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.

Never invested with Vanguard. From recent posts, customer service has declined over the years - perhaps something more important to post-retirees than the young. And, it sounds like they’ve pushed hard to move shareholders from mutual funds into ETFs. Both perhaps insignificant for 30-40 year holders of a target-date fund, but thought them worth mentioning.
@yogibearbull - Being in Michigan the nearby Milwaukee-based Strong Funds had a certain appeal. I never had a lot there, but did do some transfers in of my 403B while still working - a move possible in the 90s (but no longer allowed). I learned a lot while there. ”Pay yourself first” wasn’t original with Dick Strong - but he used the saying effectively in motivating myself (and I assume many others) to better manage our finances. In the end, Strong turned out to be a crook.

Howdy folks,
Asia and the metals. Before Fund Alarm, I believe it was Fund Vision with Salil.
That said, the paper and real bullion markets are diverging significantly (i.e. the premiums are widening). Since the banking issue, the demand for physical bullion has skyrocketed. This has led to increases in premiums and further out delivery dates. This increase in premiums implies a market with artificial pricing on the paper side. That's fine and longstanding. What might be different this time, is the int'l flight from the dollar into other species. It might be in slow motion and take years, but we're witnessing the end of the dollar as the worldwide medium of exchange and reserve currency. When that happens, the PM's will rise significantly. I say this because in other currencies around the world, they've been doing better than stateside for years. It all depends upon which currency they're priced in. That's OK. The markets are what they are.
and so it goes,
peace,
rono

Hold a target date fund for 20, 30, 40 years? Sounds good in theory.
What legal or contractual agreement exists with the sponsor to operate that fund for an indefinite time period or as @Baseball_Fan says to adhere to the same allocations, operating restrictions, fee structures? I’ve had at least two firms I invested through (Strong & Oppenheimer) go completely out of existence in the past 25 years. A third one, Templeton has been essentially merged out of existence since I opened a workplace plan there in the early 70s. Or are these simply extreme aberrations due to my antiquity?

Would the class agree that indexing and especially target fund investing are indeed active management...indexes do change over time..so really the advantage is as mentioned prior, low costs and keeping the "man away from the machine, man only there to feed the dog who keeps the man away from the machine"
LB yes, I understand what you wrote and agree re Target Date funds but do know folks who got wiggy over the last 3 years and bailed out...and these are very educated, successful folks with MBAs etc...they looked like their dog got run over during the down drafts and did bail to cash...
While we are at it, meaning looking at the way back time machine...I actually wonder how many of us would have actually done better rolling with treasury notes for the past 30-40 years instead of puttering around with buying funds, stocks. Don't the studies show that most investors do NOT come anywhere near the returns listed for funds etc....due to the in and out and puttering around?
David M...saw the TWEIX in your post...that would have been a great long hold....and someone on the boards wrote within the past two years that they had a friend/colleague who had only ONE fund, Blackrock Global Allocation MDLOX?...keep it simple....keep adding to it. I read that a long long time ago in IBD Investors Business Daily. same thing, invest in one solid fund, keep at it. Enjoy your life, go to the beach, focus on your job etc...

What would you hold for the next 20 years? The $70 billion 2040 Target Date VFORX is the most obvious solution for many investors but not here. The notion that you can’t get a reasonably smooth ride purely by indexing isn’t true. You can index a lot of things, including bonds. VFORX is all index, has a 0.08% expense ratio and will grow gradually more conservative in its allocations as 2040 approaches. A target date fund isn’t right for tinkerers and traders like on MFO, but I actually think it’s quite useful for many employees in retirement plans who don’t understand investing. One and done.

Last year, the media declared Allocation 60-40 dead, and this year they have risen from the dead, or risen from the ashes. WSJ, Barron's, M*, almost everybody. Media headlines are for the the current news with some hype.
While basic 60-40 (SP500-like + 10-yr Treasuries) had its ups and downs, there were only 5 years in history when both stocks and bonds were down, 1931 (both DODBX and VWELX existed then), 1941, 1969, 2018, 2022 (last year), and in absolute terms, 2022 was simply the worst year for 60-40 since 1937. It is almost natural that dramatic rebounds follow dramatic collapses (for funds at least).
https://twitter.com/charliebilello/status/1609209009994612739

Down-years are to be expected from time to time
Lean years, sure. Down years, not so much. Aside from last year, the last calendar year in which PRWCX lost money was in 2008, when it lost 27.17%. The only other calendar year in which it lost money was 1990 when it lost 1.3%. (Inception was in 1986.)

As PRWCX has risen lately, I redistributed some of my shares to where I wanted them in other TRP funds, but still within the T-IRA. PRWCX is up (per Morningstar) YTD by +7.13%. I've been in since 2013. Quite very satisfied. Down-years are to be expected from time to time. The amount I'm holding in terms of proportion within my portfolio is getting uncomfortably high, which is why I moved some $$$ around. PRWCX is still almost 38% of my total. My other balanced fund is BRUFX: almost at break-even today, YTD.
(*Edited.)

Today is the 32nd anniversary of my purchase of DODGX. It was neck and neck with SPY up until the dot com bust. From then on, SPY never caught up. What happened the last 1-3-5-10-15-20 years doesn't make any difference.

Good for you.
I read some reputable article 41y ago about the best funds, and DODGX was right in there, and I invested, but of course bailed at some point. TWEIX and TORYX and the others in the article fell by the wayside over time.
It remains interesting to me that 10y returns of the very best broad-based biggies still show, today, DODGX slightly lagging FXAIX, FCNTX slightly ahead, and the only big big winner FBGRX.
All the others I looked up lag. FLPSX, e.g.
Of course niches (FSELX) excel also.
I did have a good friend in the 1990s, amateur investor, tell me she was in FBGRX big and was going to stay. I wonder if she did. At the time I thought meh. What a fund that was (and very recently is).