I'm thinking that some confuse amount invested with tax cost basis.
Amount invested is simply what is paid out of pocket to purchase. While cost basis is made up of purchase amount plus any dividends and capital gains used to buy additional shares. At times amount invested and cost basis will be the same amount if one takes all distributions in cash, as I do, with no reinvestment of capital gains and dividends going back into the fund.
My broker provided statements reflect amount invested, cost basis, along with total return for each asset held. In this way, I know where I stand from an amount invested and cost analysis along with total return performance for each asset held from the date of purchase. Total return performance is also provided for the account.
I've got a few funds that are back of what I paid for them (mostly bond funds) but for the time held they are reflecting a positive total return. If sold, I could book a slight tax loss but also find joy in knowing I made money in them over the years held. I plan on keeping them as they are still producing a good income stream. In fact, some have paid out more money to me through the years owned than my cost of purchase. These payouts along with my growth of principal are what I call the organic growth of my money.
I have found that by holding my mutual funds for an extended period of time affords me the organic growth on my money that I seek. Plus, when you trade around the edges, as I have done, adds a little more growth to the portfolio as well. In addition, I have found that buying during the pullbacks generally offers good upward opportunity over buying during a fully valued market.
So, what is there not to understand about the power of dividends and how they help grow principal?

Hi, guys.
This was a flagged discussion. The argument was that apkmetro plagiarized a Wall Street Journal article with only the sort of tweaks that a college sophomore could imagine getting away with. As I checked their homepage, their business model appears to depend on copying stuff from behind paywalls and posted tweaked versions.
It's pretty bad. I'd prefer we not associate with, much less encourage, them.
That said, johnN is pointing us to an article that makes valuable points, as the Journal often does. My compromise with my conscience is to share (a) the link to the legit story, (b) the intro paragraph and (c) the point of the article.
Alex Edmans, Why Many People Misunderstand Dividends, and the Damage This Does https://wsj.com/articles/why-many-people-misunderstand-dividends-and-the-damage-this-does-11591454292, Wall Street Journal, 7 June 2020.
Dr. Edmans is a professor of finance at London Business School.

Over the past year, voices across the corporate and political spectrum have argued that companies are beholden to all stakeholders, not just shareholders. And indeed, many companies are recognizing these responsibilities in the current pandemic, with several paying furloughed workers and donating products. Investors have largely supported those efforts. But when it comes to corporate responsibility, there’s one red line that many shareholders say should never be crossed: the dividend.

• companies are so manic about protecting their dividend that they're willing to cut workers in order to preserve it
  
• dividends don't benefit investors because they're simply pulling money out of the company and lowering its share price
  
• stock buybacks are different, and better, because buybacks are more flexible. You can execute them when it makes sense (Snowball laughs out loud given the transparent record of buying back overvalued shares in order to prop them up) and skip other years. Dividends are sort of a permanent entitlement.
  
• in consequence, companies do stupid things to guard the dividend, investors overpay for stocks offering a dividend (you can lose 2-4% per annum in total returns) and it encourages investor complacency because they see dividend-payers are "buy it and forget it" stocks.
  
• solutions? Have reporting services focus on total return, not share price appreciation, stats and have companies treat all future dividends as "special dividends," that is, as one time payouts that will be resumed if and only if economic circumstances justify it.

David, with thanks to johnN

The fund is changing focus from opportunistic ("event driven") value investing to intrinsic value investing, and adding an explicit requirement that 65% of its portfolio be invested in income-producing securities. As it migrates its portfolio, it expects to have a lot of turnover.
Managers (people) come and go, but I can't recall seeing a subadvisor (management company) resigning. Usually it's fired by the fund family running the fund. Here, the fund's long time (30+ years) managers, Harold Levy and David Cohen created the submanagement company that is "resigning". If they simply wanted to close up shop, First Eagle could have hired the remaining managers and not had to overhaul the fund. All in all, the "resignation" seems rather strange.
The in-house managers assigned by First Eagle have at best limited experience managing funds. Albertini is a manager of FEBAX, but he's the junior one of four, with just over a year's experience there. First Eagle describes Gupta as an associate manager of SGENX, but he doesn't appear in the fund's prospectus. It's a similar situation with Christian Heck who is described as an associate manger of SGOVX, but isn't in the fund's prospectus. In short, no lead management experience, and little experience at a level senior enough to even merit a mention in a prospectus.
High turnover, inexperienced management, virtually a new fund (new objective). Hard to find any reason to consider this fund.

A “trigger point” for electric cars will occur once they overtake gasoline-powered vehicles around 2030-2035, Zeng said. That view is more ambitious than that of researchers such as BNEF, which expects the shift to take place a few years later.
CATL, which is adding a production facility in Germany, is set to make more than 70% of batteries required by BMW, an early customer, Zeng said. CATL also works with Volkswagen’s Audi unit and is cooperating with Porsche, he said.

a-million-mile-battery-from-china-could-power-your-electric-car

Hi Vintage,
Hope you're doing well and being safe.
First off, I always maintain a couple of canaries to alert me to movement in the sector. Good or bad, this is where I like to play. Collecting coins for 65 years does things to you.
I had purchases of ISVLF 1/30/19 @ .2231, 3/24/20 @ .2749, 4/6/20 @ .235. (currently @ .499)
KOOYF 3/24/20 @ .16 (currently @ .255)
TKRFF most recent on 4/6/20 @ .088 (currently @ .1405)
Please keep in mind that these are penny silver mining stocks and you can rest assured that you will see massive volatility. It is COMMON to see 10% point swings in a day.
And please let me repeat that the vast majority of precious metal mutual funds consist of mining stocks, albeit gold dominate. The bullion plays are mostly ETFs. Be very careful with bullion ETFs as they are taxable at collectible rates (i.e. keep them in deferred or exempt accounts). And I will mention again, I do not like bullion ETFs. Too many accounting issues that give me the creeps. For bullion, the first and foremost alternative is REAL PHYSICAL BULLION. Geez, go with bling is you must. For playing the sector, I like the mining stocks and over the years, silver has been my investment vehicle of choice. Originally per force as a GI bill econ major selling my restaurant stash into the Hunt Bros attempt to corner the market. Silver went up 10x to ~$50. Gold went up 2-3 to $850. Rono partied like a bloody maniac.
I got into the miners during the Big Bonanza from 2002 to 2011. The leverage is enormous. I was buying Silver Wheaton between $2-4 per and it went to $43. ChaChing! My one and only Home Run.
and so it goes,
peace and flatten the curve,
rono

Two 9 to 1 up/down volume days in a row. Can’t recall that ever occurring. This means both of Marty Zweig’s indicators have kicked in within a week of each other, I had a study last January on Morningstar (which I can’t locate) about how rare and bullish this is for the next six months.I believe something like 4 occasions over the past 60 years. It occurred early last January 2019, March 2009, January 1987, and August 1982.

From The Dallas Morning News. Yes I'm one of those always believing there's hope out there.
"Just say it, said Randall Stephenson: “We got a problem.”
The CEO of AT&T, like many business leaders, went public last week with his disgust about racism and violence in America. If the words sound familiar, maybe it’s because Stephenson used almost the exact language four years ago in the wake of police killings in downtown Dallas.
In 2016, he made national news by acknowledging the problem of racism and urging employees to not just be tolerant. “Move into uncomfortable territory,” he said, and really confront the issue of race."
What has to happen now

yup. Just saw that. We all know that the metrics for measuring unemployment has been massaged for a very long time (per @rono.) Yet the miraculous upswing in the latest numbers are risible. As much as we didn't trust previous unemployment reports, this one is simply, truly, utterly bogus.

Anything to do with Trump is "bogus"?
The 6 months ago BLS great report was bogus. The last one was bogus.
Trump declared that breathing air is good for you.
4 more years are coming :-)

I like to track DODBX, instead. Balanced. Stocks AND bonds. My numbers are from Morningstar. It sits today at 80th percentile among peers. But in real terms, down for 2020 now by just -3.77%. Given the recent uptrend, I'd say it will climb out and produce profit, as well as yield: currently at 2.57%. Looking at percentile rankings going back several, maybe a handful of years, there are some years where it underperformed peers, but most years are good to excellent. It is less consistently wonderful than PRWCX, but PRWCX is still CLOSED.
Back in 2010, reorienting a friend (and wife's) money, my intent was to spread the money out, to diversify. So, they own both DODBX and PRWCX, still, 10 years on. I guess you just can't have EVERYTHING. Life is like that. And, like me, they are investors, not traders. Trading just seems too much like real WORK!

With Rates So Low, Income Investors Need to Rethink Bonds
Incognito search for full content
https://www.google.com/search?q=With+Rates+So+Low,+Income+Investors+Need+to+Rethink+Bonds&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
https://news.knowledia.com/US/en/articles/with-rates-so-low-income-investors-need-to-rethink-bonds-acade152e87656b8b197c0d8c89d99ff244c7551
Already-beleaguered income investors are facing a tough decade. Ten years ago, investors were bemoaning a 3.8% yield on the 10-year Treasury, because a decade before that, they were yielding 6.4%. Recently, 10-year Treasuries yielded 0.88%.
“We are at a pretty bleak starting point for income investors,” says Michael Fredericks, manager of the $16 billion BlackRock Multi-Asset Income Portfolio fund (ticker: BAICX).

@FD1000: "...D&C is [one of the worst managers of all time]...". Oh my goodness. Really; what does one do with that?

I meant to say below average. EXample: DODGX trail the "stupid" index SPY for performance + risk attributes. See the (proof)
Please don't come back and claim it's not fair because DODGX is more value while SPY is blend. The goal is to make money and if your fund has worse performance + SD,Sharpe,Sortino it's a knockout. You can'y hide behind "VALUE" for years. Recent performance is another proof. YTD...DODGX -7.8...SPY -0.2%

Through the ups and down, flexibility (more like being skillful) is one of the reason I invested with Giroux through all these years. This article also revealed his personal toll as a money manager through this pandemic.

From the same source, stockchart, I think this(link) maybe be easier but only allows 5 funds. The easy part is by letting you select the period easily. You have one month and all the way using start/end dates.
The best IMO is PortfolioVis. It has many more choices and you can see SD, max draw, Sharpe, Sortino and more but allow you only 4 funds. See (link) for BBN,GWMEX,TSIIX,ANBEX for 3 years. It shows how BBN SD=12 is 2-3 times higher than the others

I guess we’re playing with semantics here.
“Fabricated” = “completely made up. An investigation will follow.” Geez, I don’t think so.
We had one last winter. You saw where that went.
“Cooked” = “distorted, exaggerated, shaded, tilted, incomplete, compromised and unreliable.” Yes. The government’s been doing that for years with the numbers. Cost of living is a great example.
Whether you believe the numbers or consider them wholly fabricated, the S&P is now up over 40% since late March. So the numbers today helped put $$ In the pockets of investors. The numbers might be as phony as a $1,000 bill. But if you pass a phony $1,000 bill and get away with it (putting morals aside), you still keep the goodies.

In my own funds, the rise has been in price per share lately, not yield. But I'm not complaining. Here's just one observation: I bought into PTIAX at $22.39 a couple of years ago. Two days ago, it reached $22.40. Now back to $22.38. I suppose "I dun good" with the dollar-cost-averaging, all this time, plus just a couple of bigger boosts, like when I put part of the profit from the sale of the house in there.

Thanks Junkster. I had that book years ago, wish I’d kept it.

@Catch22 - Your regular and comprehensive “Fund Boat” commentaries (“Bond Boat” my nick-name perhaps?) for many years here and at FA were a classic. While I argued with you a lot, they were always packed with information about investment grade bonds / trends and I’m sure helped many investors. You were right a lot more often than you were wrong as I recall. So, if you’re exiting government bonds, readers should take notice.
Regards

Here's what I can share from owning ZVNBX, one of the two Zevenbergen funds -- the other N class being ZVGNX.
The fund managers are very focused and articulate about their reasons for owning a concentrated portfolio of two large cap growth funds, the outcome of running separate managed accounts for 30 and 26 years in these products.
In general, the main difference between ZVNBX and ZVGNX (Genea) is that the latter is focused on founder-led companies (Musk, Bezos), does not own any health care companies, and is invested in more companies that are, let's say, very early in the curve.
Some nuts and bolts:
From a revenue side, their initial hurdle rate is owning companies that have a minimum growth rate of 15% but a revenue growth rate of between 25-30%, and if they can't grow at that rate, they consider selling. They want to own companies whose business model can sustain that growth rate for 1-3-5-10 years, those companies they consider durable.
(An example of a company they own is NOW (Service NOW), a tech company. It recently said that they expect $7.4T in digital transformation in the next three years.)
These funds can be volatile, and so investor returns lag investment returns, which they often do in many funds, as most of us know. Overall, however, they have had positive inflows since inception.
The average portfolio turnover since inception has been 30%.
Platform availability continues to expand. Having two LCG funds has not been as easy to market, and the firm has a small marketing budget. In mid-April total AUM was about $65M despite being in existence for less than 5 years. It's $95M now.
Schwab offers both N classes NTF for a purchase of $100.
While M* classifies the funds as LCG, they consider the funds all-cap. They can drive attribution in the small and mid cap space as well.
These offerings are worth investor awareness, additional thoughts, and what the initial poster is asking.

Poor Mohammad El-Erian - just one of a parade of gloomy morose prognosticators Bloomberg has frequently featured on air over the past two or three months. Not to pick on just El-Erian, Larry Summers is another gloomy predictor they’ve rolled out since the market encountered a downdraft in March. Here’s El-Erian in April .
Hilarious watching El-Erian try to do some sort of mid-course correction this morning after the hot (warmer?) data came out. Sounds like he’s pushing short / intermediate investment grade corporates at this point. Points to the dangers of trying to base long term investment decisions on these types of pronouncements. Truth is: Nobody knows where the global economy will be in a year - let alone 5 or 10 years. If you can’t have a 5-10 year time horizon, you shouldn’t be in equities & most risk assets at all.
Purely local and anecdotal - but in northern Mi it’s almost impossible getting construction / remodeling done this summer. Builders are backed up for months. I suspect a lot of money that would have gone to the airlines and hospitality businesses this summer is being pumped into home improvement projects instead. Tourism locally is down, but improving. Big box stores are crowded. Waited half an hour in a check-out line this week.
Link to May Jobs Report Story:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-05/u-s-jobless-rate-unexpectedly-fell-in-may-as-hiring-rebounded

Giroux is one of the best managers of all time.
Dodge & Cox just the opposite.
PRWCX is why you want to own managed funds. A flexible and correct approach for years. In most cases for most investors just use stocks indexes + managed bond funds, especially if your portfolio has a higher % in bonds.