"Cutting losses quickly and letting profits run" is the right way.
1) It took me about 18 years (1995-2013) to get it until I got to a nice-size portfolio. In those years I was invested at 99+%. When the funds I owned lagged, I just switched to better-performing risk/reward funds.
2) In 2013, I added 2 new rules based on quicker market movements. Sell any stock/allocation fund if it loses more than 6% from the last top and sell any bond fund with more than 3% loss.
3) In 2017, one year prior to retirement, I implemented a new system, trading mostly bond funds. I would sell any bond fund before it reaches a 1% loss from the last top. Trading in/out is based on the big picture(risk is very high=out, otherwise=in) + uptrends.
Basically, I could be 99+% in or out. It's not about relative performance anymore, it's about protecting my portfolio first.

Good question @Ben. However, what’s more desirable for one person might be less desirable for another.
I held funds at as many as 5 different houses at one time. Perfectly workable. Over very long time horizons there was a reluctance to depend on any single fiduciary firm, advisor or money manager - not knowing how they might change or be affected by things beyond their control some day. However, when you’re down to your last 10-20 years of life and when the probable time to shift 100% into cash is 10 years away or less, than the advantage noted of spreading the money around among 4 or 5 different mutual fund fudiciaries houses ceases to be much of a factor. (Ie : I don’t expect T.Rowe Price or American Funds to go “belly-up” any time in the next 10 years.) Of course, it’s somewhat of an empty argument anyway because even if the firm failed, money inside a fund is supposed to be perfectly safe.
One thing having money at 5 different houses did was allow me to move in and out of different sectors pretty much at will. I began spreading my money around after the SEC got involved big-time is seeing that funds prohibit “excessive trading” around 2000 (following some very real abuses). ISTM they went overboard. So, for instance, if I wanted to sell some of my REIT, gold or natural resource holdings only two weeks after increasing the position at one fiduciary, I could lighten up at a different where I held a similar fund without running amuck of anyone’s rules. With ETFs now available and the ability to own / trade stocks or CEFs through a full service broker pretty much at will, that concern has faded. Now (for me, anyway) it’s mutual funds for the really large, dominant long-term positions and ETFs or CEFs for the areas I’m apt to trade.
But, hey - if it works for you don’t change it.
@msf said: ”A minor plus of buying directly is the ability to do Roth conversions (within a single family) by dollar amount rather than in number of shares as brokerages require.”
Nice reminder … I did a “quickie” conversion of 100% of holdings at D&C and Oakmark in early March ‘09. Phoned each on a Friday afternoon as markets plummeted. They explained everything and emailed links to the necessary documents the same day. Got the paperwork into USPS overnight mail Monday morning. Wasn’t a lot of time to be terribly fussy about what to convert, if anyone remembers what the beginning of March 2009 was like.
@Ben - One big advantage of staying with the various houses is ability to trade without worrying about “early redemption” fees (in most cases anyway). With NTF funds at Fido anything sold within 60 days incurs a fee, and with some brokerages it’s 90 days. Also, fund to fund exchanges are a bit faster at a house. Only by about 1 extra day, however, based on my experience with Fido.

The first trading book I ever read, “How I Made $2,000,000 In The Stock Market” by Nicolas Darvas, taught me the precept of always cutting my losses and letting my profits run as well as the power of trading momentum, The book had a huge impact on my life so I am a believer. But……. Please note the article linked by the OP was written by a founding member of Long Term Capital Management. We all know how that turned out. Probably explains why he then took a 10 year sabbatical from the markets.
Also regarding hedge funds who are are glorified for employing the strategy of cutting losses letting profits run and momentum trading. Their long term performance compared to simply buying and holding the S@P is beyond woeful. See the link below to where depending on the time period the S@P won by a 3x to 4x margin. Bear markets, which are few and far between are where the hedge funds win. Even though even then they are still losers.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-sp-500-index-out-performed-hedge-funds-over-the-last-10-years-and-it-wasnt-even-close/

It's a similar argument when someone says, I own 20 funds VS 3 funds and I don't have any problem.
The following are several issues, at least for me.
1) We have 5 accounts at each discount broker. One joint, 2 Roth IRAs, and 2 Rollover IRAs. If I own 5 funds from 5 different families, think how many more accounts I need to have.
2) If you trade, as I do, it's a nightmare to have several brokerages. If you don't trade often, having one discount broker is much easier. Suppose I own D&C fund directly and want to sell it all this coming Monday and buy instead GOODX. How many hoops do you have to jump thru?
3) Customer service is usually much better at discount brokers (think Fidelity and Schwab) with a lot more services and options. You don't spend more time at discount brokers, you just selected your own way of investing based on the limitation you imposed.
4) You don't need an agent to move your money from selling a fund to MM. Fidelity does it automatically, at Schwab you need to buy the MM.
5) At year end filing taxes is a lot easier and faster for me, the IRS doesn't care.
6) Over the years I bought several funds with commissions at Schwab, I didn't pay any fees, it all depends on the account size and persistence you have, sometimes you just have to ask.

@Ben
I'm not yet retired, just turned 60, so my situation is a bit different than yours. I, like you enjoy managing our finances and my wife is happy to be hands off though at times I wish she showed more interest. That is largely why 12 years ago I consolidated our investments to a brokerage (TDA and then Schwab after the merger), so that if and when anything happened to me healthwise, she would have an easier time wrapping her arms around our finances. We have no children, so there would be no help to step in and assist her in that regard. We have since left Schwab and moved to TRP entirely after TRP offered their Summit Program and the fact most of our investments were through TRP funds anyway.
Both of my wife's parents lived to 91 years of age and for their final 3 years my wife lived with them as their primary care giver and to honor their wishes to remain out of nursing facilities. We were very grateful when they consolidated their finances to just a few accounts as we were not only physically caring for their daily needs, but making sure the bills got paid and taking care of their investments which was made easier for us after the consolidation. Also made doing their annual tax returns easier. Estate matters were also simplified after their deaths because of the consolidation.
Just my 2 cents worth, but by all means keep doing what you are doing as long as you are able and enjoy it, probably helps keep you young!

+1.
I notice a lot of the same stuff. I was glad to buy a new vehicle, however, when we got here. Peace of mind, for a few years, anyhow. Yes, there are recalls all the time. We took ours into the dealer and the work was done for free. With our down-payment and a discount through a nephew who works at the place, we did good. Payments under $280/month at 1.99%. Nissan Sentra.
4cbe8441-9fdb-4aac-91f7-f82e0b589036(1).png
(That stupid link does not work. Copy a file and try to share it? A major stupid undertaking I'm unwilling to spend time on.)
I notice the daily take-out here everywhere I turn. Crazy fancy nails, too. Etc. Etc.

Thank you, @Mark One may buy 'cheaply' the book, 'The Millionaire Next Door'. Yes, income is very important, but so are spending habits. I will admit this book and its methods, don't help the ultra poor.

Quite right. You could have eighteen bazillion dollars and be foolish with it, and lose it all. That happens to celebrities often enough. I knew a guy who trusted his accountant TOO much. Never checked the 1040 for himself. He was beholden to the IRS for a helluva lot of money, over a period of years and years.
And if you're very poor, the savings and investment techniques which require the use of MONEY YOU DON'T HAVE are useless. But the school systems truly ought to be teaching financial literacy. Not in order to make students all excellent and talented capitalists. Yet, capitalism is the only game in town--- apart from a hybrid economic arrangement like they have in Scandinavia. (Where poverty and homelessness are not such a scourge, as in the States?) And people DO invest in Scandinavian countries, eh?

Not a bad idea to get off the FR/BL train soon. When rates stop going up, these act just as short-term HY from low-rated companies that cannot access the normal bond market. There is a recession risk too, but the is consensus that it has been cancelled. Bankrate is showing 30-yr mortgage at 7.40%, so at least the housing may be cooked.
BTW, Treasury 2-yr FRNs are different - they yield 3m T-Bill yield plus a spread; they reset weekly.

My research on FR/BL, has indicated they do well in "both" flat and rising interest rate environments. They performed very well for me in the from about 2010 through 2017, when rates hovered around zero for many years. They started struggling more when rate hike fears started getting serious in the 2018 and later years, and then like a lot of junk bond funds, they did not do well when bonds as a whole tanked in 2020, but as rates started rising rapidly after the 2020 crash, they started being one of the strongest bond oef categories. They may not perform as strongly now that rate hikes "appear" to be flattening out, and other bond categories may started performing better, but I am not in the camp that says FR/BL will not still offer some attractiveness. The real threat is if the FEDs start cutting rates, but as long as inflation is still relatively higher than the FEDs desire, I am not expecting any aggressive rate cutting actions. I am in the camp that we may bump around for the next year, without any strong rate hike or rate cut direction.
Just My Opinion, and I do not currently own any FR/BL funds, and haven't for a few years.

Nonretirement stuff at TIAA is only for those with retirement accounts that WANT to stick around for consolidation of accounts.
Fer sure, mostly. Though TIAA does have a product or two that some without retirement accounts might want to buy. I've mentioned TREA (one only has to be related to someone with a retirement account, not be a retirement account owner to be eligible).
Another is TIAA's vanilla deferred VA, "Intelligent Variable Annuity", especially if one likes Vanguard funds. Vanguard no longer offers its own VA - it outsourced it to Transamerica. The Transamerica VA has base M&E expenses of 0.27%. The TIAA VA charges 0.35% for $100K-$500K, 0.25% for AUM above that. While that may be initially a bit higher than Transamerica, the kicker is that after 10 years, the wrapper fees drop to 10 basis points.
The TIAA VA offers most of the same Vanguard and DFA portfolios as Transamerica, while also offering a variety of TIAA portfolios (obviously) plus portfolios from Franklin, Janus, PIMCO, T. Rowe Price and others. All are low cost share classes (as opposed to other providers like Fidelity that may offer the same portfolios with higher ERs).
Transamerica VA offerings (see p. 3)
TIAA VA offerings
Fidelity VA offerings (compare PIMCO VIT Real Return 0.77% admin class E/R with TIAA's 0.52% inst class E/R)
Not that these are for most people. Just suggesting that TIAA products are not only for those with existing retirement accounts at TIAA.

Concur that USFR is ahead of TFLO in 3 and 5 years performance in terms of Martin ratio while having similar risk (MAXDD %). Yields are 3.8 and 4.3%, respectively. Search is performed using MFO Premium.
Fidelity and Vanguard fund screening are limited that lacks detailed comparison as one would find in M* for individual funds. Guess there is no free lunch.

Fidelity certainly demonstrated some stupidity, or perhaps laziness - by saying that all funds were eligible for auto investment (they aren't) without even checking; by telling me to post a feedback on the webpage instead of engaging in a conversation to elicit more details. It seems @Sven was more successful in actually having a conversation with Fidelity.
Regarding the fund research page, while the search box does work (as Yogi illustrated), the fund screener on that page fails to include D&C as a family one can search for.
IMHO that's worse because if you don't already know that you're interested in D&C funds, you'll never run across them on the Fidelity site. Even if you screen on some criterion other than fund family, say LCV global funds, you won't know that DODWX is available.
Screener results (no D&C)
Before attributing malice I look for some rationale. The only one I could suggest was a bias against families that pay nothing for shelf space - D&C, Schwab, and Vanguard. But that's not what is happening. Fidelity isn't hiding Schwab or Vanguard funds.
OTOH, I do attribute malice (aka ulterior motive) to Fidelity and Schwab for excluding TF funds from their "top funds" list. That's not stupidity, that's deliberate. In fact, one of those brokerages originally included TF funds in its list years ago, though I don't recall which one.

I kept significant amounts directly at D&C for 25 years. Great outfit. Since opening a Fido brokerage account 2 years ago, more options than I’d ever imagined opened up. Age, too, has been a factor in wanting to combine everything under 1 umbrella. Possibly, the types of funds & distribution network that served one well at age 55 are not the same ones he / she might elect as they near 80. To each his own.

Current rates:
Government M-mkt funds (7-day yield) VMFXX 5.26%, SPAXX 4.97%, SNVXX 5.04%
3-mo T-Bills 5.56%, 8/17/23
FRN yield = T-Bill yield + spread (2023 range 12-20 bps).
So, one has to decide if extra 40-75 bps over m-mkt funds with FRNs makes sense. It depends on the amounts involved too. Real advantage over T-Bills is that FRNs are rolled over every 2 years, instead of every 3 months.
With FRN ETFs, decide if giving up 15 bps is worth it when the fund isn't really doing much work. I could go along with 5bps ER for such trivial work.

@catch22
My father and his sisters kicked themselves because starting in 1965, there was at least one cousin at UT for 20 plus years, and then my sister was teaching school. Then in the 2000's the grandkids started at UT. So far there have been four of them.
If they had bought a house large enough for all the cousins ( there were never more than 3 or 4 at a time) in the 60's they would have made out like bandits.
My sister's husband paid $15000 for five acres of land outside of Wimberly ( 45 mins south) in the 1980s. He built his house over time but had a small mortgage for AC and a rain water collecting system. It is assessed at $800,000 now

Yikes. The 10-Year Treasury sits at over 4.27% late day. Been screaming higher for couple weeks. 30 year fixed mortgages now average over 7%. I think the economy is cooling. A check of a few car dealers online over the weekend showed a respectable / high inventory of new vehicles on some lots, and an occasional discounted price - both rare in recent years.

@Anna
My wife and I just signed up at Kroll the monitoring service pbi uses. The letter had a Membership number that you need to sign up, which was in the letter.
I don't know if you could get a response from either pbi or Kroll without it, but Kroll has all the information you would expect already, DOB name address etc so if they are willing to help they have an account in your name already.
To verify identity they then ask you about your cars, mortgages etc
BTW We have been victims of many many hacks and possible data breaches over the years ( one year I counted five) and nothing ever came of it. Taht is not to say it couldn't, but these Monitoring services don't really do much.
Your best bet, I think, is the freeze your credit report access at all there credit reporting bureaus.
Unless you have to increase your credit line on a card, or take out a loan, it is seamless and does not interfere with anything.
It is kinda a pain to set up though

Interesting. Afraid I use icloud storage for a lot of stuff. But for really critical passwords, they’re not recorded anywhere except in my head. I’ll jot down written “clues” to help me remember. If the PWs / clues reference a theatrical performance or favorite landscape photo in some manner, they are easy for me to decipher.
As I’ve noted before, my ipad’s DejaOffice files appeared to have been broken into couple years ago. A subsequent purchase of Norton Anti-virus helped stop that type of occurrence. I don’t store those in the Deja provided DropBox cloud. But they are uploaded to Apple’s icloud along with everything else.
Good stuff. Thanks for all the suggestions. Some very thorough thoughtful folks here.

I know ZEOIX well, invested in it briefly, for a short period, several years ago, and continued it on a M* Watchlist. I maintained it in a "category" of funds I entitled "cash alternative" options, that had a history of low SD. As the OP noted, it had periods of "lows" that did not meet my criteria, for use on a longer term basis, to preserve principal. I also had other funds on my "watchlist" such as BTMIX, RPHIX, FPFIX, etc. and ended up using those other 3 funds, more extensively over the years, but sold them all in early 2022 when they started deteriorating in a manner that threatened the principal in my Taxable Brokerage portfolio. None of these bond oefs qualified for buy and hold purposes, nor as a "cash substitute", but when I owned them you could not get CDs, MMs, etc. that provided a safer return, so you had to take more risks, to get more rewards, but I did it as a very active manager of these funds, andtraded them as needed, to preserve principal, and was fully aware of the risks of these funds.

Interestingly, there was a lot of discussion on ZEOIX back in 2020 as a "cash alternative". It was being compared to RPHYX in a positive manner. Coincidently, RPHYX was re-opening at that time after being closed for quite a while.
Type ZEOIX into the search bar and review all the chatter just a few years ago.

Jeff Gunlach was fired from TCW under weird circumstances over 10 years ago.
https://reuters.com/article/us-tcw-lawsuit/ex-star-manager-gundlach-sued-over-stealing-drugs-porn-idUSTRE6064YI20100108
Gunlach later formed DoubleLine management that went on successfully.