GE sold off the financial unit many years ago I believe.

what's interesting is to not use longest time frame but to set the start date to 2007, so you're going into retirement at a very bad time. i did it w PRWCX. started with 1 mil and at the end of 2019 you had 780k with a max drawdown of 55%, at the 10th percentile. scary. but at least you still had money. oh -- did retirement of 20 years. thanks for posting this!

I could not figure out where to set a custom start date. I'm pretty sure I clicked all the options. What am I missing?

yeah, she has always given some prudent conservative advice with way wacko and foolishly conservative advice
for years
dogmatic to boot

I often X-Ray my stuff using their tool. (Premium.) OK, so today is a week-end. That might have something to do with it. But the changes in the numbers are quite significant, in a good way. How do I know if I can trust them? (Well, can we ever be sure, completely?)
The new X-Ray (6:15 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday) has moved my portfolio's P/E from 1.0 to .77 and that's pretty big, in a good way. P/B is .70. ... PROJECTED EPS over the next 5 years has jumped from 1.18 to 1.30. And (current) Yield is 1.44. That last number is up, just a bit. (All of this is compared to the SP500.) I'm sitting wondering how I could be so smart--- because I'm NOT.

PRWCX's manager David Giroux chimes in on GE:

What about some nonutility stocks?
We are bullish on General Electric [GE].
GE is a controversial name lately.
We didn’t own it until recently. I’ve known [new CEO] Larry Culp for about 19 years, from when he ran Danaher [DHR]. I don’t think Larry has ever failed at anything, and we’re confident he will turn around GE. I don’t own GE for the upcoming quarter or the upcoming year; I’m looking at free cash flow in 2023 or 2024, and think this stock can double or triple over three to five years. It’s hard to find situations like that in the marketplace.

t-rowe-price-fund-manager-david-giroux-stock-picks-disruption-51570818202

what's interesting is to not use longest time frame but to set the start date to 2007, so you're going into retirement at a very bad time. i did it w PRWCX. started with 1 mil and at the end of 2019 you had 780k with a max drawdown of 55%, at the 10th percentile. scary. but at least you still had money. oh -- did retirement of 20 years. thanks for posting this!

Great point...thanks. Wonder if starting in the year 2000 (tech bubble) had more dire results. The perpetual Withdrawal Rate would surely be lower (for both starting years) and maybe a better data points to use for this 2020 start year scenario.

what's interesting is to not use longest time frame but to set the start date to 2007, so you're going into retirement at a very bad time. i did it w PRWCX. started with 1 mil and at the end of 2019 you had 780k with a max drawdown of 55%, at the 10th percentile. scary. but at least you still had money. oh -- did retirement of 20 years. thanks for posting this!

Using Portfolio Visualizer's Monte Carlo Stimulation feature, I back tested some of the funds I hold in my portfolio. As defind by PV, the Perpetual withdrawal rate is the percentage of portfolio balance that can be withdrawn at the end of each year while retaining the inflation adjusted portfolio balance.
@MJG's link here - https://portfoliovisualizer.com/monte-carlo-simulation#analysisResults
At the website, I switch Portfolio Type to "ticker". I entered the tickers one at a time and made the portfolio weight 100%. This provide me with stand alone data for each fund that I hold. I may later combine funds and weight them to see if the combined funds provide better overall results.
As I enter the phase of life where I will be spending some of these assets (using the 4% rule), I wanted to see how these funds fared as stand alone (asset concentration) and in combination with one another (asset allocation). Stand alone funds that provided the highest perpetual withdrawal rate at the 10th percentile (worst market conditions) were healthcare funds - VGHCX, PRHSX, FSMEX. This sector has historically had great risk adjusted returns. The big question is will they continue to be great funds to own into the future. I think so. Others that provided good withdrawal rates were - PRMTX (Communication & Media Tech Sector) and FSRPX (Retail Sector). Asset allocation funds that I own that did well were PRWCX (70 stocks/30 bonds) and VWINX (40/60). In fact, VWINX had a higher perpetual withdrawal rate than its sister fund VWELX when looking at the 10th percentile (worst market conditions).
Owning funds that have historically provide the best perpetual withdrawal rate in the worst market conditions (10th percentile) seems like a worthy review. Edited: adding criteria like "worst years first" makes your results even more sobering. Let me know your thoughts and how your funds fared using this criteria.

Hi @rforno
You noted:

" in 'safe' bonds earning piddling amounts"

Is/are the piles of debt too large across most bond areas? Yes. Will a day of reckoning arrive to blow up the debt markets? The potential exists.
Catch

Absolutely. Ten, twenty years ago bonds were considered safe. But today and going forward? That's why I put 'safe' in quotes. :)

A bit academic, but worth pushing through during lockdown:

Our goal in this paper was to pick apart the two most common and simple factor approaches, Value and Momentum, defined in terms of the earnings yield and the 6-month trailing return, respectively. In future pieces, we intend to use our new toolkit to illustrate the many ways in which their underlying signals can be improved, in ways that we’ve been using in live portfolios for more than 20 years. Examples of the kinds of improvements that are possible include: refining the definitions of the factors, using quality screens to avoid companies with poor “holding” growth, and selecting for companies with disciplined capital allocation practices via shareholder yield and other factors. We will also continue to explore the effects that portfolio concentration, risk management, and rebalancing have on factor strategies through time.

Paper:
https://osam.com/Commentary/factors-from-scratch
In Podcast Form:
https://osam.com/Commentary/wwos-podcast-factors-from-scratch

Thanks for posting. HWIAX is one of Old_Skeet's laggards. It was a deep value fund which had been faltering. Thankfully, it was a very small position within my portfolio which I establised a few years ago when the good times were rolling. I never added to it awaiting deep value to recover. I'm thinking I'm going to let it roll into HWHAX which has about a 6.5% yield and see how things go.
I've got another deep value fund that I've been wataching as well (TEQIX). Opened to watch and keep up with how deep value was performing. It's been a laggard as well ... but, doing better than HWIAX.

The fund is closing, not shutting down. Normally it's not surprising to see a fine performing small cap fund close. However, a fund with just $13M AUM (and a corresponding ER a bit south of 3%) would be more likely to shut down than to close.
Perhaps this is being done to give the new manager some breathing space?
The original manager (16 years) just left.

Effective as of May 1, 2020, Mr. Richard A. Barone will no longer serve as a portfolio manager of the Ancora Income Fund and Ancora Special Opportunity Fund. Accordingly, all references to Mr. Barone as portfolio manager in the Funds’ Prospectus, Summary Prospectus and SAI are hereby removed.
Also effective as of May 1, 2020, Mr. James Bernard, CFA, and Kevin Gale will serve as the new co-portfolio managers of the Ancora Income Fund, and John Micklitsch will serve as the new portfolio manager for the Ancora Special Opportunity Fund.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1260667/000116204420000277/ancora497202005.htm
It is curious that this supplement, detailing a May 1 change in management, is dated May 7th. This might have been an unexpected change.

@Crash I've been using the same tax guy for 20 years even though I moved out of state in 2016.Apparently he prepares quite a few tax returns for St. Louisans who've moved out of state. The only hassles are Fedexing my info to him and the fact he only accepts cash or checks. I moved to Florida so he doesn't have to prepare a state tax return, but if I moved again I would feel fully comfortable with him preparing my state tax returns again.

@msf and @davidmoran You are confirming what my tax guy has told us. He is really, really good. But he's back in Massachusetts, still. We used him for 2019 tax return because we had partial-year MA and HI, both. Is there anything apart from what his personal preference might be that would keep us from continuing to use him? ..... BTW, 2020 ---- back in January, was the first time I took ANYTHING from the Trad. IRA. Ostensibly then, that legitimate portion of the distribution can be reported as non-taxable. He spelled it out for me a couple of times: the formula the IRS uses to "tease-out" the non-taxable portion from the rest of it, but it all just sounded ridiculously arcane, complicated and utterly convoluted to me. In other words: bullshit. There is exactly $5,000 of non-taxable money in that IRA, but somehow, it's not possible to just tell the IRS: "OK, I'm taking that $5,000.00 now. See you later." (If we COULD continue to use him, HE would be familiar with our circumstances and we could rely on him to let us know what the status is, in hard-dollar terms, from year to year. It would not take more than a few years, I suppose, to run through that $5,000.00).

If I understand you correctly, there were a couple of years in which you had compensation allowing you to contribute to an IRA. But on your tax form, after taking deductions, exemptions, etc., you had little or no taxable income left against which to deduct the IRA contributions.
This doesn't help you now, but at the time you discovered that a contribution was non-deductible you might have recharacterized the contribution as a Roth contribution. At least if this happened after 1996 (Roths started in 1997). That way, the earnings on these contributions would be tax-free.
Still, because you didn't deduct the contributions when you made them, the amounts you contributed (but not their earnings) will be tax-free when you withdraw them.

@davidmoran: I'm retired, wife works under the table, now. Gotta have earned income in order to make tax-deferred "contributions" to IRA. A couple of times, a few years ago, my contributions to Trad. IRA turned out to be unintended non-deductible----- because there was not enough income on the tax form to make those contributions "against." Thankfully, despite that fact, things look pretty rosy for myself and my wife, these days. :)

/'Fortunes are going to be made' -- Suze Orman on investing amid the coronavirus pandemic
BY SHAWN LANGLOIS | MARKETWATCH - 05/09/2020
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/3532E59E-8D6D-11EA-AD06-F36B40BB8290
'I can guarantee you that if you stay in and you just stick with it, three years from now you will be very, very happy that you did'
Celebrity financial adviser Suze Orman isn't for everybody. She once told MarketWatch
http://www.marketwatch.com/ story/suze-ormans-fire-storm-her-advice-for-millennials-retiring-early-is-simple-but-bleak-2019-06-24
that "there are people that hate my guts. You don't even want to know the things they say."
But there's no denying that her common sense brand of money management has resonated with her devoted fanbase over the years. Lately, with many in that fanbase struggling to navigate the coronavirus pandemic, she's been hitting the media circuit to address just some of the issues.
During a CNN segment that aired on Saturday, Orman was asked by a viewer how to approach investing in the stock market in the face of the historic volatility.
Here's her answer:
In other words, she's advising those without more-pressing obligations to take a specific sum of money and invest it every month into something like the Vanguard Total Market ETF(VTI) .
"If you do it month in and month out and you have at least three five or 10 years or longer until you need the money you will be happy," she continued. "If you need money within a year it's not money that belongs in the stock market. Take it out now."
Back in late February, when the Dow Jones Industrial Averagehad dropped more than 1,000 in a single session on fears of what the coronavirus could do to the U.S. economy, Orman raised a few eyebrows when she said "I rejoice" in the face of such pullbacks.
She used the opportunity to again push her case for dollar-cost averaging (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/suze- orman-says-investors-should-rejoice-at-the-dows-more-than-1000-point-tumble-heres-why-2020-02-24).
"The higher the market goes, the shares cost more, the less shares their money buys, the less money they make, in the long run," she told CNBC. "With this dip, if it continues to go down, they should just stay the course and actually be quite happy because the market is still incredibly high."
One month and a brutal stretch of market losses later, the New York Times best-selling author returned to CNBC (https: //www.cnbc.com/2020/03/26/coronavirus-suze-orman-says-no-better-time-to-start-investing.html) in late March to urge investors to stick with the plan.
"You will never, ever, know the bottom. You will never, ever, know the top," she said. "Fortunes are going to be made out of this time. So just stay calm. I can guarantee you that if you stay in and you just stick with it, three years from now you will be very, very happy that you did."
Here's Orman talking financial stability in a recent appearance on the Tamron Hall Show:
(https://www.youtube.com/embed/0Auos1d8c_8)
Orman, of course, is not alone in pushing the time-tested dollar-cost averaging approach.,/
Do you trust ms Orman?

So I had learned 15 years back. Converted $50K to $75K in 2 months and then turned $75K to $40K in about 8 days. Closed my account and ran. It was a mistake.

Happened to me when trading futures during my doctoral years. Made insane profits & hideous losses until I found what worked for me and my temperment, then I eeked out a slow steady profit for a while before quitting due to life changes. Now when I play (key word) with futures, which is rarely these days, it's in 1-2 lots only which is barely 1% of my trading account value - nothing extravagant.
What worked for me back then was, say if I lost 20K one day ... I would half my position sizing and not increase it back to normal trading lots until I had earned that money back. My thinking was that would reduce my risk and also force me to "be better" in my analysis and trading, even when it was "so clearly obvious" which way the market was going --- which if I acted on that impulse, I'd probably have been wrong. :) (I also considered this my penalty box.)

PS - There are too many people out there selling too many "strategies". Ignore. You need to know what your objective is. Speculating buying calls and puts? or earn income? mine is the latter. I might have said this before. 0.25% a week should be the target. 1% a month. 12% a year. Now lets say 0.10% a week, 0.4% a month, 4.8% a year. I'll still take it.

This. A well known options hedge fund blew up a few years ago because they were selling Very OTM naked puts on various commodities (similar to what VF is doing on the SPY but I'm sure he's more rational/careful) ... which is a strategy that worked in most market conditions, until it didn't, and their positions experienced a multi-sigma move against them overnight, and BAM! Out of business.
Anyone selling you the idea you can make 5-15% overnight, per week, or per month using options (or anything, really) is likely selling you reckless ideas packaged as snake oil. Only pikers will buy into that b/c they are enamored only by the potential gains, not how the trades are structured or what could happen if they lose. In this case, the only person making a profit is the newsletter/signal provider.

interesting article but I'm also looking for actions. Based on the info what an investor to do?
The % of SP500/QQQ revenues that are coming from abroad are 40/50% and why I only hold US LC for years now. If I want more risk/reward I would use QQQ instead of some of the SP500. The top QQQ companies rule the world and the beauty of the big high tech is the ability to acquire the next customer cheaply and depress their competition.

A very intriguing fund and seemingly well-allocated fund that I would consider adding to my portfolio -- though I have a hard time paying 1.07 a year for it when the performance (and some holdings) seems quite comparable to PRWCX, which I'm still quite happy with.

PRWCX is by far one of my favorite funds but VLAIX beats it from one month to 3 years and for 3 years is by 2% annually.
===========

BenWP:Seems to be a fine fund. I’m wondering why only one of the managers has any skin in the game? Kind of surprising on the face of it.

Nice to have but not necessary. Gundlach has a huge amount in DBLTX, I still don't own DBLTX for years, same with D&C shop...if I can find a better option.