I think it's pretty "easy". If you believe in Schwab view, then CLMAX will be a good choice.
In the last 4 + 12 weeks, CLMAX ranks at 94+72 and lagging badly with 0% + 0.9%.
CLMAX has a good record in the riskier specialized securitized when you look at 3 years, but as a trader I'm looking at a shorter-term.
Generally, I like Schwab take on fixed income more than most others (VG, Fidelity) but I hardly ever use it for my trades.

As a loyal customer and (reasonably successful) Amazon reviewer for near 20 years, I agree with Lewis and the article. When push comes to shove they treat you like c***. I can only sympathize with the workers. I’ll never write them another review. I avoid buying there when possible.
Prime delivery has become a joke as I think @Mark alludes to. The movies alone are worth $120 a year (to me anyways), so I keep the membership. That, however, does not encumber me to purchase their products. Hell, I’ll gladly drive 15-20 miles to the nearest Walmart just to avoid having to buy from Amazon. I know some Wal Mart employees. Generally, they like working there.
BTW - Many will recall some years ago when Amazon allowed non-profits like MFO to receive a thin slice of the sale proceeds if purchased thru a link on that non-profit’s website. (And, MFO participated.) We all know how that went. Right? Basically, that’s what they do - use you until you no longer serve their interests. Corporate conscience? …

As a former CPA, I encountered this scenario repeatedly during my career as well as in my colleagues careers. It's up or out: if you don't receive a promotion every two years, start looking for another employer. When I worked for DOD, a number of administrative jobs were contracted out to avoid paying DOD employees higher wages for doing the same work, year after year. Based on the second sentence in your excerpt, Bezos considered experienced employees to be the equivalent of termites or cockroaches, not as an asset but as a pest to be minimized or eradicated !

I agree that a third party PW manger is probably safer than Apple, Firefox or Google. Both LastPass and 1Password were given good reviews in WSJ recently.
However, I do not use any of the above to store my financial passwords. I have them in an encrypted Word document that is only on my computer ( hard copy in safe deposit) and I enter them by hand or copy and paste
One of the downnsides to these notifications is that many of them refer to a web service I have not used in years and there is no easy "delete account" button.

Just for comparison’s sake, here’s the daily average trading volume for the Avantis ETFs run by DFA alumni which have been around for just shy of two years and cover a similar space:
AVUV Avantis U.S. Small Cap Value 147,014
AVUS Avantis U.S. Equity 111,454
AVDE Avantis International Equity 62,698
AVDV Avantis International Small Cap Value 112,198
AVEM Avantis Emerging Markets Equity 67,246

I haven’t used it before (at least knowingly). But today one of my seldom used IOS devices displayed a warning that a password I use for a news site (a very weak one by choice) had appeared on a national data base of stolen passwords. The message even identified the news site where I use it. Apparently I’d left keychain switched on on that device and Apple had been monitoring that password.
Well, I changed the PW and a few others that were intentionally simple and easy to remember. Than I researched Apple’s keychain function to see what it’s all about.
Article
Here’s a snippet: “If you have iCloud Keychain set up as an option to auto-fill passwords into mobile and web apps, Safari will help out in the auditing so that it can warn you of compromised passwords whenever you log in to a website. So if you use iCloud Keychain to auto-fill your credentials into a website in Safari, after you sing in, Safari will give you a prompt to "Change Password on Website," like so: This password has appeared in a data leak, which puts this account at high risk of compromise. You should change your password immediately.
One problem with above: I don’t use Safari for sensitive sites. I use DuckGo instead.
Like most of you, I’m sure, I use some pretty tough passwords for financial sites, some extending to 15 characters. (And, most often 2-factor authentication is also used.) Each password is unique. So, I’m not particularly concerned. The one that may have been heisted is a simple one I’ve used for over 20 years where security isn’t much of a concern. On the other hand - If Russian hackers can shut down a major U.S. pipeline, how do you keep them from accessing your personal financial data - or worse?
So … Do you think trusting Apple to remember your passwords is a good idea? Or a bad idea?
Please forgive listing this as “Other Investing.” But ISTM security of financial records is pretty important.

Worth considering before investing: https://nytimes.com/2021/06/15/briefing/amazon-warehouse-investigation.html

In his drive to create the world’s most efficient company, Jeff Bezos discovered what he thought was another inefficiency worth eliminating: hourly employees who spent years working for the same company.
Longtime employees expected to receive raises. They also became less enthusiastic about the work, Amazon’s data suggested. And they were a potential source of internal discontent.
Bezos came to believe that an entrenched blue-collar work force represented “a march to mediocrity,” as David Niekerk, a former Amazon executive who built the company’s warehouse human resources operations, told The Times, as part of an investigative project being published this morning. “What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need.”
In response, Amazon encouraged employee turnover. After three years on the job, hourly workers no longer received automatic raises, and the company offered bonuses to people who quit. It also offered limited upward mobility for hourly workers, preferring to hire managers from the outside.
As is often the case with one of Amazon’s business strategies, it worked.
Turnover at Amazon is much higher than at many other companies — with an annual rate of roughly 150 percent for warehouse workers, The Times’s story discloses, which means that the number who leave the company over a full year is larger than the level of total warehouse employment. The churn is so high that it’s visible in the government’s statistics on turnover in the entire warehouse industry: When Amazon opens a new fulfillment center, local turnover often surges....

“On a summer Friday afternoon last year, hedge-fund manager Dan Kamensky broke bankruptcy laws. That evening on a recorded line, he pleaded with a banker to say the whole thing was a misunderstanding. “Maybe I should go to jail,” Mr. Kamensky said on the call.
Mr. Kamensky reports to federal prison on June 18. His hedge fund is in the process of closing, and a career that included stints at white-shoe law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and storied hedge fund Paulson & Co. has been wrecked. “He came undone,” U.S. District Judge Denise Cote said during a court hearing on May 7.
Mr. Kamensky, 48 years old, worked in the high-stakes, high-conflict world of distressed investing, which aims to profit from companies teetering on the brink of or in bankruptcy. He launched his hedge fund, Marble Ridge, in 2015 with $20 million and was managing nearly $1 billion a few years later. His fund … was a relatively small player in the distressed market …
He was anxious, had difficulty sleeping, lost weight and had trouble concentrating at the office or at home … In 2017, Mr. Kamensky began working with a psychologist and a sleep specialist. He also consulted an executive coach … His efforts to control his emotions began to unravel in a bitter fight over struggling luxury-goods retailer Neiman Marcus Group Ltd.”
Thought maybe @Junkster would enjoy this story.
Excerpted / edited for brevity from The Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2021
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hedge-fund-manager-who-came-undone-is-headed-to-prison-11623490201

A simple answer @Bobpa, with a $50,000 you will make up the $50 TF in about 9 months of owning the fund. All the time past that is extra money in your account.
The difference between expense ratios is 1.05% - 0.9% = 0.15%. The reduced exp ratio equates to $75 saved on a $50k investment in one year. If you buy RPHIX you will spend a 1 time TF of $50 to make an extra $75 in reduced expenses in one year. The next 9 years is gravy.

Keep in mind that the magnitude of the final difference over ten years is affected by the volatility of the returns and by the magnitude of the returns. Just a way of saying that past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
I prefer instead to look at the 0.25% difference in ERs and estimate my breakeven point. For a $50K investment, $50 represents 10 basis points (0.1%). So it would take about 10/25 of a year, or around five months, to break even. Anything after that is gravy.
At Fidelity, you could make incremental additions for $5. So you could add $5K at a time and still have a 5 month break even point.
If volatility and rate of return didn't matter, you could just compare a 0% return on retail shares with a constant 0.25% return on investor class shares after subtracting $50.
This simplistic calculation gives you:
RPHYX: $50K x 1.00 ^ 10 = $50K at the end of 10 years.
RPHIX: $49,950 x (1.0025) ^ 10 = $51,212.89 at the end of 10 years.

I just noticed fred’s link to Schwab isn’t working.
Try This
Here’s the gist:
“Due to our expectations for higher bond yields in the second half of the year, we continue to suggest investors keep the average duration in their portfolios below their normal benchmark. For example, for an investor with a portfolio of core bonds that is similar to the Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index, which has an average duration of 6.5 years, we would suggest reducing it to the three- to five-year region. If yields do move higher, with real yields in positive territory, we would view it as an opportunity to gradually extend duration through a laddered approach.”
I just dug up the MaxFunds take on CLMAX:
Score: 9 / 100 "Poor"
Outlooks:
Forecast: -2%
Best Case: 22
Worst Case: -30%
Link
Always - 2 sides to every proposition. :)

@fred495 - Thanks for the great summary. You make a strong case. I didn’t miss your original meaning / intent.
At a glance, I’d say these guys know how to short bonds & employ leverage thru derivatives. I like to check returns back to at least 2008 when possible. This one’s less than 10 years old. I’m sure there’s a place for a fund like this in some folks’ portfolios. But if you hold bonds for the “old fashioned” reason - to hedge against economic calamity (like 2008) - than shorting investment grade bonds ISTM probably isn’t going to achieve the desired effect. Possibly these guys are quick on their feet and good at changing course.
Bonds today are a bit of a mystery. Just when everybody and his brother was expecting the 10-year to rise from around 1.7% to 2% it reversed course and fell all the way down to 1.46% (at last look). I’ve heard 2 reasons put forth: (1) Even these low rates look attractive to foreign investors; (2) Corporate pension funds are again healthy because of the hot stock market and need to lock-up funds in bonds to meet obligations 30 + years out. So they’re pouring stock gains into fixed income products.

Now we're reaching well into the realm of diversions.
You cannot spend unrealized gains.
What's being taxed is what we get in, i.e. income, regardless of whether it is spent or saved. If you want to switch what's being taxed from what we get in to what we spend, then suggest replacing income taxes with consumption taxes and see how well the middle class fares.
I have never heard of 'unrealized income'
You've probably heard of phantom income - income that's recognized for tax purposes but not realized. That can't be spent either.

Eliminating capital gains carry over and trying to tax unrealized capital appreciation, even limiting it to a large dollar amounts will only hurt the baby boomers who have inherited the stock Mom got in 1950
Except for 2010, there is no capital gains carry over. Just the opposite - heirs get a step up in basis. So let's skip the nonsense about baby boomers who have inherited stock with several decades of taxable gain. True the gain from 1950 is unrealized, but for tax purposes has already been wiped off the books. Same as ETFs wipe their gains off the books - by passing it along to someone else without being taxed on the transfer and without a cap gains carry over.
Perhaps you're thinking about introducing a capital gains carryover and eliminating the step up, so that the gains become taxable to the heirs. Whether that tax is assessed immediately (by taxing unrealized gains) or not (by taxing gains when realized), the tax liability on that gain remains the same. Only the timing is different.
So how large is that potential liability that "will only hurt baby boomers"?

The Obama administration proposed repealing stepped-up basis subject to several exemptions, including a general exemption for the first $100,000 in accrued gains ($200,000 per couple). The US Department of the Treasury estimated that, together with raising the capital gains rate to 28 percent, this proposal would raise $210 billion over 10 years. Ninety-nine percent of the revenue raised would come from the top 1 percent of households ranked by income.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-difference-between-carryover-basis-and-step-basis
You may very well be right demographically. It could be the baby boomers getting all this liability. But that's not the question. The question is which baby boomers. The 1 percenters or the 99 percenters?

I have some cash sitting on the sideline looking for a home. CLMAX has been on my watch list for a while as a fund that actively, and mostly successfully, tries to manage interest rate risk. If, as the Schwab outlook states, 10-year Treasury yields may rise to the 2.0% to 2.5% level, I expect this fund to be able to navigate the expected rate rise as well as it did in the recent past when rates rose.
I don't know of any other fund that has managed interest rate volatility as well and as consistently as CLMAX. Over the past five years, annual total returns have fluctuated nicely within a range of 5.2 and 8.9%, and YTD it's up 6.1%. In the Nontraditional Bond category, M* determined that the fund's 3-year and 5-year total returns rank in the top 1%.
In the meantime, I hold the following three dedicated bond funds in my portfolio: NVHAX, RCTIX and TSIIX, with very pleasing YTD total returns of 5.9%, 3.6% and 1.8%, respectively. So far, so good.
Fred

ProPublica did its usual thorough job in crunching numbers, with thoughtful and transparent methodology. See, e.g. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-calculated-the-true-tax-rates-of-the-wealthiest
That said, I agree that the press release was designed as much to shock as to inform. Like some others, I'm not thrilled with the way the "true tax" rate was presented. But there is something real behind it. The greater the wealth, the greater the amount of unrecognized income.
The problem I see with ProPublica's presentation is not in the point being made, but in the way it glides too easily between wealth and income. ProPublica is more precise in its full writings, but is glib in its summary.
Net increase in wealth is a reasonable measure of income for the wealthy, because "operating expenses" like necessities and taxes become a smaller percentage of asset gain as wealth goes up. But for the "common man", this is not a good calculation.
For the typical middle class, early 40s household, net increase in wealth over the past five years (ending in 2018) was $65K while this household paid $62K in federal taxes - a 95% "true tax" rate. (ProPublica figures.) The reason is twofold: taxes and living expenses roughly match wage income so savings/growth is a small percentage of wealth, and what growth there is comes almost all from home appreciation.
I hesitate to say that the issues raised by Shostakovich and sma3 are distractions, but they are details that don't take away from the main point. It's not just on growth of old-tech company stock where taxes are deferred, but also on the laborer's home appreciation.
Further, how we tax home appreciation shows it is possible to protect the average person while still taxing outsized gains. We exempt $250K/$500K of gain on homes, even when it is realized. That means a lot to most people, but but it is a pittance on $100M mansions.
sma3 wonders how unrealized capital losses would be handled. Why would that be any different from the way we treat realized losses? Currently you get to apply $3K of losses against ordinary income, but you have to carry over the rest on your books. It's not a hard problem; it's what we do now. And that $3K cap is another way in which we try not to hurt the typical taxpayer (letting them get an immediate benefit from losses) while not facilitating abuse of the system (converting huge cap gains losses into ordinary losses).
I agree that the headline piece was designed for shock value; I disagree that there is less substance in the whole piece of work than meets the eye.

It is the 10% probability that the homeowners will need the insurance against natural disasters including fire, wind storm and others. Several years ago our house was damaged by a large tree fallen on the side of the house. The total bill came to about $30K. I expect homeowner insurance will rise again given the replacement cost of our home has gone up considerably.
Given the global warming, flood insurance is on the rise on southeast coast as the major cities faces several hurricanes per year. Living in Pacific Northwest we experienced wildfires last year.

@OldJoe, dunno if you're responding to me or not, but I was talking about investing. All of us should expect to see prices going up on anything related to ag commodities; after six straight years of negative returns (which does NOT mean food prices didn't rise then), DBA is up 18% this year so far. Get ready for more.
Meanwhile, I'm sticking with my decision not to add to commodities or other inflation assets. If you're concerned about food prices, though, maybe you could think about buying some ag commodities to help offset your costs.

I found the original article pretty underwhelming scandal-mongering.
For the record, the system that favors Bezos also favors me -- I have a very small number of shares in a boring old-tech company that were gifted to me a number of years ago which I (foolishly) never cashed out when I first received (and was a struggling student). As such I have modest paper wealth as well that I'm not paying tax on.

Call me dense on this subject, but ISTM we already have virtual dollars. Years ago, when the government printed money, it really printed it. Now the Fed just adds virtual dollars electronically to banks' reserves. Voila, instant, albeit virtual, cash. Obviously these virtual dollars are tied to "real" dollars because they're denominated in real dollars.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081415/understanding-how-federal-reserve-creates-money.asp
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2017/november/does-federal-reserve-print-money
The Digital Dollar piece linked to above claims that "Transfer payments, such as those provided by governments to people during the Covid-19 crisis, would be made faster and easier if that money could be deposited directly into digital wallets."
"Digital" currency wouldn't have made them go any faster, because the payments were already made electronically at least to some recipients.
What we don't have (yet) are virtual wallets. So called "virtual wallets" now are just software layered upon existing payment systems.
A prepaid, rechargeable card comes close to a virtual wallet. Conceptually, it stores cash value on the card, like a physical wallet stores paper money. Potential loss is limited to the amount on the card, as is potential loss from having a "real" wallet stolen. They can be recharged with cash without using a bank. (I suspect the reality is that prepaid cards still rely on being connected to a server. That would mean less anonymity than advertised, and a greater possibility of failure as compared with pulling a dollar bill out of your wallet.)
In short, so long as "virtual" dollars are linked to "real" dollars, I don't see a big difference between them and the current, largely virtual system. There are significant concerns (notably in privacy and access) with a cashless society. But that's a different question, one that arises as virtual dollars supplant physical money.

That very thing has made my blood boil for many years: deceptive packaging that gives the appearance (or almost the same appearance) as the last time you bought, but the CONTENTS of the package has shrunk. Price? Same or higher. Gov't inflation numbers are indeed BS. Ice cream. Triscuits. ANY box of crackers, really. Soup. You name it. ...