Also: we don't have the luxury anymore of endless time to outrun total catastrophe, like we would have had 30-40 years ago when we knew what was happening, so any obstacle is a problem.
Plus, there are major actors for whom the price differential doesn't matter, e.g., supposedly regulated utilities that operate on essentially cost-plus contracts with their customers. The incentive is to build expensively so a given allowed profit margin brings in more dollars, for the benefit mainly of execs and shareholders. It makes new rate hikes a regular feature of ratepayers' lives. The only way for customers to get around additional hikes is to put in home solar, but knocking out the credits makes that a bridge too far for many folks.
My state's main utility is doing exactly what you'd think they'd do, extending the life of one of the dirtiest coal-fired plants in the nation and building a massive new, super-costly and polluting methane-burning plant instead of diversifying into renewables and storage. The regulatory body is utterly captured, to the max since the R legislature super-gerrymandered the commissioners' electoral districts, session before last.

Hank,
Miss the Contrarian Chronicles from 20 years back on MSN Money.
“It became a must-read for investors burned by the dot-com bubble and wary of Wall Street's pervasive optimism. The column stood as a stark, often witty, counterpoint to the prevailing market narratives of its time”.
Need the Chronicles today!

Morningstar has RPHIX at 2 stars ! Yes I know it's not in the right category. Thought it was a 1 for how many years?

In 2022 VTAPX lost nearly 3% while NEAR gained a little. To me the latter is a better cash substitute. Cash should not experience down years.
Calendar years are easy to get statistics on. But I think the sentiment here is that cash should not be down more than 12 consecutive months, regardless of whether those months exactly align with calendar years.
From its low on 10/6/21, NEAR did not recover (including divs) until 12/16/22. That's more than 14 months underwater. It took eight months for it to hit its nadir, down 1.32%, on 6/14/22.
NEAR is a good fund, it outperforms cash over periods of multiple years, and this short term bond fund should do better then ultrashort funds when/if the yield curve steepens. So if you're betting on a rate reduction (i.e. the Fed being more concerned with avoiding a recession than with rising inflation), or if you simply want to hedge your bets, it can meet those needs.
A couple of somewhat similar funds to NEAR are the ultrashort funds PYLMX and BBBIX. The former modestly underperforms NEAR but tracks it closely with under half the volatility and 1/3 the max drawdown. The latter is just slightly more volatile, has a max drawdown that's two thirds of NEAR's, and has outperformed over the past 1,3,5,10, and lifetime of NEAR.
Though for a cash substitute, it's hard to beat RPHIX. Never a down year (twelve consecutive months, whenever), infrequent miscues, and over the lifetime of NEAR much better stats including risk metrics and performance.
Testfolio comparison of the four funds

Bill Fleckenstein is a virtual encyclopedia on the precious metals and miners. I’d be much wealthier had I followed 100% of his advice going back about 5 years. From yesterday’s ”Daily Rap” (8/09/2025):
”… these tariffs won't impact demand or the spot gold price much. However, they do cause a problem for folks who arbitrage between London Gold and Comex Gold, because Comex Gold requires 100-ounce bars for settlement, which is what comes out of Switzerland and has now been sanctioned to the tune of 39%. Meanwhile, London gold has 400-ounce bars … what this has done is thrown a monkey wrench into the plumbing of gold … ”
Excerpt from: Daily Rap (Fleckenstein Capital LLC). This is a subscription based service. Link takes you to the site one year ago. You’d need to “pay-up” to read current commentaries.

@rforno said,

That's precisely why I am NOT in my state pension plan! My entire 403b is in a vanilla quality equity-only American Fund.

If you are a public school teacher I believe you are contributing to your state pension through monthly (payroll deductions) that are mandatory contributions to help fund the state pension fund. Your state also is required to contribute and often state's choose not to fully fund. Big problem when they don't.
Your 403(b) is an additional retirement option that you elect to contribute to individually. It is not mandatory.
In addition to 403(b) options you may also have 457 and 401(a) options.
At retirement, all teachers, who qualify (by age, years of service, etc.), will receive a pension (the State of CT in my case) based on a specific set of criteria and formula.
Your 403(b) is totally separate from your state/municipal pension. I too contributed to my 403(b).
When you separate service you can roll over your 403(b). Another option is to annuitize your 403(b). I did both.

Nope. As a university professor I had the option of selecting either the state pension or self-directed 403(b) - known as the Optional Retirement Plan - when hired. In my case the 403(b) contributions are pre-tax and 'above' my salary ... nothing I do or have touches the state pension system and I don't contribute to it myself. (Though pension and ORP folks alike can open up various pre- or post-tax 403b or 457b accounts as supplimental retirement accounts to save extra if we want.)
What you say is true for many K-12 teachers/staff in my state, but even then I believe they're also given the choice of either a traditional pension or ORP. But of course that varies by state and/or district.

@rforno said,

That's precisely why I am NOT in my state pension plan! My entire 403b is in a vanilla quality equity-only American Fund.

If you are a public school teacher I believe you are contributing to your state pension through monthly (payroll deductions) that are mandatory contributions to help fund the state pension fund. Your state also is required to contribute and often state's choose not to fully fund. Big problem when they don't.
Your 403(b) is an additional retirement option that you elect to contribute to individually. It is not mandatory.
In addition to 403(b) options you may also have 457 and 401(a) options.
At retirement, all teachers, who qualify (by age, years of service, etc.), will receive a pension (the State of CT in my case) based on a specific set of criteria and formula.
Your 403(b) is totally separate from your state/municipal pension. I too contributed to my 403(b).
When you separate service you can roll over your 403(b). Another option is to annuitize your 403(b). I did both.

“For a 'gambler at heart', who likes NEAR and is concerned about inflation, why not VTAPX? It seems to correlate pretty strongly with NEAR over the recent cycle w a bit more volatility and a good bit higher return. Plus, you get bonus inflation protection…”
Thanks, I’ll stay where I am. My cash allocation (mainly NEAR) is currently just 14% of portfolio. 86% is already invested in assets designed to provide “inflation protection”. That includes equities, commodities, REITs, multi-asset and tactical allocation funds - plus a few leveraged income-focused CEFs.
In 2022 VTAPX lost nearly 3% while NEAR gained a little. To me the latter is a better cash substitute. Cash should not experience down-years. Certainly VTAPX is a great fund and may meet your needs. For a very conservative investor who wanted to throw a whole lot at it, it might provide adequate inflation protection - but don’t count on it. And you are correct that over 10 years VTAPX has outperformed NEAR (by about 0.34% on an annual return basis).
A gambler isn’t reckless. What he does is weigh probabilities and attempt to derive intelligent decisions based on them. Investing is a lot like that.

“Since the early 2000s, pension funds have increasingly added private assets to their investments.”
“Private assets didn’t measurably improve pensions’ returns, says JP Aubry, associate director
of research at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, who conducted a study on them.
Before the financial crisis of 2008-09, they outperformed broad market, passive strategies slightly,
while they underperformed after.”
“Private assets might have a certain cachet, but public markets work just fine,
says Jason Kephart, senior principal, multi-asset manager research at Morningstar.
'People who have invested in public markets over the last 15 years have done well.'”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/economy/bitcoin-private-equity-and-other-alt-investments-are-coming-for-your-401-k-what-could-go-wrong/ar-AA1K77IJ

A firm I read believes that if DJT fires Powell, and forces the fed rate down to 1.5, ALL deficit funding will be short term with disastrous consequences for LT debt. While there will be a surge in economic activity, inflation will soon blow up, stocks crater and only Gold and hard assets will out preform
" The Bond Market will Riot"

But do we have proof that long term rates will go up? TNX has mostly sat under 4% for 20 years. If employers don’t raise prices, but stop hiring, maybe little inflation and long rates stay same? Tariffs could be used to encourage bond buying?

Hank,
Thanks for detailed breakdown, never had enough time to research CEFs, seemed opaque. The affable billionaire Mario seems to have done ok last few years. But seems to trade like a convertible fund. But correlation with SPY is low, so a good metric:
* 1-Year Correlation: 0.28
* 3-Year Correlation: 0.41
* 5-Year Correlation: 0.46

FD1000,
I said crypto is very risky, probably 5-10% max in portfolio. Just pointing out like you implied that politics should not factor into investing decision. Many people have missed out on biggest gains of last year because (maybe in part at least) they don’t like politics of people in the space (crypto, Palantir, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac).
I have advocated more than 12 years ago that Treasury should take very small amount from bond sales and put into S&P 500 - very radical at the time but President just this year is talking about setting up a sovereign wealth fund.

Gemini won’t reveal source for data, but
https://www.tiingo.com/products/end-of-day-stock-price-data
$30/month
Claims to have data from 1970s, then can have AI write Python code to generate output needed.

They offer a pretty generous free subscription as well. Access to all of their data (all stocks, funds, 30+ years of historical data), but limited in quantity: 500 unique symbols per month, 50 queries per hour, 1000 queries per day.
Quality of data looks very good. I ran a query on VFIAX between 2/19/20 and 3/23/20 inclusive (max drawdown dates) to compare with M* and the Gemini figure given above (-33.72%).
M* chart gives -33.80%, exactly what one gets using Tingo's (10 digit precision) adjusted prices. Tingo also gives a more precise div figure for March 9 ($1.1794/share) than I've been able to find elsewhere. Using that div figure I was able to validate Tingo's adjusted price for March 9th.
In contrast, Yahoo's adjusted price for that date seemed off a little. And using Yahoo's (two decimal place) adjusted price figures for the drawdown endpoints produced a drawdown of -33.83%, vs. Tingo's and M*'s -33.80%. (We already knew that Yahoo's rounding results in inaccuracies.)
I also found that if one compounded the daily gains (after accounting for the div on March 9) the result is also -33.80% so long as one uses at least five decimal places of precision. Rounding each day's gain (or loss) to 4 decimal places resulted in a perceived loss of -33.82%.
All in all, Tingo seems to be both very accurate (not giving wrong values) and very precise (lots of decimal places). Easy to use - output in JSON and csv format.

Smart people buy Toyota vehicles and hold them for 15+ years.

Has been easy in California to keep cars for long term. Don’t know about newer cars.
We had Camry V6 250,000 miles but totaled in accident. Body shop guy did minor fix and gave to his mom.
Another Toyota we had for 18 years with 175,000 miles and sold for $3,000 this year. We have another 22 year old Lexus V8 still running strong with 235,000 miles.
Had coworker who retired with same car he drive on in first day of work - 1990 Sentra with 300,000 miles. Another guy’s Corolla only lasted 400,000 miles.
But the pièce de résistance goes to guy who has 800,000 plus miles on his 1999 Tundra 4.7 L V8 - I rode it in a few years back and rode well. Of course everything but engine and transmission were replaced - axles, etc.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/young-americans-drowning-credit-card-debt-delinquency-rates-climb-near-10-q2
"New York Fed researchers said credit card delinquency rates for Americans under 40 have been "unusually elevated," adding they are keeping a "close eye" on the trend. The rate of balances transitioning into serious delinquency for 18-29-year-olds has hovered around the 10% mark since 2023."
I almost feel bad for the younger gens. I don't think they have a clue as to what we are up against these next few years. Elevated car prices won't even be the worst of it.
The American dream might become a nightmare.

It's all in SNAXX at 4.29%
SUTXX nets more after accounting for state income taxes. And it's safer as it is a pure Treasuries fund.
SNAXX yield drops to 4.067% after subtracting off state taxes. SUTXX yields 4.13%. It's been like this for a few years now.
Even better than SUTXX are funds outside of Schwab, including VUSXX (4.24%, $3K min) and FSIXX (4.16% and $1 min).

Why not mention the biggest cause...
The highest inflation in the last 4 decades by the previous administration.
Smart people buy Toyota vehicles and hold them for 15+ years.

Thanks for the notification!
"The executive order is part of a broad deregulatory push under the Trump administration,
which has rolled back restrictions on cryptocurrency investments,
closed regulatory probes into the industry and loosened banking industry rules."
"The private equity industry has in recent years struggled to raise money
from the pension funds and endowments that it has relied on historically.
Groups such as Blackstone and Apollo predict that accessing 401k plans
could deliver hundreds of billions of dollars in new industry assets."
https://archive.ph/nE6xK

Great pics. Reminded us of being there many years ago. Especially remember the gorgeous fjords.