I like to sleep well at night. 10 years in bucket #1 is the best sleeping aid.

My allocation model is so fragmented & complicated that I fall asleep at night just trying to figure it all out.
Great sleep inducer.
I’ve been burned more than once on used cars, Usually buy new. Then I know what I’m getting. There’s an old expression that when you buy used you’re “Buying somebody else’s problems.”

:) - Since according to @NumbersGirl this is a paid subscription service I guess you have a right to bitch. For the freebies out there - including some M* functions - I takes what I can get. M* did me a favor when they eliminated their free portfolio tracker. What I use now, for only a few dollars a month from Apple’s app store, is light-years ahead of what M* offered. It’s been a tremendous help for this “allocation nerd”.

The car that was totaled was a CPO that was flawless for three years. That’s why we went back to the same dealership and bought a 3 year newer version of the same car, even the same color. Shit happened. But we were lucky we caught the non inspection and demanded our own inspections

@yogibearbull
I recall 10-20 years back, that some 'stable value' choices found within 401k/403b plans may have contained ETN products; synthetic bonds, so to speak; as I named them.
--- The bonds in such a fund are sometimes called "wrapped" bonds, referring to the fact that they are insured. The insurance is commonly issued in the form of a so-called synthetic guaranteed investment certificate (GIC). ---
During the 2008 melt, a friend received a letter stating that 'one shouldn't be concerned about the safety of their underlying 'stable value fund'.
At the time, even some insurers were not very stable. No back up for the back up, for the back up. The musical chairs problem and who is remains without a chair.
Wondering today about ETN's stuff inside such funds.

@crash. Thank you for your concern. I was sore and the airbag cut my hand but no great harm. We liked the car so much that we bought the same car,,, three years newer. Big out of pocket. It was a CPO car but I figured out it had never been inspected. Had it checked out and it had low compression. The dealer took the car back. The next day it was back on the lot as a CPO car. Buyer beware.

CPO?
Glad you're pretty much ok, physically.

@crash. Thank you for your concern. I was sore and the airbag cut my hand but no great harm. We liked the car so much that we bought the same car,,, three years newer. Big out of pocket. It was a CPO car but I figured out it had never been inspected. Had it checked out and it had low compression. The dealer took the car back. The next day it was back on the lot as a CPO car. Buyer beware.

How many years later, and 'Morningstar' + 'not working' is still a thing? Asking as a longtime former M* user.

Others may not be aware of all the history, eh?

@sma3….. +1. Retired without a pension too. I like to sleep well at night. 10 years in bucket #1 is the best sleeping aid.

Most people agree that the worst negative impact is to have to sell equities at the bottom because you need the money to live on. So you should not have money in the market that you will need to live on for the foreseeable future.
The question is always "how long is the foreseeable future". A very long time it turns out.
I looked at DJA and SP500 worse case losses over last 100 years and how long it took to get back to peak and stay there.
Pundits usually say five years of expenses is enough to keep you from selling at the bottom, but this ignores the two "double bottoms " ie in the 1930s and 1970s when stocks crashed again and the "lost decade" of the 2000s
It took 10 years for DJA to get past it's peak in 1973. It took 13 years for SP500 to get past 2000 peak.
Our good buddy John Hussman believes we could be in for a 60% decline from here.
https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc230319/
So I try to ensure I have enough cash and bonds ( after accounting for Social Security and dividends etc ) to live on for at least ten years. I am retired without a pension, so what I got is all I am going to get!

How many years later, and 'Morningstar' + 'not working' is still a thing? Asking as a longtime former M* user.

@LewisBraham, when Dutch giant ING got into trouble during the GFC 2008-09 and had to be rescued by the Dutch government, one condition was to refocus on core businesses. It ended up divesting its US operations (noncore):
ING insurance and asset management businesses (US) went to Yoya Financial/VOYA.
ING Direct (US online bank, that itself had origin in the failed online NetBank in GA) went to Capital One/COF. Unluckily or luckily, I stayed through all these transitions after my early find years ago that NetBank offered FREE wire transfers - that didn't last long!
We don't know all details of the UBS takeover of CS, but there may be similar conditions by the government or by UBS. CS in the US already had a lot of controversial M&A history - First Boston, Warburg Pincus (asset management unit), Donaldson Lufkin Jenerette.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_Suisse

This morning there are fewer CDs (1 year) available this morning at Fidelity and Vanguard. On last Friday, there were many more choices. Stayed with large banks only - Morgan Stanley, UBS and Barclays.
Will wait after March 22th FOMC meeting to see if treasury will return. Two weeks ago T bills were yielding over 5.2% (6 mo) and 4.8% (2 years). Just like that they were all gone.
It is time to refocus on investment grade bond funds since corporate junk and bank loan funds took a sizable hit this week.

Heard as low as ONE billion (not sure which currency) was offered by UBS. This Credit Sussie debacle is actually bigger issue on global level of financial contagion. The Swiss government already made billions line of credit available.
++++
During the hay days, Credit Sussie Bank is the second largest Swiss bank widely held in many mutual funds. It was worth many bullions in asset. Something went terrible wrong in recent years that led to their demise.

UBS Group AG agreed to take over its longtime rival Credit Suisse Group AG for more than $3 billion, pushed into the biggest banking deal in years by regulators eager to halt a dangerous decline in confidence in the global banking system. The deal between the twin pillars of Swiss finance is the first megamerger of systemically important global banks since the 2008 financial crisis when institutions across the banking landscape were carved up and matched with rivals, often at the behest of regulators.
The Swiss government said it would provide more than $9 billion to backstop some losses that UBS may incur by taking over Credit Suisse. The Swiss National Bank also provided more than $100 billion of liquidity to UBS to help facilitate the deal.
Swiss authorities were under pressure to make the deal happen before Asian markets opened for the week. The urgency on the part of regulators was prompted by an increasingly dire outlook at Credit Suisse, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. The bank faced as much as $10 billion in customer outflows a day last week, this person said.
The sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this month prompted investors globally to scour for weak spots in the financial system. Credit Suisse was already first on many lists of troubled institutions, weakened by years of self-inflicted scandals and trading losses. Swiss officials, along with regulators in the U.S., U.K. and European Union, who all oversee parts of the bank, feared it would become insolvent this week if not dealt with, and they were concerned crumbling confidence could spread to other banks.
An end to Credit Suisse’s nearly 167-year run marks one of the most significant moments in the banking world since the last financial crisis. It also represents a new global dimension of damage from a banking storm started with the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this month.
Unlike Silicon Valley Bank, whose business was concentrated in a single geographic area and industry, Credit Suisse is a global player despite recent efforts to reduce its sprawl and curb riskier activities such as lending to hedge funds.
Credit Suisse had a half-trillion-dollar balance sheet and around 50,000 employees at the end of 2022, including more than 16,000 in Switzerland.
UBS has around 74,000 employees globally. It has a balance sheet roughly twice as large, at $1.1 trillion in total assets. After swallowing Credit Suisse, UBS’s balance sheet will rival Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG in asset size.

The above is excerpted from a current article in The Wall Street Journal, and was edited for brevity.

@yogibearbull
Thanks
I think I read that last fall
Notice, Baranyk does not include downloading portfolio data from spreadsheet in the list of features they are looking to support.
Hopefully that is because he didnt intend this to be a comprehensive list. I hope so because that is the only reason that I use the legacy portfolio manger. I can easily dump all my symbols, shares and average price paid into Portfolio and get a pretty accurate asset allocation, stock overlap and industry representation etc.
This ( download) function is pretty easy to set up. A site I follow "Simply Safe Dividends"
has been doing it for years.

Hi, MikeW.
David Sherman does things that I like (and respect).
(1) His strategies are consistently distinctive; there's not a "me, too!" in the bunch. They're thoughtful and serve a valid and important purpose: providing fixed income strategies that diversify a normal fixed income portfolio. Five of his six funds, for instance, have negative downside capture rates; that is, they tend to make money when the bond market is losing it.
(2) He does not like losing money. That's "the return of principal" principle. His strategies are mostly credit driven; that is, their holdings are less affected by interest rate changes than by the creditworthiness of the issuer. And his team does really rigorous credit research, which is reflected in relatively small and relatively brief drawdowns. Strategic Income did have two positions misfire and/or blow-up about eight years ago, but that's been about it for serious goofs.
(3) He executes those strategies well. His flagship Short-Term High Yield fund famously has the highest Sharpe ratio of any fund in existence over most of the time periods we've checked. (Over the past 10 years, it is #1 with a Sharpe of 2.26. The second highest ratio is 1.01.) The MFO rating - a conservative metric that relies on the fund's Martin ratio, which also drives the Ulcer Index calculations - for all six of his funds, ranging in age from 1.5 - 12 years, is in the top 20%. The MFO risk rating for five of the six is low and for one, Strategic Income, is below average.
For what that's worth,
David

Banks are teetering as customers yank their deposits. Markets are seesawing as investors scurry toward safety. Regulators are scrambling after years of complacency.
The sudden collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — the biggest bank failures since the Great Recession — have put the precariousness of lenders in stark relief. The problem for SVB was that it held many bonds that were bought back when interest rates were low. Over the past year, the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates eight times. As rates went up, newer versions of bonds became more valuable to investors than those SVB was holding.
The bank racked up nearly $2 billion in losses. Those losses set off alarms with investors and some of the bank’s customers, who began withdrawing their money — a classic bank run was underway.
Even before SVB capsized, investors were racing to figure out which other banks might be susceptible to similar spirals. One bright red flag: large losses in a bank’s bond portfolios. These are known as unrealized losses — they turn into real losses only if the banks have to sell the assets. These unrealized losses are especially notable as a percentage of a bank’s deposits — a crucial metric, since more losses mean a greater chance of a bank struggling to repay its customers.
At the end of last year U.S. banks were facing more than $600 billion of unrealized losses because of rising rates, federal regulators estimated. Those losses had the potential to chew through more than one-third of banks’ so-called capital buffers, which are meant to protect depositors from losses. The thinner a bank’s capital buffers, the greater its customers’ risk of losing money and the more likely investors and customers are to flee.
But the $600 billion figure, which accounted for a limited set of a bank’s assets, might understate the severity of the industry’s potential losses. This week alone, two separate groups of academics released papers estimating that banks were facing at least $1.7 trillion in potential losses.

Midsize banks like SVB do not have the same regulatory oversight as the nation’s biggest banks, who, among other provisions, are subject to tougher requirements to have a certain amount of reserves in moments of crisis. But no bank is completely immune to a run.
First Republic Bank was forced to seek a lifeline this week, receiving tens of billions of dollars from other banks. On Thursday, the U.S. authorities helped organize an industry bailout of First Republic — one of the large banks that had attracted particular attention from nervous investors.
The troubles lurking in the balance sheets of small banks could have a large effect on the economy. The banks could change their lending standards in order to shore up their finances, making it harder for a person to take out a mortgage or a business to get a loan to expand.
Analysts at Goldman believe that this will have the same impact as a Fed interest rate increase of up to half a point. Economists have been debating whether the Fed should stop raising rates because of the financial turmoil, and futures markets suggest that many traders believe it could begin cutting rates before the end of the year.
On Friday, investors continued to pummel the shares of regional bank stocks. First Republic’s stock is down more than 80 percent for the year, and other regional banks like Pacific Western and Western Alliance have lost more than half their values.
Investors, in other words, are far from convinced that the crisis is over.

The above section contains excerpts from a lengthy article in The New York Times, which was heavily edited for brevity.

I’m loving the higher yields on cash. I retired six years ago, and this is the first time I’ve been able to get decent returns on cash, except for a brief period a couple years ago. As a result, I haven’t held as much in cash reserves as a retiree probably should. However, I’ve been able to load up on CDs yielding 5% and higher lately, in addition to our maximum limits on i-Bonds. When the new rates are announced for I-Bonds, I’ll decide whether to cash them out or continue holding. I’m not fooling with treasuries because the yields on CDs are higher and I’ve been laddering them so I’ve got cash available with regularity. Plus we’re keeping a healthy amount in Fidelity money markets yielding well over 4% right now. This has been a pleasant turn of events considering the total disaster bond funds have been for protecting assets.

@Crash. In 2008 I was busy running a business and I was ten years from retirement. I didn’t have all day to follow the markets every move and digest a hundred other dudes fears. The future of democracy wasn’t in question and the crazy caucus wasn’t threatening default. And I don’t remember members of Congress calling for a civil war. But if the worst happened I had a decade for the market the climb back and short of that,,,, to save more money. Of course things look extra volatile now. If we live long enough, this too shall pass. Best regards to you Crash.

On rather short notice, Cohanzick invited people to listen to David Sherman talk about the significance of “recent developments.” Reportedly, 90 people called in. No slides, just David at his desk talking through two topics and fielding questions.
Highlights:
1. none of his funds have exposure to banks or thrifts. Early in his career, at Leucadia, he was taught that this additional financial sector focus offered “incremental gains that were not worth the risk.”
2. in a “moral hazard” sort of way, institituions worldwide have “adopted an umbrella policy: avoid any failure at all cost.”
3. Sherman’s policy preference would be a 1-2 bps / year charge for insurance on accounts over $250k with an opt-out provision and some sort of preferential payments scheme (akin, I think, to what happens in a bankruptcy liquidation) to avoid runs on the bank. (James Mackintosh, in Friday's WSJ, speculates on investment regulations to pursue the same end; he suggests requiring banks to invest only in short-term Treasuries as backing for regular deposits, with greater flexibility for special high-yield accounts.)
4. He believes interest rates will remain higher for longer than commonly expected, unless the fed has to accommodate a systemic risk. A fed “pivot” now would be “ a bad sign regarding speculation and future inflation.”
5. the commercial real estate market, which is reliant on floating rate securities, is a major and generally unrecognized risk. High quality lenders like BlackRock “are handing the keys back to the bank.” Eventually the government will need to pursue a solution like the Resolution Trust (1989-1995) to work to resolve the savings & loan crisis.
6. Q: is the banking system close to melt-down? A: No. With the exception of a few incidents involving insolvent micro banks, there are no “FDIC-regulated banks where uninsured depositors didn’t get their money back.”
7. Q: are you positive on high yield this yield? A: we don’t speculate but “In general, active HY will outperform stocks over the next couple years based on valuations.”
8. Q: has the risk-return equation become more compelling? Are you playing offense or defense now? A: “I love this question. Compliance hates it. We love markets like this, even if they’re frustrating, difficult or stressful because they create volatility and volatility creates opportunity. Things were more shaky a year ago ... we’ve become more offensive over the past several months Dry powder not diminished but new money is getting invested at substantially higher returns. Dry powder (at year’s end his funds were 30% and 70% “dry powder”) reflects view that we’ll have more opportunities and we will not be forced to take duration risk. We’re avoiding highly stressed or distressed issuers whose business model is questionable relative to other opportunities. We think there will be more of opportunities; commercial RE will raise its ugly head to create them.”
9. Q: where do you get such great ideas? A: swiped one from a student in my Global Value Investing class at NYU. (Roughly.)
 
10. Q: Has the opportunity set changed since 1/1/2023? A: "We focus on business model, the group tried to be disciplined in our credit work in all periods though everyone occasionally gets out of their lane. We’re focusing on staying at the highest level of the capital structure. Social media makes everything worse. Investors do less work, act more in reaction to events, and since it’s easier to move money, it’s also easier to over-react. Across portfolios, we have the highest level of leveraged loan ownership in years. LLs significantly higher return than the bonds, assuming no rate collapse.”
David either reads the board or has a news alert set for his name, so I’m confident that if I’ve materially misrepresented his words, he’ll help guide us back to the light.
For what that’s worth, David