My only Matthews fund was MEGMX, although I had been strongly committed to their funds several years ago. I decided to take good profits and put them into ARTYX. I was concerned about all the turnover of managers, then the news of the outflows pushed me to sell.

Interesting. Didn't they just launch MEGMX?

@FD1k
>> 3) Healthcare got a lot more expensive since Obama care.
cites?
Here's one for ya:
https://www.statnews.com/2019/03/22/affordable-care-act-controls-costs/
@msf did a lot of substantiated posting in this area back when.

I'm not going to repost all that material, as people seem more interested in posturing with terse "narratives" and clickbait headlines than with numbers and objective analyses.
"Healthcare". What's that? National expenditures? National expenditures per capita? An analog of risk adjusted returns, e.g. improved health / change in cost?
"A lot more expensive". More expensive than what? Than it was in 2009? Certainly healthcare costs rise faster than inflation. That was true a decade ago, that's true now. So what? Not a single figure proffered, let alone two to show a comparison.
ACA "saved the U.S. $2.3 trillion"? Compared with what? "The bottom line: cumulatively from 2010 to 2017 the ACA reduced health care spending a total of $2.3 trillion."
National health expenditures in 2010 totaled $2.593T; by 2017 they totaled $3.487T. Each of the intervening years also experienced expenditures more than the 2010 baseline. Cumulatively, from 2010 to 2017 health expenditures increased by trillions of dollars.
https://www.cms.gov/files/zip/nhe-summary-including-share-gdp-cy-1960-2018.zip
"In 2017 alone, health expenditures were $650 billion lower than projected." So what's being compared are actual expenditures under the ACA with projected expenditures under the ACA. Actual expenditures being less that projected expenditures is evidence that projections didn't pan out, it's not evidence that the ACA had anything to do with it. Projected expenditures for 2017 may have been just as overstated under the old law as under the ACA.
As the column itself acknowledges, "Why have health care expenditures risen more slowly than projected? No one is entirely sure."
Here's a HealthAffairs piece on the subject:

Before the ACA, the uninsured rate hovered around 15 percent of the population. By 2018, that rate dropped to 8.5 percent, resulting in 18 million more people with coverage.
Efforts to achieve other policy goals were less successful. The ACA did not stem high and rapidly rising health care costs care for all Americans. Delivery system reforms advanced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Innovation Center have shown disappointing results, and mechanisms intended to rein in federal costs have been dropped.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200406.93812/full/
Regarding Obama's claim that family's premiums would be lowered by $2500, the opinion piece says that "the ACA has more than delivered on that promise, saving about $4,000 per family."
As I explained above, and the Health Affairs piece details, statnews' calculation of realized "savings" is flawed. Large savings have not been realized, nor, Obama's rosy projections aside, were they expected.
The 2009 CMS projections (pp. 16-18) cited by the statnews column, discusses the sources of savings. It characterizes the Act's expected impact as moderate: "overall moderate effects of the PPACA on NHE [National Health Expenditures]"
FactCheck (2008): Obama’s Inflated Health ‘Savings’, substantiates the CMS writing.
https://www.factcheck.org/2008/06/obamas-inflated-health-savings/

My only Matthews fund was MEGMX, although I had been strongly committed to their funds several years ago. I decided to take good profits and put them into ARTYX. I was concerned about all the turnover of managers, then the news of the outflows pushed me to sell.

An example of how Covid-19 effects continue to ripple through the economy. Forbes
“ In March ... American Airlines, without notice, cancelled its order for 1.35 million bags – or 1.7 million pounds – of mixed almonds, cashews, pecans and pistachios, the much-loved mix that it had been serving warm to its premium-class passengers for more than 30 years.“
-
Related : After posting the above, this more sobering story broke:
Fort Worth-Based American Airlines to Cut 19,000 Jobs CNBC
The flowers died on fields of hope
All the way from east to west
Where the mighty winds will blow
I'll put my dreams to rest
This scary monster is very much alive
Like a hundred years ago
From: The World We Used to Know

You can actually sell or buy both....it’s just you do so for different reasons. But a call gives the holder the right to buy the underlying security (if exercised)....and the put gives holder the right to sell the underlying security.
I’m by no means an expert! And VF got me thinking about using this for income again (I have done covered-calls for several years now). But I’ve been noodling around with selling some out of the money puts (thereby “going short” on the put) on triple-digit-priced stocks for 1-6 weeks out.....hoping to not have it exercised, and it “sidelines” the money required to purchase the underlying stock, at the exercise price, for the duration that the put option is held short.
Also, when buying calls (“going long” a call), most do this to take advantage of a price increase on the underlying stock (bullish stance) without having to put as much capital at risk (theoretically, only the cost of the call premium is put at risk). Sometimes, you can make more when a stock increases by holding the call option, depending upon maturity and how far out of the money the exercise price is. Many do not hold the option until expiration/exercise, but trade in the value of the option contract itself.
It seems very complicated when you explain it, but if you paper traded some options (maybe on the CBOE website or something?), it makes a little bit more sense. But I have very little idea when it comes to option spreads (multiple options on the same security)....
Sorry to hijack the thread! :)

The current U.S. minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. An 8-hour 5-day work week nets $290. A month’s work nets about $1160.00. Those $750 monthly contributions would consume 65% of the individual’s pay. (Hopefully, there’d be minimal payroll taxes.) After contributing the $750, the individual would have about $400 left over - or $100 per week to survive on.
Any suggestions for living on $100 weekly? In the early going I’d watch at groceries for the 50% clearance sales on hot dogs and other packaged meats when the marked date was about to expire. Still perfectly fine eating. For drinking? There’s Old Milwaukee in a pinch. Haven’t tasted it in years. Rough around the edges. But in this case, you’d be drinking to your eventual riches. Might make it more palatable.
BTW - Attempts to raise the minimum wage are met with admonition by some that the lower wage is better for workers because if they were paid more they’d be replaced by automation or a foreign worker. So the lower wage is being kept in place to benefit them. Chop-logic. Gotta love it!

Is there a reason You need to move this fund to another? I show it has had a 35% return over the last year! I my opinion if it isn't broke don't fix it.

It also had a maximum drawdown of 58% in 2008-09 and took 6 years to recover. Time to take profits off the table and move it to something a bit less volatile.

Thanks @Sven - For some reason I’ve always read the paper fund reports they arrive in the mail, but rarely online unless I have a specific need. Recently shifted to 100% online account info (for security reasons), so don’t get Price’s reports mailed to me anymore.. As of January, as I understand it, funds will no longer be required to mail them unless you specifically request it.
On a related note, I replaced the mining fund in my static allocation a month ago with Invesco’s infrastructure GIZAX. Hasn’t done much yet, but I know it holds some utilities. Giroux gives me reason to be optimistic. Infrastructure funds must be a tough road. Price had one for a few years but gave up on it and shut it down several years ago. (Of course, you can also buy utilities funds.)

@FD1000; I'm guessing you bought in around 3/25/20 ?
Derf

Nope, I sold over 90% at the end of 02/2020 and the rest days later.
Made several good trades with QQQ+PCI in 03/2020.
Start investing back in bond funds to over 99+% in 04/2020.
I had a huge % in GWMEX for several months. I owned IOFIX only in the last several weeks.
I wish I was brave enough to buy IOFIX on 3/25/2020. It made over 50% since then.

How do you square owning IOFIX with your later comment in this string to avoid risky funds?

I'm a trader and don't recommend what I do to others. My posts are generic unless someone asks me specifically about my portfolio.
This thread isn't about avoiding risky funds. Please read the original posts "What are your 5 or 6 largest holdings? *Or where are the bulk of your holdings?"
BTW, I don't believe in just lower risk funds, I believe in great risk/reward funds. You should look for funds that have good performance but also good risk attributes(SD, Max Draw, Sharpe, Sortino).
For allocation my go 2 funds are:
Moderate=PRWCX. In the last several years VLAIX is good too.
Conservative=VWINX,VWIAX

Likewise, I neglected to mention that even IRAs inherited from the same person can't be combined if they are of different types. However, there may still be a way to combine accounts (again, assuming inherited from the same person), because some of them are 403(b)s.
Here's a 2016 article from Kitces that covers rolling over inherited 403(b)s. Take it with a grain of salt, as the more recent SECURE Act has changed some things (e.g. eliminating stretch IRAs if the original owner died after 2019, but extending the non-stretch period allowed from five years to ten years).
https://www.kitces.com/blog/non-spouse-beneficiary-stretch-of-inherited-ira-and-401k-or-403b-employer-retirement-plans/
One of the things Kitces points out is that one has (or had?) the option of doing a rollover Roth conversion of the 403(b). That is, rolling the inherited T-403(b) directly into an inherited Roth IRA. Of course taxes would be due upon conversion. This could provide Mrs. Ruffles a way to increase the assets in that small inherited Roth IRA, assuming both the 403b and Roth IRA were inherited from the same person.
Of course this would not eliminate RMDs.
Even if the 403(b)s could not be combined with existing inherited IRAs (Roth or Traditional), rolling them over could still simplify administration. OTOH, Mrs. Ruffles may have investment options in the 403(b)s that are unique to them (e.g. stable value or TREA, or R6 share class of funds, or ...).

Not trying to pile on Matthews, because I don't currently own any of their funds, but another PM recently departed after co-managing the Pacific Tiger fund for several years. He was replaced by two people, one of whom had earlier been at Matthews but then spent a short while at Seafarer (leaving there under what looked like less than the best of circumstances). Matthews appears to be a fund company in flux right now.

You're right SFnative. Just googled and found the article below from April 2020. Two PMs actually not mentioned in the recent articles also left earlier in the year: Lydia So who was lead pm on the Asia Small Fund and had been with the firm for 15 years based on her linkedin, and Rahul Gupta who was co manager of Pacific Tiger fund (this is the one you referenced) both left the firm in April 2020. Tiffany Hsiao actually took over Asia Small when Lydia departed before leaving herself a few months later.
So that's 5 very senior PMs departing in the span of 6 months, plus the President/Global CIO, COO and CHRO. I see smoke!
https://citywireusa.com/professional-buyer/news/fund-files-matthews-managers-depart-invesco-fund-under-review-after-index-error/a1354995
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydia-so-cfa-b9b0171b3/

Thanks for posting
I need to dig into this, or maybe someone else will do it for me. There seem to be relationships here that I have never seen before, for instance, why does she think total (non-business) assets per national (including business) annual output is a valid thing to track?
Equally, she notes this coincidence — “ When equities were over 20% of household assets in the late 1960's, the result over the next 10 years was about 2-3% annualized returns, which is not even adjusted for inflation. Then, when equities fell to cheap levels in the 1970's and 1980's, down to well below 10% of household assets, the annualized forward returns were over 15%, which even after adjusting for inflation were great.” — is the implication here that the crowd tends to be wrong? I don’t believe she says.
Finally, she notes — corporate equity value outweighs debt value by more than average. These seem to me to be 2 very different things. What if a corporation had only debt and no equity, think Koch Industries? Or what if an old line publicly traded company did not have any debt?

A young investor should be at 70/30, maybe even 80/20. I started investing in my late 30" and was at %100 stocks. After about 5 years I changed to about 85-90% stocks and only about 8 years prior to retirement I changed gradually but rapidly to more bonds when I was sure to hit my retirement date.

Not fantasyland huh? Consider these points:
1. 76 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck
2. 62 percent of Americans have less than 1,000 dollars in their savings account
3. 65 percent of those 65 and older have less than $25,000 in retirement
4. 21 percent of all Americans have no savings account at all
5. 43 percent of American households spend more money than they make each month
6. Middle-class Americans today make up a minority of the population. In 1971, 61 percent of all Americans lived in middle-class households
7. In the last 14 years, median income of middle-class households declined by 4 percent
8. Median wealth for middle class households dropped by an astounding 28 percent between 2001 and 2013
9. Middle class take-home pay before expenses has plummeted to just 43 percent of gross pay, compared to 1970 when the middle class took home approximately 62 percent of all income
10. There are still 900,000 fewer middle-class jobs in America than there were when the last recession began
11. According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year
So yeah, I think saving $750/mo is out of reach for a large percentage of the US population.
More Here

The above report is from 2015. What happened to Median household income in the United States from 1990 to 2019? It went up very nicely from 2015 to 2019 under you know what president (link)
(link)

Tomorrow (September 30) Price’s 40/60 conservative balanced fund TRRIX celebrates its 18th birthday. Since inception, Lipper shows the fund averaging 6.25% - not too far from the 7% figure being batted around here. That was than this is now? Think again. Over the past 5 years the return is even better - averaging 6.47%. Lipper
My own take (based on recollections) is that 7% was pretty easily attainable for a conservative investor in the 70s thru the 90s and up until roughly 5-10 years ago when bond yields began to scrape bottom - where they remain today.
It’s hard finding anything good on the subject. Google it and you’re apt to get a bunch of investment advertisements promising to bring you remarkable returns. Sure! I’m linking an article from The Motley Fool I think does a decent job on the 7% subject. Fool

So you've got 3 years of RMD in cash? You can handle a little volatility then. How about going with USMV? Of course PRWCX, a real favorite around here, and with very good reason, might be a good choice if you could get into it.

Mrs. Ruffles has a fairly small (<$7.5k) inherited IRA at Fido from which she has to take an even smaller RMD (at least in the years when they’re required). Except for the RMDs, it hasn’t been touched since she inherited it and is all in FMAGX (probably originally from the Peter Lynch era). I’d like to move it into one fund that won’t have such massive potential drawdowns. With this size, I don’t think it’s worth working with too many moving parts though I’ve put three years of RMD money into a cash equivalent.
I’ve been considering JABAX, BALFX, VLAAX which are all NTF at Fido. Any comments or other suggestions?

Not trying to pile on Matthews, because I don't currently own any of their funds, but another PM recently departed after co-managing the Pacific Tiger fund for several years. He was replaced by two people, one of whom had earlier been at Matthews but then spent a short while at Seafarer (leaving there under what looked like less than the best of circumstances). Matthews appears to be a fund company in flux right now.

Not fantasyland huh? Consider these points:
1. 76 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck
2. 62 percent of Americans have less than 1,000 dollars in their savings account
3. 65 percent of those 65 and older have less than $25,000 in retirement
4. 21 percent of all Americans have no savings account at all
5. 43 percent of American households spend more money than they make each month
6. Middle-class Americans today make up a minority of the population. In 1971, 61 percent of all Americans lived in middle-class households
7. In the last 14 years, median income of middle-class households declined by 4 percent
8. Median wealth for middle class households dropped by an astounding 28 percent between 2001 and 2013
9. Middle class take-home pay before expenses has plummeted to just 43 percent of gross pay, compared to 1970 when the middle class took home approximately 62 percent of all income
10. There are still 900,000 fewer middle-class jobs in America than there were when the last recession began
11. According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year
So yeah, I think saving $750/mo is out of reach for a large percentage of the US population.
More Here

I don't think it's really fantasyland. It just gives you an overall feel for the numbers.
But yes, $750 a month is a lot. And 20 years is a long time. And 7% is a good return. That's a lot of consistency and discipline. And a lot of work, if the invested money was earned from a job or business.
I guess $390K is better to have than not to have, but I would have hoped to see a larger sum. Gives you some idea how much money we are talking about when we talk about millions. By my nature I'm an investor and a slow builder, but maybe we're chumps.

I love these fantasyland hypothetical scenarios that presume that A. most Americans have $750 extra a month to stash in the stock market and B. that the stock market's past returns will be the same in the future. Depending on which study you believe, on the low end, 40% of Americans have less than $1,000 in liquid assets to invest: https://bankrate.com/banking/savings/financial-security-january-2020/
But more importantly, who can say with any honesty what the next 20 years of stock performance will bring? No one.