@hank;you said," I don’t compute my returns daily or report them publicly.
End of this conversation, Derf

Not necessarily. If you send me a polite request (via the mfo mail service) sometime after December 31, 2020 I just might share my 2020 net gain / loss numbers with you. I do compute returns at the end of every year for my own purposes and store them in my data bank. However, what possible value to others such (unsubstantiated) data would provide is a bit of a mystery. Frankly, I think it’s silly to get excited about the last 2-3 months’ performance. Seasoned investors know that such data over short periods like that is pretty meaningless. It’s the aggregate compounded return over a number of years that matters.
In addition to being irrelevant and potentially misleading, performance claims by anonymous voices on an open forum like this are just that. Barring confirming specifics such as name, address, SS#, account numbers and certified statements from financial institutions these claims must be considered unsubstantiated. That’s not an indictment of the forum. There’s a lot to be said for an informal and mostly anonymous arrangement like this.
You have caused me to rethink how I post. Some whom I respect mightily here have routinely declined to provide specifics regarding their investments / investment approach. But they’re great contributors in other ways. I suspect that in some cases they recognize that without providing personal and substantiating data, their claims would be of dubious value or open to suspicion. In other cases, I suspect it’s because they’re not certified to advise other investors and fear that by referencing their holdings they might inadvertently steer someone in the wrong direction.
In the future I’ll refrain in my board posts from mentioning any “buys” or “sells” or any mutual funds I own currently or have owned previously. Nor will I acknowledge any business associations I may have with any specific fund company or other fiduciaries or any associations I may have had in the past. Further, I’ll refrain from making any comment about perceived market valuation or direction. I won’t mention specific types of investments I own. And I won’t divulge my allocation to various assets. In essence, comments I’m not willing to substantiate by providing personal account-specific information have no place in this forum. Additionally, I’m not a certified financial advisor and so should not be opining about such matters as asset allocation, market valuations or direction.
Best regards

As rono stated: this will be a DEPRESSION. I wonder: will all of this stuff serve--- eventually--- to bridge the divorce between Wall St. and Main St.? I will be pleasantly surprised if society pulls itself out of this black hole sooner than a few years from now. YEARS. Yes, we have the FDIC SIPC, government rescue-projects..... And the markets have for years already been disconnected from reality. "Fundamentals" is almost a dirty word. The whole enterprise has been a fragile balancing act. Are we going to be watching the slow-motion unwinding of it all?

Airlines that can't manage their own finances should go through a structured bankruptcy and be nationalized. But the way it works here is capitalism on the way up--they gouge customers, cut services and keep all the profits--and socialism on the way down--taxpayer funded bailouts. Frankly, I'm sick of this one-sided socialism for the rich with regard to bailouts. Companies don't want to be regulated and they boast about the wonders of the free market and the moment there's a problem they have their hands in taxpayers' pockets. Either be capitalist thoroughly as a corporation and accept the fact that you now must go bankrupt or be thoroughly socialist, have a national airline system as the service is too vital not to be. Nor is this a revolutionary concept. For many years Qantas, Australia's airline, was nationalized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Qantas

nope after Boeing spent what 50 or 100 billion on buybacks in the last ten years. But the taxpayer will bail them out again
Let us at least pray the US gets an equity stake or warrants like Warren could get

I haven't read any negative comments on M* from the financial press. But I haven't been looking for them either. Neither do I spend a lot of time in the market blogosphere, like Seeking Alpha.
My own observation is that their home page has lost its focus on mutual funds. The result is a discordant mischmasch of conflicting advice aimed at a variety of different audiences from IRA buyers to stock pickers to financial advisors.
Consider the CEO's letter to readers posted recently.

Many investors today have never experienced a bear market in their personal investing and many more hadn’t accumulated significant wealth of their own during the last downturn. The same is true for many professional investors who either have never experienced this type of market environment or did not have as much professional financial responsibility during it. This is a challenging environment for the experienced and even more unsettling for the inexperienced.

Say what? A thirty year old with an interest in investing might have noticed a couple of major shocks growing up. I noticed the end of the silver standard as a mere lad of 8 tender years. Nor was it possible to avoid the impact of inflation.
If young professional investors have not studied, and learned from, recent large shocks I would not trust my money to them. Such people will continue to be punished by market surprises until they learn to pay attention to valuations and leverage.

Morningstar’s mission is to empower investor success, and we are committed to weathering this storm with all investors. We are confident that with a sustained focus on long-term investing principles, investors will manage through this crisis just fine.

Does that mean we should be reading another iteration from Christine Benz, John Rekenthaler's dyspeptic musings, or the latest stock touts?
The writing has never been very strong. Sam Lee was the only person I looked forward to. Russ Kinnel spends most of his time on their more expensive platforms. Jeff Ptak touts indexes. And there are only so many ways Benz can rewrite the same five or six topics.

“With my Schwab account down 22.14 % YTD, I don't think that's to funny”
- Not sure what that means ... Is the Schwab everything you own,or just part of your investments?
- Are you calling a bottom in the market at today’s numbers?
- Do you have an allocation model you wish to share?
I don’t compute my returns daily or report them publicly. I do benchmark against TRRIX - as I’ve been doing for at least 15 years (often mentioned here). Generally I’m very close to that fund’s return over time..
Regards

@hank: Is the answer Infinite ? While you were fully invested I was the opposite, to much so !!
With my Schwab account down 22.14 % YTD, I don't think that's to funny ! How are you doing ?
Since 01/01/2020 I've put 7.3 % of total starting portfolio to work. Approximate half before the down draft. So I'm not throwing a large % into the fire.
parsig9, from above, is investing a lot more than me , but to be fair he has a (few) years to go to retirement & I've been there for ten years.
You commented, "What about the current situation makes one bullish at this juncture ."
Nothing about this situation makes me bullish at this time. Down the line things will turn & Mr . Market will catch his breathe & rise again. Or are things different time ?
Have a good evening , Derf

Come on Simon. You make comments like,

"Stock prices are going much higher - higher than you can ever imagine."

and

" the bull market will last another 15 years",

those aren't arrogant statements? By the way, ironically you made these comments close to the top of the market, Feb.15th.
I'd like to see you stick around, but if someone points out statements you made that were so misleading at best, just say,

"man I was wrong".

@PopTart- I knew that you'd been paying attention all these years. Good job! :)

@Old_Joe - Contrary to popular belief, over the years I've paid attention to the posts on MFO as well as the old FundAlarm site. I have learned ... :)

@PopTart- I knew that you'd been paying attention all these years. Good job! :)

The Leuthold folks track a bunch of metrics. Some target the distance to "normal" and others target the distance to "fair value."
The fair value note released this week looked at price/cash flow, price to book, dividend yield and three flavors of P/E. The implied drop to reach the median level maintained over the past 70 years ranged from -1 to -22%, depending on the metric.
Bear markets end up with valuations somewhere around the bottom quartile of the range. So ROE-based P/E is normal at 18.3 and low at 15.1. At the beginning of this week, the market's ROE-based P/E was 18.35 which might translate to "not wildly overvalued but way back the trough in a bear."
For what that's worth, David

Spent 12% of my portfolio on PRFDX, PRDGX, TRVLX . Bit on PRNEX too. I will start moving around 5% a week from my cash equivalent funds into equity until it's gone. I am comfortable buying from here down to oblivion. I have 15- 20 years to retirement.

in past bear markets, there was no need to try and buy the declines. The market kept making new lows. If you waited until the market was stable again, and even months into recovery, you had plenty of years and upside to profit from.

Nothing different. I sold a few things in mid-Feb that had gone up to what i thought were nosebleed levels, and then was able to buy them back in recent days at prices lower than what I paid for them originally. At the risk of sounding like I'm gloating, looking @ their charts, I sold them literally the day before the markets began to roll ... so great timing, I guess.
I've had a large cash pile for years sitting next to my equity-centric portfolios, so I'm VERY happy to be putting it all to work into equities now that they're coming down so sharply. Some of the stuff I just bought is down 10-15% already but I'm not worrying since they're solid (and mostly) 'value' companies.

Yuppers - That’s pretty much been my understanding of how it’s supposed to be done - exception perhaps for the very young with 25-50 year time horizons. But those folks should be out golfing or fishing. I’m getting hammered - but currently no worse that my long held benchmark - TRRIX. So there’s some solace in that my risk going in seems to have been appropriate for me / commensurate with what that very conservative fund takes.
I’ve never held more than 20% cash. Just 15% going into this. A lot of that has already been put to work. But still have another 50% residing in global bond funds and alternative funds. Those have lost only a few percent compared to equities and may end up being deployed in coming months should the markets fall another 10-50%. I don’t think it will fall another 50% - just saying I’d still have some remaining funds to (heave, throw, pitch) at it if it should. :)

Nothing different. I sold a few things in mid-Feb that had gone up to what i thought were nosebleed levels, and then was able to buy them back in recent days at prices lower than what I paid for them originally. At the risk of sounding like I'm gloating, looking @ their charts, I sold them literally the day before the markets began to roll ... so great timing, I guess.
I've had a large cash pile for years sitting next to my equity-centric portfolios, so I'm VERY happy to be putting it all to work into equities now that they're coming down so sharply. Some of the stuff I just bought is down 10-15% already but I'm not worrying since they're solid (and mostly) 'value' companies.

I owned ARTKX since 2006, saw some its best years, but finally sold it a week ago. I am not really bothered about one of the fund manager (Global Value team head) leaving, as most of its good years was under Samra. However, its performance has gone bad increasingly in the recent years as msf said.
Most of my recent International large cap went to Vanguard International dividend growth fund (a category that normally ends buying quality stocks). I also brought VWIGX, which I held in my daughter's Educatinoal IRA for the last few years.

@msf Yes. Thanks for the comments. I see its performance has only been middling in recent years. My memory of it traces back to outperforming years.

In the past, ARTKX is a fund I would have looked at. But given its declining relative performance over the years (going from 5* over the past 10 years to 4* over the past five, to 3* over the past three), I might have expected it to have reopened sooner.
The M* analysis notes that "the fund has historically fared best during sell-offs." This time though, YTD, it's behind its category average, -32.82% vs -30.49%.
The analysis also says that it blends quantitative and qualitative screens. If one wants a value-leaning international blend fund with a fair amount of EM (10% - 20%), that uses both quantitative and qualitative processes, BRXAX is an alternative to consider.
It's also from a solid fund family (MFS), but it costs less and is much smaller in size ($250M vs. $14B). The funds have comparable std dev, same 3 year risk rating, similar market cap and style (on the border between value and blend), identical Sharpe ratios, nearly identical market capture ratios.
It's done slightly worse, cumulatively over its nearly five year lifetime, -8.05% vs. -6.90%, though better over the past three years, -14.7% vs. -18.5%. YTD, BRXAX has slightly outperformed its category average at -29.51% (ARTKX has underperformed YTD). All figures are as of 3/16/2020, using this M* chart.
Given the similarity between these funds, I'd take a closer look at both before deciding to invest in ARTKX. Though if one wants a compact portfolio, ARTKX's has just 39 equity holdings vs. 135 for BRXAX. Or if one doesn't insist on on a value-leaning fund, it's not hard to find better performing foreign large cap funds.

Thanks for the heads up. I owned ARTKX for several years....I don't remember what prompted me sell it but recall regretting the decision more than once. Its down 32% YTD. Reestablishing a position while its still down may make sense.....A quick glance at M* suggests it has a new structure. I will need to figure out what that means.

David Snowball touched on the split off of managers in his March commentary.
Mona

Thanks for the heads up. I owned ARTKX for several years....I don't remember what prompted me sell it but recall regretting the decision more than once. Its down 32% YTD. Reestablishing a position while its still down may make sense.....A quick glance at M* suggests it has a new structure. I will need to figure out what that means.