details).
But missing are the total return data for 1-week, 1-month, 3-monts, YTD, 1-year, 3-years, 10-years, Since Purchase, and Custom Dates; these data are in the bottom half of "My Performance" page in the old M* Portfolio, and could possibly be added later.
The old M* Portfolio was/is a unique product and I doubt that the new M* Investor will ever approximate/emulate it fully. The new M* Investors started out as a tool for linked-brokerage-accounts, with some M* analytics slapped on, and M* has made lots of improvements in its features after vigorous complaints.
Anyway, things are much improved and the old M* Portfolio users can hang on to the new M* Investor rather than looking for alternatives. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am also using Stock Rover (SR), so I have 2 different portfolio systems going for now.

So T-bills are in special category different from regular stock and fund sales.
T-bills are in a special category different from regular and muni bond sales. Bonds have their own rules dealing with appreciation. Unless bond appreciation is de minimus (under 1/4% per year), it is taxed as ordinary income (even for munis, except for OID).
Q: If I anticipate a sizable capital gain on the sale of an investment during the year, do I need to make a quarterly estimated tax payment during the tax year?
You can make substantially equal estimates or you can file Form 2210 Schedule AI (annualized income) to account for uneven income throughout the year. I've used that in the past for large 4th quarter Roth conversions, cap gains distributions, fund sales, etc.
You have to keep track of your income by period (Jan-March, April-May, June-Aug, Sept-Dec) and work through the tax liability for each quarter. In recent years before 2023 it wasn't worth the effort because interest rates were so low. Little interest income was lost in paying equal estimates.
2022 IRS pages:
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f2210.pdf (Form 2210)
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i2210.pdf (Instructions)
Also, taxpayers are not required to file a 4th quarter estimate if they file their tax return including amount due by January 31st.

@SecretAgent - My issue with Matthews was an investment with MAPIX. I owned it for more than 7 years, and it still lost money. I’m a buy and hold investor, and didn’t realize all of the turmoil going on at Matthews — managers leaving, manager changes, etc. They changed the manager of MAPIX, who changed its investment style significantly— and it went from a top performing fund to the bottom of the barrel. It made significant gains the first few years that I owned it, and then cratered. All of this happened after the management changes. My fault, I guess, for not keeping abreast. Apparently, a lot of their top managers quit.

MFO's MultiSearch is a great tool with an extremely extensive database underlying it, including a lot of MFO-defined metrics. In no way was I trying to disparage it.
That said, I'm more interested in the underlying data than in the tool. You link to images of the UI to show the screening parameters available. I prefer to look at simple table of those parameters:
https://www.member.mfopremium.com/wp-content/themes/twentynineteen-child_202106v3/olib/media/multisearch_screening_parameters.pdf?v20210728.1
I was taught in programming language design that generally less is better; too many ways of accomplishing something confuses people. Not unlike the effect seen when 401(k)s have too many options. So using predefined sets of options via select boxes is a good screener design for many users.
Realistically, many people think of screeners this way - give me all the diversified foreign funds with large cap blend portfolios and a three year risk/reward rating of 5 (out of 5).
I prefer something more flexible and powerful like a SQL interpreter. The LexisNexis query language is another example of this sort of flexibility, though that language is designed more for document searches than database field searches.
I gave a simple example of a query above that most tools can't handle. Say I'm concerned about the stability of funds that are very small. I might search for funds over $1B in AUM. But recognizing that it takes time to build assets, I might make allowances. For young (under 3 year old) funds, I could accept funds with at least $500M in assets.
Of course I could do this in two separate searches (over $1B, young and over $500M), though I'd have to combine the result sets and weed out duplicates (young funds with over $1B in assets). I'd like to be able to do this in a single query. And I'd like to be able to set arbitrary thresholds, say $767M instead of $500M. That's not possible if I'm given only a choice of $500M, $1B, $10B, or $100B.
As to cost, let's see how the tax laws change in a couple of years. Right now, there are no above-the-line charitable deductions (as there were in 2021). And without a mortgage it's hard to itemize now.
One can still get a tax advantage by contributing via a donor advised fund or a QCD. Those must be pure contributions with no benefit received; they are not subscriptions. Proceeds do go to a good cause. I've contributed before and expect to do so again.
This is not a complaint. It is a fact of life. The subscription services are an inducement to contribute and so pragmatically they cannot be offered separately. If the services were offered separately, people would be less motivated to contribute beyond the cost of the subscription. (I also decline the tote bags offered from 501(c)(3) institutions X, Y, and Z.)
https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/support-us
https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/support-us/501c3/

The attraction for many, I assume, is for investors locked out of PRWCX due to its prolonged closure. TRP put a hard close on PRWCX many years ago. I jumped on PRFCX when it became available and paired it with TCAF, so hopefully the result will replicate PRWCX.

One can download the entire MFO dataset, or as you seem to suggest, download a view that includes only a subset of columns (AUM and a whole lot of other, but not all, fields). And one can program a spreadsheet to sort and search based on various criteria. Better yet, import into a database and use its query engine.
Either way, this is circumventing the MFO screeners, not using them. In the picture on the right below, what this is doing is snarfing the box "Data" and attaching your own query engine to it.

One of the things I used to do for 25 years was sell data. Being able to download all of the data for the price of an MFO subscription seems like more of a feature than a circumvention to me. But there were always people that wanted us to do the slicing and dicing for them. So we charged them more.

" time tested magical thinking...". Too funny @wabac. lol
Wasn't there a fund years ago that was very successful in that it assigned placeholder identifiers for each stock, only looking at financial metrics/performance and took the bias of actually knowing which company it was... I guess those who look at Brand strength would disagree but again I recall this was an outperformer

My preference is to slice and dice raw data (annualized returns, ERs, etc.). My ideal would be a screener that let the user write their own queries - to have access to every data column, to be able to use logical connectors. For example:
> $1B in AUM or (> $500M in AUM and < 3 years old).

With MFO premium you could download the dataset that includes something like AUM, and a whole lot of other fields. And then you could apply those criteria in your spreadsheet. If you're already thinking Boolean, you could probably learn how to apply those criteria in a spreadsheet or data query. Am I missing something?

Buy low, sell high. Which funds aren't based on a formula?
I think of the formulas as theses, though not in the academic definition of the word. I would not invest in a fund if the prospectus could not coherently express the rationale, formula, thesis, approach, what have you, behind their choices. I would not invest in a fund that does not apply its formula reasonably consistently.
Are there any funds based on the idea of throwing what would now be virtual darts at virtual stock pages? Been about 40 years since I read Random Walk. I think that's where I got the idea.
If the market is going up, most theses will likely do well enough for you, if you understand why you bought it in the first place. If the market is going down, almost everything looks dreary. But utes and staples, two hoary formulas, did all right for me in 2022.
Should we wave bye-bye to the the Fama-French three factor model? How many times have you heard that small caps and value are dead? None the less, since inception in March of 2008, the formula behind RWJ has outperformed the mighty 500 formula.
I'm no fan of quants. But back in the day they were generally marketed on the notion that they had some secret formula in a black box that they could not share due to something, something, something. In which case, the prospectus might look something like this:

The XYZ fund is firmly rooted in the time-tested principle of magical thinking. We believe that the sponsor can reasonably expect to line it's pockets, and reward shareholders of the sponsor, at the expense of gullible investors.

I try to avoid any strategy based on some “formula”. Many funds do that to some extent. Dividend Aristocrats / Low Volatility Stocks included. I’d include some of the major equity index funds in that category as well, although many here would disagree.
Problem is these approaches make logical sense when first conceived. May run hot for many years or even decades. A lot of money is made. A lot of money flows in thinking they’ve found a safe steady performer. Great if you know when to get out. But the last ones to buy before the approach or scheme stumbles get burned. Worse, they may “buy-down” believing because the same formula worked for so long, the price decline represents a good buying opportunity.
I glean these thoughts from some of the things Howard Marks mentions in “The Most Important Thing.” But they are not meant to represent Marks’ views.

Most fund families allow an investor to open up a new account in a closed fund if they do it by moving shares rather than funding it with dollars. Here, that new account is in a Roth, but it could have been, e.g. a T-IRA funded with 401(k) rollover shares.
One fund company that is a stickler about not opening new accounts in closed funds is Vanguard. Years ago I tried to do a partial Roth conversion of a closed fund. Fortunately, I had already opened a position in the Roth prior to the fund closing. So after only an hour on the phone with them (at least it seemed that long), Vanguard agreed that because I was not opening a new account I could move the shares.
But if I didn't already have that Roth account open, Vanguard would not have let me move the shares to the Roth. I could not open a new account using shares.
Vanguard construes its rules very tightly. Most other families are a little more flexible.

This may be common knowledge, but I recently realized that I could do a partial Roth conversion from a closed fund to expand holdings in it. I’ve been fortunate to own ARTKX in my rollover IRA for many years, from nearly its inception. My Roth IRA was invested with T Rowe Price, which has rather pitiful foreign funds. In trying to figure out how to upgrade the foreign investments in my Roth, it dawned on me that I could try converting a portion of the ARTKX shares in my rollover IRA to my Roth. The conversion worked, so my next step is to sell the TRP fund (PSILX) and invest the proceeds in ARTKX. I’m ashamed that it took me so long to realize this, as PSILX has been a poor performer.

MFO's Basic Screener (aka QuickSearch) is still free!

Yes it is, and it is a fine engine with several post-analysis criteria available (Great Owl, MFO risk,etc.). But just as with M*'s "new and degraded" premium investor screener,only post-analysis criteria are available.
Neither tool provides screens for funds based on annualized returns, though those figures are displayed in the result sets and one can sort them. Nor are other raw (pre-analysis) screening criteria like ER or AUM available.
My preference is to slice and dice raw data (annualized returns, ERs, etc.). My ideal would be a screener that let the user write their own queries - to have access to every data column, to be able to use logical connectors. For example:
> $1B in AUM or (> $500M in AUM and < 3 years old).
M*'s premium fund screener was great at this. It provided access to a plethora of underlying data categories and let you build queries using ands and ors
https://screen.morningstar.com/v2/AdvFunds/data_definition.html?field=Sector+Weightings
After that tool vanished, M*'s basic fund screener was still available for awhile. It was a very weak tool. But it did have a limited ability to screen on a few raw data attributes. Now what?

@msf - great comments; thanks. I checked my RPHYX statement last night, and it confirms what you've stated.
I made a simple calculation when I sold some RPHYX and went to T-Bills; I looked at the average return of RPHYX over the past several years (for sake of argument, let's call it 2.4%) and also looked at the downturn RPHYX had at some point last year (don't recall when exactly, but I think it approached 2%), and decided to sell most of my RPHYX and buy 3-month treasures at my broker.
Another consideration was the need for liquidity (I am expecting needing cash within the next 6 months, didn't want to have to sell any RPHYX at a 2% loss, for example), and the ability to readily flex from 3-months to other investments if I wanted to.