Several past posts:
1) "MSF describes it—blend—a blue chip stock with its heady growth days in the past.
"Agree with msf and Lewis assessment. The fast growing business (iPhones, computers, music, and AppleTV) since Steve Jobs's returned has plateaued. In some area Apple is trailing."
2) "Growth is about revenues, cash flow and earnings versus the benchmark and industry peers and it’s forward looking, not from five or ten years ago."
FD: reality check. After another year. Apple proved it's not just another blue chip stock. It's even more amazing to do it when it's so big already.
Apple 2021 annual EPS was $5.61, a 71.04% increase from 2020. The price followed.

Even if the Fed raised rates to 2.00% by the end of the year, real rates will remain negative.

Yes.
Looks like they’re trying to talk some of the overheated markets down without having to really do much heavy lifting (raising rates quickly). I try to hedge my bets being up there in years. Still have a bit of exposure to longer dated investment grade bonds in the event the Fed pushes too hard and economy falls off a cliff. Not recommending that for anyone else. Just the way I tend to think about hedging risks.
Agree, bonds are not a good investment with inflation far above what they yield.

One veteran who said he made millions on GameStop was Bill Gross, the retired “bond king” and former star manager at California money management giant Pacific Investment Management Co. As the GameStop frenzy was reaching a fever pitch, the billionaire said his “heart has been with Main Street for many years.” He also warned investors betting on volatility options that they were “fish at the poker table” and “not part of an educated investment mob.”
Mr. Gross personally sold stock options when the Reddit investors were buying them. It wasn’t a sure bet. Mr. Gross said in a Wall Street Journal podcast last year he was down $10 million at one point before emerging with a $10 million gain as GameStop’s shares nosedived. “It felt good,” he said. “It was an experience. It’s like the first time you drove your car, or the first time you went down the ski slope.” He declined additional comment through a spokesman.
Excerpted From:
“Heard on the Street - Who Got Rich from the GameStop Revolution?” - WSJ January 29, 2022
(Unable to provide a subscription free link.)

It is fair to compare convertibles (hybrids) with moderate-allocation funds. However, the convertibles market is much more speculative now than a few years ago. Many speculative companies (startups, early-stage, low-quality) issue convertibles to get lower interest rates. A beauty of convertibles is that if the stock does well and trades above the conversion price, the debt goes away and becomes equity - so the company doesn't have to pay back debt in a traditional sense. Keep this in mind to assess why convertibles have tanked lately along with the selloff in speculative stocks - convertibles were hot in 2021 but are cold now. Tesla/TSLA is a big issuer of convertibles.
Chart https://stockcharts.com/h-perf/ui?s=ANNPX&compare=FCVSX,FMSDX,FPURX,PRWCX&id=p99932100988

Understood, tks for the feedback. We are measuring and weighting differently the stats of ANNPX and the alts you called out. Typically I give zero to low weight to periods below three years. I place a high weight on Sortino, rolling period averages and MaxDD.
VONE has done well, below are some comparative stats between VONE and ANNPX, first number is ANNPX, second number is VONE
3Y Stats
APR: 27.5, 26.1
MaxDD: 13.8, 20.3
Sortino: 3.25, 2.36
Rolling 1Y APR: 34.1, 24.8
5Y Stats
APR: 19.7, 18.3
MaxDD: 13.8, 20.3
Sortino: 2.56, 1.72
Rolling 3Y APR: 21.1, 14.9

Reviving this thread! Anybody have further thoughts on ANNPX? Virtus AllianzGI Convertible Inst
Performance of ANNPX is outstanding. Some select stats below
Age = 28 years, Mgr Tenure = 28 years
Life APR = 11.6 which beats SP500 by 0.8
Max DD = 42.6 vs. SP500 at 50.9
Life Sortino = 1.07 vs. SP500 at 0.86

Going further, Thomas Rowe Price, Jr., after founding the company in 1937, sold all his interest by 1970. So while I'm sure he raised a pretty penny from those sales, he and his heirs may have a greater total return in the 52 years after that than he did over the 33 years he owned the company.

By 1970, Mr. Price had sold out all holdings in the company he had created and turned his energies to managing portfolios for his family and a few friends.

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/22/obituaries/t-rowe-price-85-growth-stock-strategist-dead.html

@davidrmoran Agreed the thread has run its course, but “foolish impugning hed” is foolishly impugning. To say in the same interview, in the first thread link, that one is doing a lot of “soul searching” about recent losses while boasting in the same interview of future annualized returns of 40% over the next five years does not seem to fit with what the meaning of “soul searching” is. Since that boast, the fund has lost over 25% of its value. To me, what’s cruel is what shareholders who believed such statements have just experienced. Given the religiosity of the subject, the hed was apt. As you would say, kerrist.

The M* link within the article (probably already posted) is droll as well:
https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1071658/arkk-an-object-lesson-in-how-not-to-invest
It all seems to me simply like a tech gogo way up / way down event, such as some of us have seen in the past. Extremely hot 'n' hopeful followed by plunging losses. Like a 1995 Robertson Stephens fund (in some of which I and many others made and lost serious moneys; they underwrote the IPO of the startup where I worked, and held extremely exciting staff meetings).
The foolish and cruelly impugning subject hed here, plus Wood's own dumberer pronouncements, and this idiocy --- seriously??
\\ Terrible destruction of wealth.
\\ Willingly acts to cause harm. She must've known this was all bullspit no?
\\\ At what point does this cross over into malfeasance? Did Wood not enrich herself thru promotion of her fund?
kerrist kerrist
quite apart from the opaque silliness of 'If Wood has made positive public pronouncements unwittingly' and 'guess we'll know in 5 years' (hell, we'll know about everything then!), ...
yeah, way past time to leave the subject.
What a thread.

Maybe it is just me but still don’t see the fear associated with past declines of this magnitude. It is all about buying dips and potential buys. Although not into analogous year investing, this reminds me a bit of 1973. There we had weak January performance after a double digit gain in 1972. Like now the weakness was due to rising oil and commodity prices and inflation fears with a Fed that was about to aggressively raise rates. We then embarked on the longest and deepest bear market since the Depression.
@BaluBalu. As you saw another bad day for the junk bond OEFs a bit surprising in light of the strength in the major equity indexes. Many of the bank loan funds were lower too. The latter began acting suspiciously earlier this week so I said goodbye. That leaves me at 70% with the usual suspect of IOFIX which at least so far has survived the carnage elsewhere and up YTD. The play there though seems pretty much over. Wish I could buy its younger albeit less stellar performing sister which has yet to have a down month since its October 2020 inception, but not available to me at TD Ameritrade. Kind of following in the footsteps of IOFIX which has been positive every month but five over the past 6.67 years. Of course one of those five was a doozy for those that stayed the course.

As I understand it, it takes $250,000 with Price to obtain that elite “Flagship” status. Pity the “poor” soul with just $249,999 invested there that has to suffer their endless inadequacies and incompetence. Think of all the “newbies” just starting out on their decades long investing path.
@Davep - I’m glad your experience with TRP has been exemplary. And thank you for sharing. Two or three years ago I’d have written something similar. Not today.

Some of us are self directed investors. We don’t require or necessarily want a personal advisor / liaison person at every institution where we park money. It shouldn’t require a “Flagship” membership to change a mailing address, order checks, specify the amount withheld from a distribution for federal / state taxes or transfer assets to & from other fiduciaries accurately and within a reasonable time period. These and other seemingly routine transactions became the source of my frustration after 25+ years with this outfit.
I’ve invested directly with at least 15 different fund houses* over 50+ years. With the exception of Strong Funds in the 90s I haven’t encountered the shoddy level of routine account servicing that became the trademark at TRP.
Other Fund Houses I’ve invested directly with …
Templeton,
Mutual Series
Franklin
Calimos
Permenant Portfolio
Oppenheimer
Fidelity
Invesco
TIAA CREF
NATIXIS
Oakmark
Dodge & Cox
American Century
Delaware
Hussman
Strong Funds

While some indexes rallied to the yearend (DJIA, Nasdaq Comp), other indexes peaked around November 8, 2021. Now, Russell 2000/IWM is in the bear territory. Don't even ask about the EMs that peaked in mid-February 2021. All major indexes are below 200-dMA except DJ Utilities - what's up with that? AAII Sentiment is very negative - the most bearish in about 9 years. This week had volatile swings in the market. May be the market is trying to form a base or bottom.
LINK

For those waiting on better valuations to buy Equities, at what point would you be a serious Buyer? Do you have a specific plan in place?
What about Bonds (yeah, what about Bonds) - are any type/class of bonds worth holding in 2022?
Current S&P 500 PE Ratio: 25.85
Mean: 15.96
Median: 14.88

If you are on the sidelines congrats. Don’t see much fear in this market just everyone wanting to buy the dips. A lot of complacency. I guess that is what the past twelve years have conditioned investors to do. Should we actually get something more than a garden variety correction ala late 2018 and February/March 2020 would use a Zweig momentum buy signal to get back in. Worked like a charm after those two brief sell offs as well as the longer bear of 2008.
As for bonds the scary consensus is buy floating rate/bank loan funds as they are the place to be during periods of rising short term rates. Can’t argue with that ( and I have an allocation there) other than it seems a bit too pat and overwhelmingly embraced. If you get a really bad bear market in stocks/junk bonds, the floating rate/bank loan category will not protect you,

Without drilling deeper for month end distribution dates, month end NAV movements are always tricky to make sense of for fixed income OEFs but I see across the board both high yield and floating rate / bank loan funds are down on Thursday. It has been a long time since I have seen that happen. I hope this is not the start of something.

@MikeM, I can not reconcile your first paragraph and against the paragraph from the Q4 letter I had quoted. I am not looking for any reply / response. We have different expectations. I see what I see and shared. I am not looking to convince anybody.
In case my prior posts on GP and other managers did not make it obvious, I hire active fund managers for their business. I am not concerned about short term results. Since you mentioned about YTD results, you can look up GUSYX - M* says 25 percentile performance. I mention GUSYX because it is easy to see in it the paragraph I quoted. GISYX happens to be 8 percentile.
Years ago, Fund X made a mistake and when some of us asked for more information, they were dismissive about it. I was a novice investor at that time but I did not like their business practice and withdrew my investment. Others while were irritated by the fund’s FU mentality, stuck around. I never looked back at Fund X Co. As I said, I am not pulling my investment from GP but i am not increasing my investment. If I am not able to increase my investment to 5-10% of my PV, I liquidate. I go up to 40% of my PV. Making a temporary exception for GP.

It will be nice to track this strategy as we hit draw downs in the upcoming weeks, months, years...

Developing a strategy for managing your transition from “Accumulation” to “Drawdown” is critical. It’s a huge shift in your investment strategy, and it’s not something you should approach without a plan. Today, we’ll revisit our original retirement drawdown strategy and analyze how it’s worked since our retirement in 2018.

revisiting-our-drawdown-strategy

Some institutions provide investment account 1099s slightly early, i.e. in the fourth week of January. Vanguard sent me email yesterday (Jan 26th) saying my 1099 was available online. Though Fidelity originally said that it would provide the 1099 for my taxable account on Jan 22nd, it now says that I should check back on Feb 12 for a new date.
Years ago institutions had to send all 1099s out by Jan 31. As investments and tax laws became more complicated, this led to an increasing number of corrected 1099s being generated. More taxpayers wound up needing to file amended returns. So some deadlines were extended to February 15. (See, e.g. Notice 2009-11 extending a 1099 deadline starting with TY 2008.)
Beating the deadline by a few days is not necessarily a good thing. Better to get it right the first time than to risk having to correct it later.
FWIW, each year several T Rowe Price funds delay reporting until Feb 15. These are its real estate funds and also its small cap value (PRSVX) fund. My wild guess on the latter is that it sometimes reports non-zero amounts of Section 1250 gain. For its other funds, TRP says "late January".
https://www.troweprice.com/personal-investing/resources/planning/tax/preparation/tax-mailing-schedule.html

@BaluBalu :
Of the (7) GP funds with records of 3 years as of semi annual report date Oct 31 2021,
five have returns that are fairly close. The other 2, GPEIX & GPIIX trail. Both of these two were their first launches.
The 5 year returns also echo the same, both trail.
But as anyone knows this could turn around !?
Enjoying the ride, Derf

I'll note here that several smart and wise folks on this forum have stated -- some funds work great until they don't. RLSFX is a good example that has stumbled badly out of the gates in 2022. I invested in BLNDX despite my "rule" (ha) of not investing in funds less than 3 years old. Not a disaster yet but I'm watching it.
It started faltering after I bought (ha)

BIVIX has done quite well for the 4 year period starting 201801 -- APR of 20.1 and MaxDD of 14.4. I picked 4 years because BIVIX is less than 5 years old.
Screening for funds with a 4 year performance period starting 201801, APR of at least 20 and a MaxDD of 15 did not yield any funds in the Alt category. The closest I saw was SAPEX which has an APR of 17.7, MaxDD=14.6
Some select life of fund stats vs. SP500
APR 19.7 vs. 18.3 (impressive!)
MaxDD 14.4 vs. 19.6 (again very impressive)
Ulcer Index of 5.3 vs. 4.5