“It is up to the investor to have at least some degree of knowledge what they are investing in (and some degree of knowledge about investing in general) … .”
The “Catch22” here - Most of us acquire that knowledge gradually over years of experience.
Oh … of course there are books on the subject.
One of the better arguments in favor of target date funds I’ve heard.

Regarding Puts & Calls, there is the Put/Call Ratio commented on by McClellan Financial:

When the market changes its mood, indicators can sometimes change theirs to match. That is the message of this week’s chart.
Traders and analysts have been watching the Put/Call Ratio ever since the late Martin Zweig first called attention to it decades ago. In his 1986 book Winning On Wall Street, Zweig described his research in the 1960s, digging through figures from the Securities and Exchange Commission going back as far as WWII, and noticing that “…when options investors got too optimistic - - buying lots of calls and shunning puts - - the stock market was generally heading for trouble. The reverse was also true.”
The persistent problem over the years has been in determining what constitutes “high” and “low” readings for the Put/Call Ratio. This task is best done in retrospect, but we have to analyze and trade in realtime. And that can be hard.

learning_center/weekly_chart/put_call_ratio_range_shift/

@BaluBalu
Fido hiring, a growth sign, eh? The times I've called over many years, if the CSR couldn't readily help; the proper person was sought. No problem with that. 'Course, the caller must have a properly framed question in the first place, to expect a proper answer.
Fidelity hiring

The intent of my post was to be helpful to this forum members and not to take shots at Fidelity or any other brokerage.
Re customer competence, in the past 3 yrs, I have lost count the number of times I had to educate Fidelity CSRs about investment products available on their platform and the services they offered; while in the prior 10 yrs, I had consistently received outstanding service. Now, I hardly transact at Fidelity just to avoid having to deal with their CSR. I just leave most of my cash allocation at Fidelity. I expected Fidelity to assign less trained (and sometimes unprofessional?) reps to smaller accounts before elevating them to their highest level accounts but it is possible Fidelity lost too many employees at every level. l shall let other devoted customers train Fidelity CSRs before I check back with Fidelity.

@BaluBalu
Fido hiring, a growth sign, eh? The times I've called over many years, if the CSR couldn't readily help; the proper person was sought. No problem with that. 'Course, the caller must have a properly framed question in the first place, to expect a proper answer.
Fidelity hiring

At one time the price of nat gas ran opposite that of crude oil on many days. That’s partially because the gas was a necessary (somewhat unwanted) byproduct of oil drilling / fracking and the market for gas was saturated - so they needed to sell it off cheaply. I don’t follow this closely, but suspect that’s no longer the case. A second reason gas may behave differently than crude is its use for air conditioning in warmer months.
Yep - I’ve watched oil prices since the gas lines of the 70s (of which I partook). No way I know of to forecast the price. Even T. Boone Pickens got it wrong near the end. He’d steadfastly predicted a rebound for years before he died. His forecast came to fruition too late to do him any good.
Reminds one of the old saw about “In the long run …” :)
BTW - Today’s (supposedly informed) pundits on Bloomberg don’t seem to think the Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases will have much long range impact on oil prices. Remains to be seen of course.

@Crash "I'd been wanting to hop on the Natgas gravy train, these days". Really
Good luck with the NG, Derf
P.S. My chuckle
for the day ! TUVM

A few years ago I thought Natgas would eventually be seen as a darling and bought ALOT (for me) and kept buying on the dips to a point where it became a bottomless pit. The whole energy sector was deemed "uninvestable." I eventually started selling on bounces and ended up with a substantial though tolerable loss. It was without question the worst and most prolonged and painful bear markets I have ever personally experienced (and this is from someone whose played around with gold minors for decades)!

Thanks for that information. Unfortunately, there are a couple of features at Fidelity that one can't be sure work without either trying them out or asking. One is buying a fund with a reduced min in an IRA, and then there's this one - automatic investing.
Automatic investing is the more obscure one. You don't need to already have money in a fund to check out the IRA min. But you do need to have money in a fund to test whether an automatic investment is accepted. Of course one can call and ask.
I have a fund there (in an IRA) that used to have a lower IRA min. If I sold it off now I could not get in again. And over the years, sometimes automatic investment worked, sometimes not. Things change and it can be hard to find out.

"For years, something strange kept happening on Wall Street.
Before a big shareholder could carry out plans to sell a slug of stock, the price dropped. It was as if other investors knew what was coming."
☞ Wall Street Journal Article

Nobody told me. ;)
I think that's the first time I've followed a WSJ link that wasn't behind a paywall.
Thanks for posting.

I think Mark's suggestion--BIAWX--is a good one. And VEIGX, despite its global focus, is shaping up to be an interesting ESG play. The absence of energy in 2022 is certainly affecting performance negatively, just as its absence for years prior to 2022 was beneficial.

ESGV ... well, except it's so comparable the chart lines are barely distinguishable, so maybe not something an investor dissatisfied w/ PRBLX would be interested in.
ESGV has enough volume now that it's fairly easy to trade, if that's a distinction that would make it more attractive versus PRBLX.
To Lewis's point, Parnassus dumped all fossil fuels some time ago. Although they've never had much in traditional energy directly, they did usually keep an exposure to nearly purely fossil-fired utilities. Two of those they'd held for years, I know very well, since they operate in my state: NWE and MDU.
I was never so happy with Parnassus when they sold; NWE in particular is right at the bottom of the list of regulated utilities to be admired. The guys (they're all male) in the corporate suite there have been trying to double down on coal and rip off ratepayers, while refusing to invest a single penny more in solar and wind, not to mention trying their best to destroy the solar home and business sub-economy.
Anyhow, the lack of fossil fuel investment is very likely a reason PRBLX doesn't look all that great ytd, given that traditional energy is the sector of the moment.

Per recent announcement, it looks like T is scheduled for a $0.2775 quarterly dividend, or 4.65% at current pricing. I'm also at a loss in my taxable account, but I'm not selling (yet) since I want the slug of Warner Bros. Discovery for my pain and suffering. T may do better as the more pure play telecom services provider. Either that, or they're first up in the tax loss selling derby. WBD may just be a winner in a few years.

Is there any way to know what will be the basis for AT&T shares after it spins off WBD in early April?
Will the AT&T shares give up some of their basis to form a basis for the newly acquired WBD shares?
I've read several articles about the details (e.g about .24 shares of the new company for each share of AT&T), but cannot find anything about the basis going forward. Most articles on this subject concentrate on differing opinions of the prospects for the two separate companies.
I have some shares received from my Dad -- they're under water.
I optimistically bought some AT&T shares myself a few years ago (nice dividend, right) -- they are under water.
Apparently I'll still have those same shares after the split. But will their basis be changed (no matter what I paid for them)? And I'll have some new shares of WBD -- what will their basis be (after all, I didn't directly pay anything for them)?
I'm tempted to harvest the tax loss (and avoid the hassle) by selling now. But I'd like a better handle on the post split situation.
But maybe this spinoff will "unleash" the Warner Media business and the new stock will soar! My experience with spinoffs has not been very good. Did anybody else get saddled with the SO spinoff Mirant (loaded up with debt and went bankrupt).
Thanks for any help or insight,
David

A CityWire article was posted several hours ago regarding former PM George Jikovski.
You may need to sign in or sign up to read the article in its entirety.
Excerpts below.
"‘After 15 years at Canyon Partners, George Jikovski, partner and manager of our River Canyon Total Return fund, is leaving the firm. We’re actively recruiting his replacement, and in the interim the fund will be managed by Todd Lemkin, our CIO, and Sam Reid, our top debt trader,’ the spokesperson said."
"Jikovski had run the fund since late December 2014, investing almost exclusively in securitized assets and posting a 5.6% annualized return through Friday. The Bloomberg US Aggregate, by contrast, delivered a 1.9% annualized return over that time."
"The fund under Jikovski also delivered some extra volatility, posting a 4.4% standard deviation of returns compared to 3.3% for the index, but its returns were so far ahead of the index that its Sharpe Ratio of 1.13 more than doubled the 0.51 reading of the index."
"More than half of the fund is in floating rate securities. The popularity of these assets for both their higher yield and their inflation protection has led to their being securitized in collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) in recent years."

Oil pulled back due to China’s lockdown on Shanghai - worst outbreak in the last two years. It is severe enough to affect export production and oil consumption in that city. They are starting to use Pfizer vaccine which is considerable more effective than their Sinovac vaccine.
Not sure why industrial and precious metals are down today. Same goes for agricultural products. Crude oil was down 9% this morning, but it is still over $100 prior to the war.
Commodity is a volatile asset class so a small allocation will goes a long way. Ukraine war is still in-going so high oil price will return again.
@junkster, you are right that FSRRX is the least volatile fund to gain exposure to commodities. The fund invested 30% in commodities and some in precious metals.

All,
I managed to parse this from my digital subscription. I value their content and feel compelled to properly cite and gracefully share:
The Economist Business
Mar 26th 2022 edition Surge pricing
Mar 26th 2022
How companies use AI to set prices
The pricing of products is turning from art into science
Few american business tactics are as peculiar in a freewheeling capitalist society as the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. P.H. Hanes, founder of the textile mill that would eventually become HanesBrands, came up with it in the 1920s. That allowed him to use adverts in publications across America to deter distributors from gouging buyers of his knitted under garments. Even today many American shopkeepers hew to manufacturers’ recommended prices, as much as they would love to raise them to offset the inflationary pressures on their other costs. A growing number, though, resort to more sophisticated pricing techniques.
A seminal study from 2010 by McKinsey, a consultancy, estimated that raising prices by 1% without losing sales can boost operating profits by 8.7%, on average. Getting this right can be tricky. Set prices too high and you risk losing customers; set them too low and you leave money on the table. Retailers have historically used rules of thumb, such as adding a fixed margin on top of costs or matching what competitors charge. As energy, labour and other inputs go through the roof, they can no longer afford to treat pricing as an afterthought.
To gain an edge, shopkeepers have been turning to price-optimisation systems. These predict how customers will respond to different pricing scenarios, and recommend those that maximise sales or profits. At their core are mathematical models that use oodles of transaction data to estimate price elasticities—how much demand increases as the price falls and vice versa—for thousands of products. Price-sensitive items can then be discounted and price-insensitive ones marked up. Merchants can fine-tune the algorithms to prevent undesirable outcomes, such as double-digit price surges or larger packages costing more by unit of weight than smaller ones.
These systems are becoming cleverer thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (ai). Whereas older models used historical sales data to estimate price elasticities for individual items, the latest crop of ai-powered ones can spot patterns and relationships between multiple items. Makers of pricing software are incorporating new data sources into their models, from customers’ tweets to online product reviews, says Doug Fuehne of Pricefx, one such firm. The cloud-based platform developed by Eversight, another provider, allows retailers to test how slight increases or decreases in the price of, say, Heinz ketchup at different stores affect sales not just of that specific condiment but across the category. It is used by big manufacturers such as Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson, as well as some supermarkets (Raley’s) and clothes- sellers (JCPenney).
All this makes pricing systems “much more three-dimensional”, observes Chad Yoes, a former executive at Walmart who oversaw pricing at the retail behemoth. Retail bosses are keen to promote this sophistication to investors, who value firms’ pricing power at a time of high inflation. In February Starbucks, a chain of coffee shops, boasted about its use of analytics and ai to model pricing “on an ongoing basis”. us Foods, a food distributor, has touted its pricing system’s ability to use “over a dozen different inputs” to boost sales and profits.
Price-optimisation may make prices more volatile. “Retailers are pricing faster today than they ever have before,” says Matt Pavich of Revionics, another pricing-software firm. That is especially true in the fast-moving world of e-commerce. But even Walmart reviews the prices of many items in its stores 2-4 times a year, says Mr Yoes, up from once or twice a few years ago.
What pricing systems do not do is lead inexorably to higher prices. Mr Pavich calls this misconception “one of the biggest myths” about products like his. Sysco, a big food distributor which rolled out new pricing software last year, is a case in point. The firm says the system allows it to lower prices on “key value items”—as price-sensitive bestsellers are known in the trade—and raise them on other products. It can thus increase profits by expanding sales while maintaining margins. That keeps investors content and shoppers sweet. ■
For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "Artificial prices"
Published since September 1843 to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”
God bless
the Pudd

As @MikeW says, GQEPX is worth consideration. For its first three years of existence M* classified it as LCG and gave it low marks in its comparison group. Recently, ISTM, Jain has embraced a value discipline, a development M* recognizes in its style box. I wonder if the reported 143% turnover reflects this shift. I don’t have snapshots of the fund’s earlier portfolio holdings that might facilitate a comparison. In the event, PBLRX is 30 times bigger with only 40 positions, so it’s unlikely to be able to pivot as GQEPX seems to have done. It’s also obvious that Jain has no ESG mandate to follow; you get tobacco in his fund. I tend to like funds with smaller asset bases and concentrated holdings, criteria that Jain’s fund meet. By way of disclosure, I still hold AKREX, even though its AUM have mushroomed; it does still have a very concentrated portfolio. I think Jain is a very good LCG EM manager and my reason for not owning his fund is that I don’t see the value in EM stocks that some analysts appear to see.

It sounds like you're talking about the fee table in Fidelity fund prospectuses. Is it prospectus disclosures you have in mind? I was not aware that Fidelity ever charged 12b-1 fees (outside of its Fidelity Advisor load funds).
For example, here's the current summary prospectus for FPURX and the one from ten years ago. They both list just management fees, other fees, and 0% 12b-1 fees as you describe. Fidelity, along with many other families, has always (or at least for many years) been rather opaque about fees in its prospectuses.
If you're talking about information that's in the SAI (e.g. group fees), at least some of that is still provided. The current SAI for FPURX reports that the actual 2021 management fee of 0.3745% was comprised of a group fee of 0.2245% and an individual fund fee of 0.15%. Similarly, the current SAI reports that in 2021 Puritan paid $2,315,707 for pricing and bookkeeping services. (One could look up the average AUM to calculate a percentage.)

Thing to remember is that insurance co workouts take YEARS. The state insurance system doesn't have any pool of funds and does the workout by first seeking merger with a healthy co, and failing that, by running the failed insurer itself. I had experience with this when Mutual Benefit Life (MBL, an old, well-respected and highly-rated co until the run), a guaranteed-rate option within our 403b, failed due to a run. We were offered immediate withdrawals at 40% haircut, or the option to stick with the workout at prevailing m-mkt rates (that were about half of the guaranteed-rate by MBL) and that took several years to sort out. While money wasn't lost, there was opportunity cost due to frozen accounts. So, don't buy an insurance product from a low-rates co thinking that state insurance will you bail out quickly.
The insurance co workout is nothing like the FDIC workout for failed banks - close on Friday, reopen on Monday under a new owner/management. Main difference is that FDIC system is funded (or, very underfunded now). I have had that experience too, but that is for another time.

3 Ways to Get Better Yields than Bonds via Barrons… https://www.marketwatch.com/articles/bonds-yields-51648235275
“ Multi-Year Guaranteed Annuities.These are the equivalents of bank certificates of deposits, except that they’re sold by insurers. As of Friday morning, you could get a a 5-year MYGA from an A-rated insurer yielding as much as 3.15%”

I think that annuities can be good investments for some (in limited cases) so don't take this the wrong way, but the assertion that SPDAs, esp. multi-year ones, are equivalent to CDs overstates their safety and misses some tax differences.
In terms of taxes, they are more like IRAs - withdrawals prior to age 59½ are subject to penalties.
In terms of risk, the column states that "Even if the insurer that sold you the MYGA goes broke, which is a rare event, you will get your principal back though you may get reduced interest." Well, sort of.
Executive Life of NY (ELNY) is a good case study of what could go wrong. This insurer was solvent when the state put it into receivership. (Its parent company was bankrupt and investors, not understanding the distinction, began a "run on the bank".) Bad things can happen even without the insurer going broke.
SPDA owners had a choice of:
1. Taking the cash value of their policies, which meant forfeiting possibly several percent of principal in penalties if they were not past the multi-year penalty period, or
2. Getting a new policy (with MetLife, a solid insurer) at a lower rate and with a new seven year penalty period (regardless of the term of the original contract)
https://www.nylb.org/Documents/ELNY_VerifiedPetition_ExB.pdf
Sure, if you waited another seven years, you'd get your principal back with interest, but if you took the money and ran, you could wind up with less than the principal you started with. Likely to happen? Definitely not. Possible? Yes.