The total return for 8 years is dismal.
Alt funds are difficult to use for many investors.
They often buy/sell these funds at innopportune times.

the debt ceiling is only an issue to pay previously incurred financial obligations so the GOP is trying to use the leverage to force concessions on stuf that is popular going forward. ( as an aside , I don't comprehend how they can still be trying to claw back budget increases for the IRS. Surely many families, like ours are waiting for refunds from years ago)
the consequences of a "Default" would be so extreme, so quick to be noticed and so quickly reversed that I am not really worried. It might be possible to trade it, ie buy gold or shorts on SPY or treasuries due in a month, and then sell, but if it is not over in a day or so, you will not be able to buy gas, or food and your investments will be the least of your concern.
In a rational world the Dems would agree to some concessions in exchange for eliminating the debt ceiling all together.

VASFX up 0.5% Total in 8 years
I looked at this several times as a alternative/ macro hedge. Never seemed to figure itself out.
similar story to Market Neutral. If you are a hot gunslinging cowgirl or cowboy and really good at this stuff, who wants to have to tell your date you work at Vanguard!

For my kids 529 funds, I rebalance them every 3 years to reduce stock allocation. A year or two before tuition bills are due they were moved to money market funds. Rules on 529 funds are highly restrictive; used to be ONE change per year and now is TWICE.
Our other accounts are more actively managed, especially in the last decade.

@Sven. + 10! “ Does anyone follow the debt ceiling debate?” Thank you for bringing this up. I started a thread in Feb. about default denialism. The country, this board, my family,,, still in denial. X date is getting closer and the government is not getting closer to a resolution. I am starting to consider a major portfolio realignment because I am of an age where I don’t have years to wait for recovery. Problem is I am not at all certain where to hide. I am thinking that with the possibility of an economic slow down increasing and the likelihood of default increasing it might not be a bad time to be out of the market. But where to hide? Anyway,,,,thanks Sven for asking the right question.

I owned several Nicholas funds way back, when we lived in Milwaukee. I got a bit concerned when Al brought son into firm and it was obvious he was going to inherit the mantle. He may have been a genius but family is no way to pick best manger going forward.
I did keep my Mutual Shares for years and stayed on even after Price left.
This is one additional problem with active management. The funds that work do well, amass capital gains and there may be a serious tax bill when the manger
1) retires ( Nicholas)
2) decides to spend all his money ( Price)
3) gets fired for doing a great job but not what company wants (Vinik)
4) Serious mid life crisis (Gross)
At least it is entertaining!

I know. But it seems irrelevant to say Americans aren't saving enough when so many have nothing left over to save after paying their bills. I often think the constant complaints posed in the media over "financial illiteracy" are really just a coded repeat of the "personal responsibility" mantra, blaming the victims of massive income inequality for their own suffering when that inequality is systemic and, largely, by design, and not primarily due to individual moral or ethical failings. Yes, people should save more and put more in their retirement plans. But there are often really good reasons they can't, and in certain cases lousy reasons. There tends to be a fixation on the lousy reasons.

I think it's a combination of structural inequity AND lack of personal responsibility.
If money's tight, do we really need to go into hock for that summer vacation just because it's summer vacation and everyone is 'supposed' to take a trip? I would argue no; find something local that's more cost effective and go when you're not going to spend the next 10 years paying interest on the credit card debt used to finance the week away.
But at the same time, one can argue that the structure of the capitalist system also runs against people, too. For example, think how many things are now subscription-based versus years ago. Or why is there a 'PBM' dictating what medicine you can get when they're NOT your doctor? Etc, etc.
And don't get me started on the insane nature of our retirement system, account limitations on contributions, etc. I long since quit playing the annual contribute-and-convert-to-Roth game because for only 5-7K/year it wasn't worth it. If you want to create responsible savers, let them save what they want WHEN THEY WANT TO. Had a windfall year and can sock away 50K? Great! Had a bad year and couldn't contribute more than 5K? Okay, that's fine, too. But things like the Roth phase-out and the huge delta between 40X contribution levels and IRA contribution levels remains a sore spot for me. Nobody these days can expect a comfy retirement in 2050+ on tucking away 5-7K a year in an IRA no matter how much it might grow or how lucky the investments are.
And there's the whole single-person-penalty when compared to married couples on taxation and more. Hell, our tax code in general is slanted against most people anyway. Grargh....
Living within your means and staying debt free is what enables true freedom, but that thinking just ain't profitable.
(sorry, I'm on a roll this week - I'm hosting 2 different sessions for our uni's financial literacy week)

Thanks, Mark. For too many years I've pushed many I know to put a 'little' money, at the very least, into available 401k/403b's or a Roth. Don't try to be fancy, but learn along the way. Throw some money at a balanced fund.
The vast majority missed their best investing friend of compounding with time.
Pretty sad all around. I'm writing about boomers who can not 'catch up' to the lost time.
The other generations still have a 'chance'.

@larryb You are correct. Yet here we are years later: https://morningstar.com/funds/xnas/lmopx/performance
What happened after that streak ended is more important as a lesson I think about active management than the streak itself. Admittedly, LMOPX is a somewhat different fund than the original, but the original suffered too afterwards: https://reuters.com/article/us-legg-mason-miller/legg-masons-bill-miller-leaves-firm-amid-faded-glory-idUSKCN10M1DV Will such a streak happen again? Possibly. It could also end just as badly.

Nicholas Fund. Third ave value. Sogen international. Mutual shares. Of course Fidelity Magellan. Those are just the ones I can remember. But they come and they go.

Held NICSX and NSEIX in the IRA for around ten years. Then I got nervous about Key Man Risk (a minor character in the Yp Man movies). Held NBGNX (another golden oldy) for about the same length of time. Sold for about the same reason.
Replaced the first two with PARMX and PRBLX. NBGNX was split into RWJ and BUFSX. Given the timing on those moves, it's going to take a while for things to shake out in my favor.

Topics this Month:
Hitting Your Retirement Savings Goal
5 Things to know about the New RMD Rules & Secure 2.0
20 Years of Target Date Funds
Non Financial Aspects of Retirement
Investor Insight Magazine

Use the incessant annual/interim articles to help you identify which PMs/funds are the ones that consistently outperform their benchmarks.

That is the problem in a nutshell, though. There are virtually no funds--perhaps none at all--that consistently outperform their benchmarks, especially in the large-cap U.S. stock space. Even the best funds often have lumpy performance, and many investors, including investors on this board, can't psychologically handle that lumpy performance when the fund is having a bout of significant underperformance. In fact, the lack of consistency is one reason the stats of underperformance versus the S&P 500 long-term are so high. The fund that outperforms the S&P 500 this year will very rarely be the same as the fund that outperforms it in the next. Meanwhile the fee drag of active management is consistent year after year and is utterly predictable. It is the most predictable thing about active management. Over time the outperformance of big up years can't overcome the cumulative effect of that fee drag for almost every large-cap fund. And even when the fund can overcome the fee drag many of its investors don't enjoy it because psychologically they buy and sell the fund at the wrong times, chasing its hot performance and bailing out of it at the bottom.
I would add that the referenced PRWAX has also not consistently beaten its benchmark even in calendar years, let alone rolling ones. Morningstar benchmarks it against a Large Growth index and T. Rowe benchmarks it against the Russell 3000. In both cases, there are lagging years:
https://troweprice.com/financial-intermediary/us/en/investments/mutual-funds/us-products/all-cap-opportunities-fund.html In fact, the fund has lagged its T. Rowe-chosen Russell 3000 benchmark in both 2022 and 2021 as well as 2016 and 2014--lumpy but strong overall performance.
Fun Trivia question: What fund manager holds the record for beating the S&P 500 the most consecutive calendar years in a row? The old-timers here should know. The answer in a way explains why you can't really put much faith in most active managers long-term.
Finally, I would note that the best use of a consistent alpha metric--as opposed to an intermittent alpha one--might be for identifying fraud. There is probably something fishy going on with a fund that beats its benchmark every single year. I bet Madoff had some really high alpha.

This post is NOT in direct response to ANY particular prior post.
So we're near the end of two pages of discussion on this topic and not ONE time has the term "alpha" been stated and no attempts have been made to assert its relevance/importance in this discussion. (Another reason why I generally find worthless the annual/interim discussions of the performance of all stock funds vs indexes.)
So then...
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/alpha.asp
Excerpt:
What Is Alpha?
Alpha (α) is a term used in investing to describe an investment strategy's ability to beat the market, or its "edge." Alpha is thus also often referred to as “excess return” or “abnormal rate of return,” which refers to the idea that markets are efficient, and so there is no way to systematically earn returns that exceed the broad market as a whole. Alpha is often used in conjunction with beta (the Greek letter β), which measures the broad market's overall volatility or risk, known as systematic market risk.
Alpha is used in finance as a measure of performance, indicating when a strategy, trader, or portfolio manager has managed to beat the market return over some period. Alpha, often considered the active return on an investment, gauges the performance of an investment against a market index or benchmark that is considered to represent the market’s movement as a whole.
The excess return of an investment relative to the return of a benchmark index is the investment’s alpha. Alpha may be positive or negative and is the result of active investing. Beta, on the other hand, can be earned through passive index investing.
Please temporarily couch your bias for/against Zack's. Just using a page of theirs below to illustrate the relevance/importance of it in this discussion, and in the scoping of funds that consistently outperform benchmarks.
https://www.zacks.com/stock/news/2079438/is-t-rowe-price-all-cap-opportunities-fund-prwax-a-strong-mutual-fund-pick-right-now?cid=CS-YAHOO-FT-mutual_fund_equity_report-2079438
Excerpt:
Risk Factors
With a 5-year beta of 1, the fund is likely to be as volatile as the market average. Another factor to consider is alpha, as it reflects a portfolio's performance on a risk-adjusted basis relative to a benchmark-in this case, the S&P 500. Over the past 5 years, the fund has a positive alpha of 2.72. This means that managers in this portfolio are skilled in picking securities that generate better-than-benchmark returns.

https://fundresearch.fidelity.com/fund-screener/results/compare/overview/averageAnnualReturnsYear3/desc/1?order=&tickers=PRWAX,FXAIX
FWIW, PRWAX beats the S&P for ALL SIX YTD-to-Life interim periods. We are current and LT holders of PRWAX (drumroll) because of its alpha and those results.
Bottom Line: Use the incessant annual/interim articles to help you identify which PMs/funds are the ones that consistently outperform their benchmarks. Avoid concentrating on the headline news that, um, duh, most of them don't.

Nicholas Fund. Third ave value. Sogen international. Mutual shares. Of course Fidelity Magellan. Those are just the ones I can remember. But they come and they go.

CNN/Money, THE BEST MUTUAL FUNDS Here Are the Pros' Choices for the Next Decade, October 12, 1987.
The text is presented in a single, unbroken, stream of sentences, so I don't recommend reading. A few highlights:
"Although the managers we interviewed were divided on when a market downturn would come, almost all agreed that one is long overdue. When it does happen, many fear stock prices could sink 20% to 40%".
The dateline of the piece is Oct 12, 1987. Black Monday was exactly one week later, when the Dow dropped 22.6% in a single day. That was after selloffs Oct 14-16 that resulted in the Dow declining 4.6%.
https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/stock-market-crash-of-1987
Results:
1. VWNDX, then managed for 23 years by John Neff (age 56). Had a wide lead over #2 winner.
2. MUTHX, then managed by Max Heine and Michael Price (age 36). Money says that Price had been managing with Heine for 13 years, which would date back to his joining Heine Securities in 1975. Money also describes Price as the principal manager. But the 1995 prospectus for the fund says that Price had been managing the day-to-day operations for five years (i.e. starting around 1990).
" In contrast to our top two funds, both of which employ a primarily conservative (and contrarian) approach, eight of the top 10 ... are either aggressive growth or long-term growth funds."
3. NICSX - managed by founder
3. (tie) ACRNX - managed by founder, Ralph Wanger
5. SEQUX - managed by founder
6. PENNX
7. Evergreen Fund - managed by founder
This fund is hard to trace. Evergreen funds were owned by First Union Corp. (banking company), which merged into Wachovia in 2001, which was acquired by Wells Fargo in 2008. Somewhere along that line the Evergreen fund may have gotten renamed or merged into another Evergreen or Keystone fund.
Evergreen was so scandal-ridden (e.g. 2001-2003 trading abuses, 2008 ultra short bond mispricings), not to mention merely being owned by Wells Fargo, that it's no surprise one cannot find a trace of it now. I especially like the lead in the CBS piece on the ultrashort bond fund: "There's really only one word that can be used to describe people who engaged in the sorts of activities Evergreen is accused of: crooks."
8. FMAGX. "(up 1,795% to July 1 [for past 10 years], compared with 590% for Windsor). ... . One of the reasons for Magellan's downgrading is that the fund, like many growth seekers that remain fully invested in stocks at all times, is likely to stumble in declining markets."
VPMCX, only 3 years old at the time, came in at #12.
Perhaps a good summary of attitudes at the time is this part of the text:

low in our experts' esteem were index funds -- the increasingly popular vehicles that aim to match the returns of a major market barometer such as the S&P 500. Ralph Wanger, manager of the third-place Acorn Fund, was the one maverick in our survey, awarding a vote to Vanguard's $900 million no- load Index Trust, up 27.3% for the six months to July 1, compared with 27.4% for the S&P 500 that it attempts to duplicate. Says Wanger: ''At least you're assured of approximating the market averages with an index fund. The S& P 500 is one tough bogey."

”Our brains are wired to send us immediate signals of fear and reward when we witness stock market volatility. Adrenaline and dopamine rushes cloud our judgment as we weigh the risks and benefits of our options. Ignoring fear or delaying instant gratification is incredibly difficult because it demands that we go against our instinctual behaviors.”
From - Retraining Your Brain
Article quotes Buffet as saying you shouldn’t buy anything you wouldn’t be willing to own for 10 years. I think that gage is a good starting point. I don’t like following more than 20 different holdings, so that’s enough to motivate me to dampen down the trading.

This is a really nice discussion. Lots of food for thought.
FWIW, I'm in Stillers' camp. My wife and I have owned FSELX for many years.
I realize that it's dangerous to own a single-industry fund, but I believe in this industry. Many years ago, my 403b had T Rowe Price Science and Technology fund as my largest holding. When I moved to Fidelity (and had to be in Fidelity funds), I chose FSELX.
We also chose FSELX for my wife's Roth IRA when they first became available.
I feel that science and technology, in the broad sense, will always be successful (at least in my lifetime) and I'm willing to withstand volatility. So, to some degree, success depends upon ones entry point.
I aso have some other managed funds, some index funds and a slug of dividend paying stocks.
David

FMIJX is my international fund for the last decade. To me it is a sleep easy fund. It has a value tilt so probably not in vogue over the past few years, but I still believe over a cycle it will do well.
FWIW, my experience with the Artisan EM fund, ARTYX was not good for me. A closed fund that had an extraordinary return versus peers. When it re-opened, I sold SFGIX and bought that fund. I thought I was making a smart move. It turned out to be a roller coaster where I lost a lot of money with. It was a very volatile fund, which would make me think ARTKX would be too. I sold and moved that money to RNWOX which is more in the SFGIX mantra.
Over the long haul, if you can stick with it, Artisan is probably a good choice, as long as you can take the roller coaster ride in investing. Good luck with your decision.

”If I own a volatile fund, I expect it to go down more than the market. But I also look for it to more than make up that underperformance on the upswing. And I'll wait that out, unless there are specific reasons for me to doubt the fund or the management going forward.”
We’ve discussed in the past that this approach works if one has socked away an amount of cash sufficient to outlast a multi-year bear market so they don’t need to pull money out of a deeply depressed equity portfolio. Folks have mentioned holding anywhere from 3 years worth all the way out to 5 or more years worth of cash. If I remember correctly, @msf is one who does that . Different strokes. I don’t hold a cash reserve (but do have a pension), so my inclination is more to limit big swings in investment portfolio. The “upside” would be that I’m 100% invested all the time.
BTW - The folks that hold a lot of reserve cash have done very well the last couple years. I never could have envisioned 2 or 3 years ago the kind of returns cash / cash-like investments have delivered the past couple years. To have anticipated that requires one with more intelligence and foresight than I possess. Wasn’t it only 2 years ago that Powell was describing inflation as “transient.”?

If one is concerned about the bubble factor in traditional market-cap weighted S&P 500/Total Market Indexes, it is easy today to have a value factor overlay to the index. VVIAX has beaten 74% of its peers in the past 15 years, 86% in the past ten years. Its expense ratio: 0.05%. But if you want to avoid "value momentum" as odd as that sounds, you could just equal weight the index to avoid having too much for instance in the FAANG stocks in the S&P 500 or too much in financials and energy in a market-cap weighted value index. RSP comes to mind, 0.20% expense ratio--still indexed in my view. In other words, active managers have some explaining to do.

What I find interesting regarding index funds is what Fleckenstein refers to the endless money train into said index funds (my paraphrasing, not his words) from retirement investors into 401Ks etc., just like what folks were thinking in Japan years ago...this is going to go on and on, until one day it doesn't and whammo. Drives stocks/indexes up no matter what the true fundamentals are (note what AAPL did last quarter, earnings I think were flat or so and market cap goes up what $5-6Billion? What's up with that?
I think that his one of the reason's some/many invest with funds that are NOT index funds...thinking is that index fund results are based on group psychology to an extent and "it works until it doesn't"...
Hmm.