Rajiv Jain and company have produced excellent results for GSIHX and GQGPX so far.

Yep 7+ years on International GSIHX. In our defense, it didn't get great until the past 3 years. But we still should have spotted it by YE 2022, for its superb performances in down years, 2018 and 2022. Oh well, we're on board now!
We did not look at GQGPX, and more broadly, Just Say No, to EMs! We've proven to ourselves that we can't select and manage EMs and gave up years ago. But thanks for noting it!

Opened a position in arguably the best FLG OEF on the planet, GSIHX.
We've spent years trying to find a worthy Foreign fund and am not sure how we missed this pup. Swerved into it when I did a 401k portfolio transfer for a friend last week, from one Adm to another. The new Adm offered the institutional shares of it. We're going the Fido NTF route on it for the time being.
We have previously gotten the bulk of our Foreign exposure thru PRGSX and VGWAX. One of those will likely be SOLD (or at least reduced) when we get GSIHX up to a full position.

Even as a physician, I have a hard time figuring out biotech. I am personal friends with one of the Lecanemab investigators, but of course he could not share the news of it's effectiveness until it was publicly available in late 2022. With a press release 10/2022 BIIB popped 38%. Unless you knew someone and got inside information, it would have been hard to take advantage of it before the news hit.
Years ago, a urologist friend of mine, who was enrolling patients in the study of what became Viagra, told me it looked like it "really" worked, as the results, vs placebo, were pretty obvious! I am sure he bought a fair amount of Pfizer stock, although unless he sold it he may be underwater now.
The bottom line is it is very difficult for a professional biochemist or physician investigator to predict what will happen in any specific clinical trial, unless there is a striking and easily identifiable difference between treatment and placebo, as with Viagra. There have been multiple trials of mabs for Alzheimer's and probably billions of dollars spent until one was approved.
However, Biogen stock is selling below it's price when the research was released and a fraction of it's all time high in 2015.
Biogen is partners on Lecanemab which unlike adhelum, looks like it does have a significant effect on Alzheimer's, although it is modest and it is unclear how long it will last, and whether it will really reduce economic burden of Alzheimer's long term. (A completely rational approval process would have required evidence that it was cost effective, ie reduced long term costs of Alzheimer's, but the FDA laws do not require that, and the Alzheimer's lobby would have fought it tooth and nail; they called the conditional approval of adhelm "immoral" although it of course has been basically discontinued) Biogen has since dropped adhelum because it is minimally effective.
Biogen is furiously concocting new markets and new approaches.
https://investors.biogen.com/news-releases/news-release-details/eisai-presents-new-leqembir-lecanemab-irmb-investigational
How much of this hits the bottom line at BIIB is unclear. With new Alzheimer's tau protein blood tests available, if people with minimal forgetfulness are approved for treatment, the market may indeed be huge, but there will be a furious fight over approvals and prices etc as this has the potential to be budget breaking.
Medicare is trying to prevent store front clinics "Get you memory test here and we will fix it" by requiring registries and certifications. They may be less success with the obesity drugs and some weight loss clinics have been using them off label for years.
Probably argues for an equal weight biotech fund or just sticking to general health care funds.

This decision really depends on the individual investor.
Actively managed funds may underperform the broader market
for several consecutive years and returns could be "lumpy."
For example, VPMAX lagged the S&P 500 and Russell 1000 indexes in 2019, 2020, and 2021.
An investor incapable of tolerating subpar short-term performance could sell at an inopportune time.
This individual would probably be better off investing in low-cost broad-based index funds.
Having said that, I really like the Primecap management team and VPMAX in particular.
A 30-year analysis (Jan. 1994 - Dec. 2023) of Vanguard PRIMECAP, Vanguard Total Stock Market Index,
and Vanguard 500 Index can be referenced using the Portfolio Visualizer link below.
Past performance is not indicative of future performance...
https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&sl=BCPJliOkim1OuHmlYERP6

Question for Primecap heads. My daughter can invest in VPMAX or a very low fee total market fund in her 401k. She has no interest in investments and maxes out her 401k every year. She pays no attention. What would be better for the next 30 years?

Pulled this off the Marshfield website. https://www.marshfieldinc.com/
Marshfield is owned by its eight principals who have an average tenure of 23 years. Each principal must invest in the same stocks that Marshfield buys for its clients and may own no other publicly traded equities.

Added to MRFOX...

MRFOX - up all 8 calendar years. Interesting.

Rearranged some deck chairs in the IRA. I had been at about 30% bonds/cash, with any long duration bonds residing in the balanced funds.
I cut USFR in half. The remaining amount would be about one year of an RMD if I had to take it this year, rather than five years from now. After it clears, some of that will go into VRIG, boosting it to around two years.
Call them buckets if you like. I'm not getting into that argument. And I won't provide any deeper thinking than the back-of-the-envelope variety I have now provided. :)
I had a chunk of change sitting in the MMF after the last of my CD experiments petered out paid off. That ultra-short money was divided into THOPX at a duration of 1.66, FCFAX at 2.76, and FATRX at 4.77. So I'm creeping out on the limb. The total for that buy would be about two years.
I owned THOPX years ago, until the relentless war on short-term rates made it clear that I would be better off with widow and orphan funds.
Aside from the proceeds of today's sale, not much else to do but ponder the remaining follies of November 2021 that still clutter the portfolio.

By December 5, 2022 investors were used to getting slapped around by the usual suspects.
After the 2023 Santa rally, no one wants to be reminded that any "plain-vanilla," bond funds were staring at three losing years in a row.
Methinks the editorial side of garden-variety M* has problems similar to the IT side.

Found the list on another site, but no numbers. Uncertain of list order... maybe "least worst" to "most worst"?
Alerian MLP ETF (AMLP)
ProShares UltraPro VIX Short-Term Futures (UVXY)
ProShares UltraPro Short QQQ ETF (SQQQ)
PIMCO Commodity Real Return Strategy A (PCRAX)
ProShares UltraShort S&P500 (SDS)
iShares MSCI Brazil ETF (EWZ)
ProShares Short S&P500 (SH)
ProShares UltraPro Short S&P500 (SPXU)
KraneShares CSI China Internet ETF (KWEB)
PIMCO StocksPLUS Short Fund A (PSSAX)
VelocityShares Daily 2x VIX Short Term ETN (TVIXF)
Direxion Daily Small Cap Bear 3X ETF (TZA)
Velocity Shares 3x LongNAtural Gas ETN (UGAZF)
ProShares UltrsShort 20+ Year Treasury (TBT)
Direxion Daily S&P 500 Bear 3X ETF (SPXS)
FWIW the list includes the 15 funds that destroyed the most value for investors over the trailing 10 years through 2021
Note: I didn't "invest" in a single one of these! I'm so proud of myself. :)

I didn't find this article terribly informative.
In ten years of a massive bull market with complacent investors and century low interest rates, of course, inverse funds and volatility futures are going to do badly. Most of her "stinkers" have done exactly what they are designed to do and rocketed up in the right situation. Look at TBT since 2020.
A contrarians would say now is the time to buy, as M* does itself when pointing out that "unloved" fund categories outperform the next year.
A much more useful article would have compared funds in categories and have pointed out the worst ones by catagory, and the reasons for their underperformance.
Hussman made the "family" list which is kinda odd as his other funds, I think, are nowhere near as negative as HSGFX

Following are heavily edited excerpts from a current opinion article in the Washington Post. This article is designated by the Post as free to non-subscribers.
Erwin R. Tiongson is a professor of the practice in Georgetown University’s Global Human Development Program.
What if I said you could read real world history on the underside of your kids’ Hot Wheels?
I remember the first time I looked at the underside of these cars, soon after I had learned to read, and realized they had been made in different countries in different years. Some were made in the United Kingdom and the United States; the newer ones were made in Japan. Decades later, as my work as an economist brought my family to the United States, my two children got toy cars nearly identical to mine — first made in China and, later, Vietnam.
I ask students in my economics classes to inspect the cars’ undersides, and together we trace the gradual movement of toy car manufacturing: from England and the United States in the 1960s to Japan in the mid-1970s, from South Korea in the mid-1980s to China in the late 1990s and Vietnam after.

The process of making die-cast toy cars is nearly unchanged since the 1960s and has been steadily passed from one country to another, marking the beginning of the transformation of entire economies. We observe how toy-export data mirrors worldwide trends in industrial sector employment over the past 60 years: the gradual rise of toy manufacturing and toy exports in developing economies, the expansion of light manufacturing in those countries, followed by the growth of more complex production and the entire industrial sector, soon dwarfing the traditional agriculture sector and lifting people out of low-paid, low-productivity work.
And then we see, almost as rapidly, the decline of the industrial sector in a now-richer economy, as production at lower prices becomes available from the next industrializing country.
This much world history reflected in a handful of toy cars!
With the covid-19 pandemic, the industrial world reeled from massive supply chain disruptions. In early 2022, Mattel — which makes Hot Wheels and Matchbox toy cars — made a move to “near-source” some production, bringing its supply chain closer to the United States and away from Asia and China: It announced an injection of $50 million to its factory in Mexico. So I expected to start seeing toy cars manufactured in Mexico.
Wrong... in two years, sometimes things change.
This past holiday season, my children and I took turns visiting the toy section of a large store just outside Washington. It was like a game: find a random car, take a picture of the box and the car’s underside, send it to our group chat. We found none from Bangladesh, Ethiopia or Mexico. They came from Malaysia, Thailand and, surprisingly, China, still. In the journey toward the inevitable transformation of economies, it seemed the world had taken a few detours.
It turns out that near-sourcing is more complicated than expected, as recently documented in the case of Mexico. Part of the difficulty involves scaling and coordination: As more businesses seek nearby production facilities, the nearby economy, with its limited human and infrastructure resources, is quickly overwhelmed. And just as critical pieces in toy manufacturing are still imported from China, inputs from China more generally are integral parts of more sophisticated global supply chains.
In addition, toy manufacturing reflects not only the promise of industrialization but also its disappointments. In late 2022, Mattel commemorated its 40th year of manufacturing in Malaysia by announcing the growth of its Hot Wheels factory there, the world’s biggest. This was a positive development, but Malaysia’s economy reached middle-income status decades ago; in the familiar pattern, it would by now have progressed to manufacturing more complex, profitable products. Instead, the country has remained in what economists have defined as the “middle-income trap” — caught between developing and rich nations.
I struggled to explain what we were seeing. Not because toy cars do not tell us something about the world but because they do. They reflect the world’s reality, including its surprises.

Here and Now broadcast a worthwhile report on Biogen and Aduhelm, the Alzheimer’s drug.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2021/12/10/biogen-aduhelm-reckoning-alzheimers-drug
It’s not surprising that the whole biotech sector is under pressure when one its guiding lights really screws up. The report talks of 1000 layoffs at Biogen and great disruption. There’s a link in the report to an in depth published article on the debacle in STAT.
The Times reported on Sunday that a large chunk of the contemplated increase in Medicare Part B premiums is due to the projected cost of this new drug, which according to many, does not work.

To quote a old time radio broadcaster, "now, the rest of the story ..." Aside from serious questions about the drug's efficacy,

One F.D.A. adviser called the approval of the drug perhaps “the worst approval decision that the F.D.A. has made that I can remember.” A congressional inquiry later found that the F.D.A.’s process for approving Aduhelm had been “rife with irregularities” and involved “lapses in protocol,” including unusually close collaboration with Biogen.

Biogen had licensed Aduhelm from Neurimmune (Swiss). With recent revenues from the drug so small that Biogen isn't even reporting them, and with Medicare paying for the drug only in clinical trials, Biogen is about to let its license lapse.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/business/biogen-alzheimers-aduhelm.html
To relate this to a current thread, Primecap (the management company) holds the largest percentage (11.05%) of Biogen, and Primecap (the fund, VPMCX) has 3.37% of its assets invested in Biogen. BIIB is down 13.59% in the past year (through Jan 30th), resulting in overall losses in the past 3, 5, and 10 years.

It is very likely the Fed will lower rates this year and what the Fed chair said...based on what we know now.
The main key for rate increase/decrease over the years is how fast and how much.

Really interesting for investors who own Primecap-managed funds. I've been with VPCCX for an awfully long time, my major regret being that I hold it in a taxable account which hasn't been ideal. Used to own POAGX, too. That fund had an uncanny ability to invest in companies that were bought out, and perhaps they still do given recent developments involving Splunk and Seagen. Alas, many or most of those successes have been offset by positions that went precisely the other way (Nektar and BlackBerry come to mind). All of their funds have been experiencing net redemptions for several years now.

How did Hussman not make the list? HSGFX “boasts” a - 3.8% (negative) annual return over the past 15 years, according to M*. In fairness, at least one on the list is an inverse fund. So folks should have understood what they were doing when they bought it. No doubt some traders buy and sell inverse funds trying to time the markets rather than for long term holdings.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/regional-bank-that-played-rescuer-in-2023-now-in-turmoil-163932844.html
It got too big for its britches. "Trouble in River City." Dividend suspended. And after the Flagstar AND Signature Bank acquisitions, it must meet more stringent capital reserve requirements. The bank doubled its own size in two years. "Superior planning!" .... So this explains in large part why my own Regional Bank holding has fallen like a rock in the past couple of days. BHB. I had considered throwing some money at NYCB. Glad I did not do it.
"...The stock of the Hicksville, N.Y.-based lender fell 46% Wednesday after it reported a surprise net loss of $252 million for the fourth quarter and announced a suspension of its dividend...The news sent new shockwaves through the regional banking world..."

Pretty interesting article. This is wealth destroyed over the past 10 years. Who knows if history repeats over the next 10 years, but it does say something about holding just the plain vanilla equity/income balanced portfolio without all the bells and whistles available.
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/15-funds-that-have-destroyed-most-wealth-over-past-decade?utm_source=eloqua&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_morningdigest&utm_content=51445

Conclusion
The biggest value destroyers in the fund industry illustrate that there’s no guarantee of success, even during a generally favorable market environment. Many of them also provide a valuable case study in how not to invest. (As Charlie Munger was fond of saying: “Invert, always invert.”) Investors have been far better served by the plain-vanilla fund categories that dominated the winners list, such as large-cap blend, allocation—50% to 70% equity, and foreign large blend. They’ve also generally fared well by sticking with the industry’s biggest and most established fund families. Volatile and speculative categories—as well as unproven fund shops that attract a lot of short-term hype—on the other hand, are best avoided.

some good & reassuring insights never expressed before, but i felt morningstar missed a key question :
'with all partners taking a similar GARP selection approach, how will primecap execute risk-weighted concentrated investing in a new era (interest rates ending a 3+ decade decline) ?'
a partial response was that primecap spends more time on sell decisions.
this is an interesting question, because it also affects other very good active GARP equity managers like Giroux at T.Rowe Price (who adjusts some with other assets). the most successful GARP investors succeeded by holding even when the stocks looked overvalued and far past the initial buying range, which got turbocharged in a multi-generational interest rate decline.
https://the-long-view.simplecast.com/episodes/joel-fried-and-al-mordecai-upholding-the-culture-at-primecap-management-XJ2EmBIv
or download
https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/df59cda3-c121-40eb-b58b-b6205c3ab64a/episodes/03d0879d-2fe7-46fb-92c5-7b173b1efa3a/audio/d32db191-5317-478a-967b-98e4acd17fe7/default_tc.mp3?aid=embed
(have not added to any primecap funds in 3 years, but their success still makes them by far my largest equity fund manager)

@davfor, yes, I can think of all those reasons why people might wish for cuts. How many of them have anything to do with the Fed's legal mandate?

The Federal Reserve System has been given a dual mandate—pursuing the economic goals of maximum employment and price stability.
Its my sense this fed has succeeded in establishing its inflation fighting credentials. And, the feds goal is to achieve both maximum employment and price stability and to thereby keep the economy growing. There are fairly strong signs the inflation rate may be sustainably trending downward after experiencing a strong spike caused by supply/demand imbalances during the the pandemic. The aggregate supply and demand of workers is also moving towards a balance point. With a sustainable path to achieving the price stability coming into view, it is reasonable for the fed to start shifting more of its focus to reducing the strains and imbalances caused by the interest rate spike (including those noted above). Doing that will help it continue to achieve the maximum employment part of its mandate. Waiting longer than necessary increases the risk of unnecessarily weakening the economy and of increasing the unemployment rate. Will it take 3, 6, 12, or 24 months worth of additional favorable data to provide the fed enough time to confirm that reducing the fed funds rate is prudent? My expectation is that 6 months or less will be enough. But, I am not yet making any significant investment decisions based on that expectation. (What was once the bond sleeve of my portfolio was renamed to be the ballast sleeve several years ago.)

You make sound arguments. I can't dispute that. It's only my hunch that leans the other way from a cut in the first quarter. We will see how it goes. Stay tuned. :)