PIMIX was a great fund until the beginning of 2018. PIMIX is still a decent fund
I would go with PTIAX. LT good record + good downside protection. 2 more option are TSIIX and ADVNX
2018 returns:
PTIAX: 2.01%
TSIIX: 0.68%
PIMIX: 0.58% (still top quintile)
Multisector bonds: -1.52%
ADVNX: -1.99%
Typo? 2019 perhaps?

These 3 funds are based on the following(which I post already):
1) 3 year average annually over 4.3%
2) SD(volatility) lower than 5
3) Morningstar return above average or high
4) Morningstar risk low/below average.
The PIMIX assessment was based solely on PIMIX previous years. In 2018 it was at 18% in its category but making 0.6% is pretty low when PTIAX made 2% and SEMMX made 3.9%. PIMIX was unique investing more in MBS but in the last years diversified to more global and HY but kept the distributions high. I used to own a very high % in PIMIX for years but sold in 01/2018. In 08/2019 we found out about the Argentinian fiasco bonds PIMIX had.
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PDBAX is not a M* Multi category fund but a Intermediate core plus fund (you can maybe called it Multi light because it has about 20% below IG per M*).
It's more global with over 30% abroad
It has 18.9% derivatives.
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Basically, PIMIX used to be the easiest fund to recommend but it's getting harder and why I trade :-)

@bee, Thank for your your question about what funds I might benchmark my portfolio against. One, the benchmark must be a hybrid fund and have a yield generation of about 3.5%. Not to many hybrid funds achieve this as they are geared more towards growth than income generation. Two funds that I own that come close to the required yield are two widely held American Funds. They are Income Fund of America (AMECX) with a yield of about 3.4% and a ten year average return of 8.5%. The other one is Capital Income Builder (CAIBX) with a yield of 3.6% and a ten year average return of 6.8%. Overall I am at a yield of about 3.4% with a ten year average return of better than 9 percent.
I'm thinking the main reason that I am doing a little better than these funds comes from me being active within my portfolio and my use of special investment "spiff" positions when I feel it warranted. From a yield perspective I pair up better to AMECX and from an asset allocation perspective I pair up more towards CAIBX. Performance wise, again, I have done better than either of these two funds.
My top five funds owned (size wise other than my MMK funds) when combined account for about 25% of my portfolio are AMECX, FKINX, ISFAX, CAIBX & JNBAX.
On your other comment about living below one's means. I feel blessed that both my principal residence and 2nd home are both paid for and have been for a good number of years. Living below my means for a good number of years has helped us (wife and me) get ahead along with good prudent investing.
I have had high school buddies (at reunions) that were indeed much higher wage earners that I ... ask ... I know I made more than you through the years; and, now you have a great deal more than me. How did you do it? Win a lottery? Nope, I just spent less and lived within my means saving some along the way plus I have been a good prudent investor and grown my wealth through the years.
Besides, it cost to much to keep up with the Jones that live off credit cards and are mortgaged to the hilt.
Again, bee ... Thanks for asking. Now you know.
Old_Skeet

MIAQX looks promising. But, its interesting it is classified as a multisector fund. A quick credit quality/duration comparison to Diamond Hill High Yield (DHHIX) which I own suggests the two funds are close cousins. Anyway, I plan to check into MIAQX some more.
I have owned PONAX for several years and plan to continue to hold it. My suspicion is its short duration and heavy securitized weighting have recently hampered performance. But I continue to trust its management team for the long term. I own it, RCTIX, and PTIAX in about equal amounts.

@Old_Skeet Thanks! I've looked at MIAQX before. I put it on hold for 3 reasons
1. short term record only,
2. I already own American Funds' target date funds and am concerned about putting too much bond money in AF's hands, even though managers may be different
3. I seem to remember reading that this fund has some unusual quirk to it, possibly assumes too much credit rating and/or duration risk
@FD100 I owned PTIAX before, but sold it. Don't remember why, but I think it may have been because its record is erratic (does well in the multi-sector arena, but has a few pretty bad years in there) Maybe I should take another look.

I considered investing in PIMIX a while ago. In the multi-sector bond category, PIMIX had generated top-decile trailing returns with below average volatility. The fund's non-agency mortgage sector investments accounted for much of the strong performance after the financial crisis. However, the non-agency mortgage sector is much smaller today. Yet, Pimco refuses to close PIMIX which currently has ~ $120 Bil AUM. Matter of fact, I don't believe that PIMCO has ever closed a fund because it grew too large. This compaoblony policy is not in an investor's best interest.

The above is a good encapsulation of M*'s latest analyst review (not paywalled):
https://www.morningstar.com/articles/986480/why-pimco-income-remains-among-the-best
With the better financial reporting, "trust but verify" is good practice. (With much financial reporting, the "trust" part isn't justified.)
Jacobson writes that "Pre-financial-crisis supply in the [nonagency residential mortgage] sector has been shrinking." Those securities are often referred to as legacy RMBS (i.e. securities issued pre-financial crisis). And the statement's correct. However, the post GFC RMBS 2.0 sector (with stricter borrower guidelines) is growing. Though it is still minuscule; I don't want to suggest otherwise.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/credit-suisse-and-citigroup-join-other-major-banks-in-mortgage-bond-revival-with-a-twist-2019-08-20
In late 2017 Jacobson (along with lead writer Miriam Sjoblom) was making the same point about a shrinking supply, describing the post GFC years as "a once-in-a-career opportunity. " They also commented even back then on the fund size (more on that below).
A bit concerning is Jacobson's statement that "Pimco still likes the sector for its return potential and modest volatility: ... they totaled 37% as of March 2020." This seems to be overstated.
According to M*'s portfolio page (old-style version) non-agency RMBSs amounted to 8.57% (out of 120% bond exposure) of the portfolio. The largest sector was agency MBS pass throughs at 40.58% (out of 120%), followed by asset-backed securities at 33.63% (out of 120%). All as of March 31, 2020.
According to the fund's annual statement, summary section, non-agency MBSs constituted 19.5% of assets (out of 100%), and asset backed securities constituted 12.8%. We report, you decide :-)
PIMCO says that securities (substantially all are bonds) constitute 154.5% of assets. And it reports non-agency MBSs constituting 30.3% of assets. So the non-agency RMBS percentage of securities (out of 100%) is, according to PIMCO, 30.3%/154% = 19.6%, or about what was reported in the annual statement's summary.
Regarding size: current size is $120B according to PIMCO ($117B according to M*). Jacobson made the same complaint about bloat in his 2018 analyst report (free) entitled "Is PIMCO Income Getting Too Big". According to that year's annual report, the fund's assets (all share classes) totaled $112B, or about the same size as now. But it had grown from about $69B the year before.
Mitigating that, Christine Benz (M*) comments that (at least with respect to vanilla bond funds):

managers who use derivatives to express their market outlooks may be able to successfully manage more girth than managers who focus more on bond-picking to make a difference. PIMCO Total Return and its various clones, for example, were able to deliver peer-beating returns for many years even though the fund grew too large for bond-picking to make a significant difference in its returns. At its peak, PIMCO Total Return had nearly $300 billion in assets, and Gross managed various pools of money in that same style for other entities, too.

PIMCO's funds have their issues, but so far they seem to have handled them better than I would have expected. I might put the fund on a watch list for more problems. But as I wrote above, if I had reasons before for liking the fund, I would examine those reasons before jumping ship.

I bought PIMIX 3 or 4 years ago @12.26 more or less. I must have bought it at it's highest NAV because it never got back up to my original purchase price. However, I bought it for income, and it has been reliably churning out a pretty good income since. Morningstar quotes a TTM yield of over 6%. I just keep reinvesting in more shares since I don't need the income yet. I'll keep PIMIX as long as the income keeps rolling in.

I continue to do what I have done for decades which is KISS.
Prior to retirement.
We saved for years thru 401K. Always paid all bills on time. Never made a budget. Spend the rest. No more than 5-6 funds. No spreadsheet
At retirement
1) Usually 2-4 funds
2) No budget, no spreadsheet, no tracking of anything. Our discount brokers have all the information we need. I don't need anything beyond that
3) During working and at retirement we only have several thousands(maybe 2 months of expense) in checking account. Everything else is invested most times. In the last 10 years I was in the market at 99+% at about 98%. This means no MM,CD.
4) I never understood the concept of emergency fund and/or 2-3 years of expense in cash. We have access to credit cards first, then several thousands in cash. If we need more we can sell some shares and get it within 1-2 days. So why do we need cash unless it's ransom or illegal drugs?
If stocks are down then use your bond funds for that and you must have some ballast bond funds
5) We get distribution monthly, if it's not enough I sell some shares.

Hi @bee, This is something that my broker provides for me monthly in my account statements and covers a ten year history. By year, it contains the account starting value, how much was withdrawn (or added), investment performance, and then an ending account value. With this, I know by year what the activity was for my account values, withdraws & additions, along with investment performance simply by review of this report for each of my accounts. Thus far, even though I have not made any contributions for the past five years since I have retired I have been able to grow my principal over and above my withdrawal rate and for the ten year period with my annualized performance rate of return being a little better than nine percent. A big reason for this is that my wife and I live below our means.
About five years before I retired I ran a 10% cash, 20% income and 70% equity asset allocation in my portfolio. For the past ten years, though, I have been moving more more towards an income generation allocation and I have now arrived at a base asset allocation of 20% cash, 40% income and 40% equity. From the 20/40/40 I will tweak it a little carrying up to a plus 5% overweight (or underweight) in my income and equity areas with a rebalance threshold set at + (or -) from target allocations. I generally let cash float. Currently, as I write I am at a 15% cash, 45% income and 40% equity asset allocation.
So, in answer to your question ... My broker provided account reports provide this information and this is something that I do not have to maintain myself.

Gives me a headache.
One of the reasons I've been thinking about annuitizing the retirement funds when the time comes. I'm not sure I'm going to feel like sorting through all of the choices I've invested in over the years when it comes time to take RMD's.
The taxable accounts are different. With any luck, they will be passed on. So it's easier to indulge a tempered optimism.

I follow an average of the many articles talking about 2-4y in cash or close (have erred here by being too aggressive), the rest in whatever proportion of stock and bond funds I think is wisest
I think I am missing something, since this is straightforward and widely written up
for sure you do not want to be withdrawing --- to be having to withdraw --- from the equity-heavy accounts, or even these days from the bond-heavy accounts unless you were all in like vgit the last few years
it sucks to have that much in low-earning cash, yes

To quote Wall Street, it's a dog with fleas. For 3 years, I only seen it lose money. Time to lick the wounds on PIMIX.

huh? maybe you need to graph it, not just look at yearlies
http://quotes.morningstar.com/chart/fund/chart.action?t=pimix

How does one keep track of their gains or losses while at the same time accounting for permanent losses from portfolio withdrawals?
Let say I have $100K and I plan on withdrawing 4% or $4K in year one of retirement and I do that Jan 1 of that first year. My balance is now effectively $96K as a result of the distribution. To me this is a permanent loss because I am spending, not saving that 4%. Obviously my bookkeeping accounts for this withdrawal until I spend it. Maybe I buy a car with this 4% and the car goes up in value after I buy it. Maybe I blow it on Jan 2 at the casino...ouch... but these are the dynamics of spending down your portfolio. You may have something (a car worth at least $4k) or you have nothing more than a recollection of the $4K withdrawal.
If my overall portfolio drops 10% soon after Jan 1, I now have $86.4K. My hope is that over the next 3-5 years I will recoup that 10% market loss, but I realize my withdrawal rate (4%) is now greatly impacted by my eventual portfolio balance come Jan1 of the next 3-5 years.
Segregating 5 years worth of withdrawal might act as a drag on my potential upside performance, but might hedge my downside potential. Five years of withdrawal that include a 2% inflation adjustment would amount to $20.8K. It might be prudent to keep this amount in a conservative investment with little downside risk. That leaves a little less than $80K invested for the longer term (5 years). An average 5 year return of 5.8% would return this portfolio to its $100K value, but inflation requires a 7.9% average return in order to keep the same buying power.
Seems to me that in retirement one needs segregate "withdrawal assets" (maybe up to 5 years worth) from "market assets". This way your withdrawals are not necessarily connected to the market's ups and downs. In 5 years, a new calculation will determine what the nest 5 years of "withdrawal assets" will amount to.
If your are managing these dynamics in retirement please share your strategy.

Are you concerned about your fund selection or your category selection? PIMIX is matching its category average YTD (-0.81% vs -0.78% category) That's not to say you couldn't easily find a multisector fund that's done better short term.
Why did you buy a multisector fund originally, and has that reason changed? Is this your only type of bond fund, or are you using it to get a little extra kick, recognizing that it will track equities more closely than will a vanilla bond fund?
PIMCO funds are incredibly opaque. But if I had to guess, I'd say that its middle-of-the pack performance (as opposed to better) is due to it keeping duration very short. Given that, its performance relative to other multisector funds remains impressive (and possibly due to leverage).
Duration is a factor one should consider. If you like PIMCO funds, still want a multisector fund, and don't mind the interest rate risk (i.e. you're betting that rates won't go up at least for a fair amount of time), you could look at PDIIX. It has a duration of around six years.
If you don't want a multisector fund and again are willing to live with the interest rate risk of a fund with a six year duration, then VBTLX / BND is fine. If you're willing to accept a bit of credit risk (VBTLX is 4/9 government bonds), you could look into core plus funds (or corporate funds) rather than core bond funds.
The bottom line is that what is best depends on what you're looking for.

To quote Wall Street, it's a dog with fleas. For 3 years, I only seen it lose money. Time to lick the wounds on PIMIX.

Most investors should never own FR(floating rate) funds.
The risk/reward isn't good.
You can get high distributions with funds like PIMIX but with better risk/reward,
In 2020 BKLN lost over 20% as of 3/23/2020.
Rates are not going up because the Fed told us that. The only time many bond categories suffer sizable losses is when rates rise very quickly within several weeks.
As bond OEF trader I use FR short term when FR have a great momentum and the Fed tell us they are going to raise rates like they did couple of years ago.

Market suppose to crash this wk....that was the last wk headlines say regarding earnings...maybe up little at end of today. I was expecting blood baths and bought more corp bonds recently
.
Unless 50% of US Economy fully reopened again or COVID-19 flattening, hold on to the Disney Rock&Roller mountain ride. We have new bad outbreaks/ spots in India and Mexico now...

Much Adu About Nothing? I always operate under the assumption the market could crash anytime. As a retiree it’s a prudent assumption. Anyone who worries about that all the time probably shouldn’t own equities. As I’ve lamented before, there’s rarely any discussion of risk vs personal situation in these types of discussions. “All-in” is fine if you’re 25 years old. As our life situation evolves / changes, most financial advisors advise incrementally curtailing risk. Therein lies the problem today. Those formerly “safe” alternatives (cash & bonds) yield so little. To this, David’s discussion (July Commentary) of TMSRX is spot-on. My fear (and guess) is that like many funds that have attempted hedging with less success, money flows will be late arriving and equally late departing so that investors in general won’t fare as well as they might with a longer term commitment.
Personally, life’s more fun when markets are crashing and I can poke around in the rubble looking for really beaten up funds. However, things “feel better” when markets are on a tear and everything’s rising. Like many here, I picked up some bargains back in March / April. While I’ve done nothing with my normal static allocation, the 10-15% in speculative holdings I initiated back than has been pared to only about 6% of portfolio as of today. Ideally, I’ll get that down to near 0 just before the next 25-35% market drubbing. :)
Re Jim Cramer. I don’t watch him; nor do I find his circus antics particularly annoying. I’d guess his calls are probably around 50% correct. Since it’s essentially “free” TV, you get what you pay for. The one I really can’t stand is Jonathan Ferro on Bloomberg in the morning. Yack. Yack. Like a chicken with his head cut off. Much exaggeration of whatever financial pin might have fallen that day. He’s enough to make me consider switching back to CNBC (except for their right wing-nuts). On the other hand, Ferro is often paired with raspy voiced Tom Keene whose inquisitive attitude and dry humor go well with morning coffee. Like coffee ... take the bitter with the sweet here.

19, 20 years - were has it gone. As for Janus, I tell myself I wasn’t caught up in the 90s tech mania because we didn’t have cable and it wasn’t a topic of discussion at work but in reality I had money in 4 or 5 Janus funds. Worldwide, Special Situations, Janus, Janus 40.

Helen Young Hayes, manager of JAOSX and its older sibling JAWWX (Worldwide) was a headliner in the 90s.

The once-vaunted Janus Worldwide has seen a remarkable reversal of fortune. It was once one of the most well-known growth funds around, and with good reason. From its May 1991 inception to the peak of the tech/media/telecom mania in March 2000, it nearly tripled the cumulative return of the typical world-stock fund. The fund's asset base peaked at close to $45 billion then--a close second at Janus to flagship Janus Fund (JANSX), when the firm was the hottest shop in the fund industry.
It's been all downhill for this fund in the past 12.5 years [i.e. the whole span from 2000 to the date of this piece in 2012], though. Like many Janus funds, Worldwide fell sharply to earth in the 2000-02 bear market as its portfolio of growth darlings was hammered. Just as the market and the fund began to rebound, longtime lead manager Helen Young Hayes retired in mid-2003.

https://www.morningstar.com/articles/568579/janus-worldwide-to-merge-into-janus-global-research
Where she is now: https://www.activatework.com/about/our-team/

I'm not sure what the attraction of this fund is. Returns are positive, yes, but over the time period it's been around (sans the last few years) a CD would have performed as well or better. I do like the "never had a down year theme" but in that space I much prefer AVEFX (a fund that seems to fly under the radar).

Hello
Joined fundalarm after finding website information on Kiplinger's when started investing in 2007. Met many old friends here [too many to name here]. I did learnt great amount of information. I appreciate many great investors/masters/gurus here whom taught me great amount of investing wealth and kearnt many important lessons regarding investments. My old tsp portfoliowas once all in G fund/now it is completelydifference and well diversed.
Sad things are many folks also has left (either retired and no longer desire to contribute or have gone to heaven -we do pray for them). We did loose many but slso gained many new friends
Imho it is a great site to discuss new investments ideas [mf stocks etf cef commodity products etc]
Many willing to give advice if you give respect/ civilized and ideas posting neutral thoughtful questions about investments. .without hitting each other with biases and political issues. I learnt over the years that the more you read the less you know compared to masters of investors here.
Thank you all for keeping MFO one of best sites we keep coming back too [especially if we have massive downturns recession heavy bear markets when you will see many new posts/what to do/heavy fleeing ideas blood baths/and comforting MFO members]
Please do consider continue contributing to Mr Snowball to keep site running [he will surely appreciate quarterly checks]
The monthly MF reads are exceptional/excellence readings...
I am sorry if I did hit any nerve[s] previously. Will be very Mindful careful postings moving forward
Thank Mr Snowball/Moderator to keep site running...we appreciate all you do and limitless energy/being fair neutral minded/heavy work and dedication toward MFO.
Kind regards
johnN
We did held JAOSX early 2007 but sold that lemon later after taking heavy loss...lesson learnt