This used to belong to Monsanto. There have been spin-offs and re-iterations. So now Bayer owns it. My aunt worked for Monsanto for a million years. She gave us nephews and nieces stock in the company. In those days, the 1990s, Monsanto could neither see nor shoot straight. Everything they did turned to shit, resulting in lawsuits due to totally unethical behavior. I sold and re-deployed the money.

My word! You do have a sense of humor after all! All these years and I had no idea.
:) :)

“To deep for me.”

Watch out for those spell-checkers @MikeM. They can be nasty. :)
Thanks for replying. I’m not asking “How can money just “disappear” when markets drop. I’d agree with you that sometimes an investor’s losses are attributable to a depreciation in the paper value of the underlying assets. (The ‘29 crash is often cited to support this idea.)
But the Dalbar findings suggest something quite different at work. It seems to imply that even when changes in stock values are taken into effect, U.S. investors managed to lose twice as much as the S&P lost in 2018. Simply saying there are a lot of “bad investors” can’t explain that. Per my earlier illustration, for every investor who bought high and sold a stock (or mutual fund) low, there is (in aggregate) another “investor” who sold the security high and bought it back low. Net-net, investors as a group broke-even by trading.
What might be happening:
- The S&P is an index absent any operating fees. Investors, by contrast, pay an assortment of fees to invest. Those fees come out of their potential gains - or add to their losses during bad markets.
- The S&P is specific to U.S. large-cap companies. Investors, by contrast, often diversify into non-U.S. companies, emerging markets, commodities and bonds (to name a few). Emerging markets, in particular, had a very poor year in 2018.
- The S&P holds no cash Most investors and funds maintain some cash for liquidity purposes.
- Most imortantly, I’d say, the S&P index has far outdistanced value stocks which many actively managed mutual funds seek out. It looks like the trend is beginning to turn. Possibly active management will outpace the S&P one of these years.

I've had a few items regarding inverted yield curve stashed in the laptop for a few years. I've retrieved those and looked around for other, newer related information.
I suspect there may others with theories from much earlier dates; but this look starts with Campbell Harvey from 1986. A Arturo Estrella link is also included.
I can not offer a formal financial education suggestion as to what is ahead for the markets. I can only personally rely upon what I see with market moves; being bonds and equity. Some equity market actions in 2018 (Feb. 2018 and Dec. 2018) had flashes of late 2007 market swings.
I'm one of those bad boys who watches the markets and the portfolio, daily; if time allows. Does this make me an emotional trader? The answer would be a big NO. But, I sure as heck know more about changes and trends in the investing road upon which I am driving.
Charts, charts; those darn charts. Yes, I look at these. They're not some magic back testing event view. They are the investment roads that have been and are being driven with real money. Charts just happen to be a comfort area for me to view trends to mix with other news and intuition; meaning whatever is still in my brain cells from experience.
We remain 34% U.S. focused bond fund (mostly corp. and Treasury) , 33% equity; being tech. and health related and 33% money market cash at about 1.7% yield.
These links are quite broad and could require more time than one is willing to expend on the topic; so you may pick and choose a link of your choice.
Campbell Harvey
Campbell Harvey, related videos
Campbell Harvey, direct search at YouTube
Arturo Estrella
A yield curve chart below, from my post on Wednesday. The below chart..... Treasury(s) is for 30, 10 and 5 year; as well as the 3 month. It looks a little busy if viewed on anything smaller than an Ipad size screen. The critical color is the mauve, which is the 3 month yield. So, keep in mind; this is not a price chart. If one is using a laptop/desktop with a pointer/mouse the cursor can be hovered on the lines and will display the yield %, date and percentage change from the begin date of the chart. Looking at the cross-over points will provide information as to when the inversions were taking place.
Yields, Feb. 2006 - May, 2009
Another 1,000 words could be expressed; but gotta do some other work.
Take care,
Catch

FYI: Unless you spend your day glued to a Bloomberg terminal or mainlining CNBC, you might have missed the news late last week that the yield curve for U.S. Treasury bonds “inverted” for the first time since 2007. This dry-sounding development has led to a great deal of speculation on Wall Street and in the financial press about whether an economic downturn might finally be on the way. As the Wall Street Journal’s James Mackintosh put it, “The market’s most reliable recession indicator is finally flashing red.”
Why does this have people so worried? The yield curve has inverted in the lead-up to all nine U.S. recessions since 1955. As the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco notes, there has only been one instance in the last six decades when an inversion wasn’t followed by an official recession within two years or less. That was back in the mid-1960s, when growth slowed, but the economy didn’t technically shrink. Since then, there hasn’t been a single false alarm.
Regards,
Ted
https://slate.com/business/2019/03/recession-indicator-yield-curve-economy-worry.html

Hi Guys,
DALBAR has been providing this useful service for many years. And for these many years the numbers and stats change, but the basic conclusion does not. With a few exceptions, investors suck. We underperform the various Indices most of the time. Here is a year old Link that makes the case:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-are-still-terrible-at-investing-annual-study-once-again-shows-2017-10-19
This story is frequently repeated. You might be interested in more detail, so here is a Link to a recent DALBAR report:
https://content.swanglobalinvestments.com/hubfs/Third Party Documents/Dalbar 2018 QAIB Report - Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior - Advisor Edition.pdf
As a general observation, you can improve your returns by trading less, using low cost mutual funds, and allow your wife to make the investment decisions. The data demonstrate that many of us don’t follow these simple rules. Easy to say, but hard to implement.
Good luck to all of us. We need it since our skills are insufficient.
Best Wishes

From date of inception to 2/12/2016, when it was at its nadir, the fund lost 12%, which would be outside my personal comfort zone for a bond fund. It has rebounded dramatically, no doubt about that. In fact, over the past five years it has outperformed the firm's own foreign STOCK fund. That's not what I'd call "ballast."

Interval funds are the new hot thing, it seems. A bunch of real estate funds like this have opened in recent years (like 3-5 years) that are structured similarly. If they mainly hold PE or institutional stuff (or even buildings) I could see owning some as an option to something like, maybe, TREA if you have access to it. That said, if it's just holding publicly traded REITs and charging you 2.5% for the privilege, I say run fast run far since you could own the underlying positions your own for free.

Not sure why people are responding based on a title without understanding what she said. @VintageFreak, are you 30 years old? If not she is not speaking to or about you.

DODLX YTD 4.69 tonight.
PRSNX 3.35
PTIAX 2.48
Granted, not like some stock fund returns this year. I do put more weight on the fact that PTIAX and PRSNX pay monthly. It's just more convenient. Even though I'm still re-investing everything, there will come a time when I'll be using that income. The PTIAX div has become half of what it was during the easy money ZIRP years, but even so, a monthly per-share div these days of 7 cents is maybe the best I've seen anywhere. (And I got in just when the 7-cent regime took hold.)
Risk/Reward looks good to me on these three. Yes, I could get 3.5% in a 5 year CD with Navy Fed Cr Union, but rates over the intermediate and long term will go up, n'est pas? When I see a 5% or so CD, that's when I'll park money in such a vehicle.
My ethical filter has a long memory, too. I won't do business with the Big Banks that have been and continue to be pimples on the ass of progress, with no sense of right and wrong. ("The Big Short.") Credit Unions for me.

The POINT was retiring in your mid-thirty's with no further earned income. That's a long way from 85 minus "several years". If you had retired with no income when you were 35 how exactly would you now have a home with no mortgage?

Orman is responding to a question about 20 and 30 year olds "RETIRING"! I think she is probably right on the money with that statement since they will be foregoing 30-40 years worth of paychecks from a job. Just a poorly written article. The article is "nonsense".

Orman was responding to a question about the “financial independence, retire early,” or “FIRE,” movement, a growing online trend in which people in their 30s or younger just stop working.
‘You need at least $5 million, or $6 million. Really, you might need $10 million.’

“My error. I was mistaken: TRRIX (not TRRAX) did even better than you remembered: -18.39% in 2008. Up 22.07% in 2009, for a combined 2 year total return of -0.38%. So just standing pat would have broken even with this fund. TRRAX (target date 2010) gained 27.95% in 2009, for a combined 2 year total return of -6.23%.

“
@msf - I did not know you were capable of error. :) Thanks for continuing to check this out and for getting back with the correct numbers.
Once ‘08 returns dropped from the current prospectuses (after 10 years) I lost track. That was something I always looked at for every fund I owned (or considered owning) until it got harder to do. An easy error to make. TRRIX is different from their other retirement funds in that it bears no date, nor does it follow a glide slope. As such, it’s not a target date fund.
Anything near 20% is still a steep loss for TRRIX.
Thanks.

My error. Since REATX was a 2010 target fund, I compared its 2008 performance with that of T. Rowe Price's 2010 target fund (TRRAX)'s performance in 2008.
I was mistaken: TRRIX (not TRRAX) did even better than you remembered: -18.39% in 2008. Up 22.07% in 2009, for a combined 2 year total return of -0.38%. So just standing pat would have broken even with this fund.
TRRAX (target date 2010) gained 27.95% in 2009, for a combined 2 year total return of -6.23%.
Domestic or foreign didn't seem to matter. Similar swoons in 2008, similar rebounds in 2009:
The domestic S&P 500 index fund VFINX went from -37.02% in 2008 to gain 26.49% in 2009 (per M*).
The international EAFE index fund VDMIX (Vanguard Developed Markets) went from -41.62% in 2008 to gain 28.17% in 2009.
The annuity salesman picked the worst year, but not the worst case (max drawdown). That was something like -38% for REATX (based on Yahoo data - I'm not rechecking this now). Target date funds are sold as sleep at night funds, so IMHO it's fair to look at bad years and ask whether they delivered on their promise. Lots of columns were written after the GFC faulting target date funds for their failure.
Principal protected notes, market linked CDs, index-linked annuities do deliver, in the sense that they protect against market risk. (They still expose the investor to issuer risk, except for FDIC-insured CDs.)
I'm not fond of these products because I feel one is paying to insure against a relatively low probability event happening (long term, multi-year nominal market decline). But I also don't think that FDIC-insured accounts are worth using either, except in very low interest environments or for emergency cash. I'm not their target audience.
My biggest complaint against these products is that they are usually sold in the most expensive format - as annuities - even though the annuity may add nothing but cost. Especially if the investment is already in a tax-favored account such as an IRA.

I thought the linked article from @JohnN good - but pretty rudimentary.
On a different (I hope related) note, a slick 30-minute TV infomercial - from one of those free dinner annuity peddlers provides occassional comedic relief Sunday mornings (especially if you missed SNL Saturday night). Always interesting observing their various scare tactics designed to dissuade folks from investing in mutual funds. Lots of big impressive looking charts. They seem to prey on poorly informed seniors and those nearing retirement.
The guy today was focused on frightening people away from mutual funds (and Target Date Retirement funds in particular) by highlighting the performance of American Funds Target Date 2010 REATX during 2008 (hardly a representative year). He claims it lost 28% in 2008 despite having only 38% in equities and over 60% in bonds (75% of them rated A or higher).
Can’t confirm his numbers. I’m surprised if REATX actually lost that much. However, in 2008 those invested in it would likely have been working (and importantly still contributing) and at least 2 years from retirement. For comparison, Price’s TRRIX runs a similar 40 / 60 allocation and lost around 20% in ‘08. What these hucksters did not mention was that 2009 was a strong up year. Likely REATX recouped most (not all) of that 2008 loss.
Obviously if you want to frighten folks away from target date retirement funds, highlighting the worst stock market / financial year out of the past 30 or 40 is the way to do it.

@ Lewis The problem goes back way before Trump. If I'm not mistaken the Fed. gas tax hasn't been raised in 25 years. Fuel taxes in the United States. The United States federal excise tax on gasoline is 18.4 cents per gallon and 24.4 cents per gallon for diesel fuel. The federal tax was last raised in 1993 and is not indexed to inflation, which increased by a total of 64.6 percent from 1993 until 2015.
Regards,
Ted

Added two funds I have owned for the longest time about 15 years. https://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?VDIGX,SPY,OAKBX,SGENX

( The Closing Bell will be updated sometime after 4:00 PM CDST to include the latest update from IBD and Bloomberg and will be moved to the top of the board.)
FYI:
Global stocks and bond yields slid Friday as weak manufacturing data deepened investors’ anxiety about the health of the world economy.
The Dow lost points 459 or1.77 % to close at 25502. The S&P 500 lost 1.90% while the Nasdaq was down 2.50%..
A report Friday showed factory output in the eurozone fell in March at the fastest pace in six years, while a gauge of U.S. manufacturing activity slipped to its lowest level in nearly two years. The data sent bond yields tumbling, with the German 10-year bond yield trading in negative territory for the first time since 2016 and the yield on the 10-year Treasury note at 2.453%, a fresh low for the year.
Meanwhile, stocks across the world retreated, and benchmark indexes in France, the U.K. and Germany ending down more than 1% apiece.
Bank stocks slid again Friday, putting the KBW Nasdaq Bank Index of large lenders on track for its biggest one-week slide since December. The group has been hit particularly hard by recent stock declines, in part because lower interest rates and slowing growth bode poorly for lending profitability.
Bank of America shed 4.5%, while Morgan Stanley declined 3.6% and Goldman Sachs fell 2.5%.
Commodities prices and stock sectors tied to them retreated, underscoring the dimming outlook for the global economy.
The S&P 500 energy and materials sectors each lost nearly 3%, while copper futures-—which tend to rise when investors expect growth to boost consumption of industrial materials-—retreated to a one-month low.
Of the eleven S&P 500 Sectors only one, Utilities finished with a gain. The other ten were down with Materials and Financials
Regards
Ted
Bloomberg Evening Briefing:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-22/your-evening-briefing
MarketWatch:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/stock-futures-point-lower-after-europe-data-underlines-growth-worries-2019-03-22/print
WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/markets-show-calm-after-brexit-delay-11553244944
Bloomberg:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-21/asia-stocks-to-edge-up-as-u-s-gains-dollar-rises-markets-wrap?srnd=premium
IBD:
https://www.investors.com/market-trend/stock-market-today/dow-loses-460-points-stock-market-today-nike-gets-slammed/
Reuters:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-stocks/wall-st-tumbles-as-weak-factory-data-fuels-slowdown-worries-idUSKCN1R31IA
CNBC:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/stock-market-wall-street-in-focus-as-growth-concerns-persist.html
U.K.:
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-stocks/ftse-100-sinks-as-sterling-gains-on-brexit-relief-idUKKCN1R30XV
Europe:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-stocks/european-shares-dive-after-grim-flash-pmi-surveys-idUSKCN1R30X8
Asia:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/asian-markets-mixed-as-investors-process-feds-outlook-2019-03-21/print
Bonds:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/us-bonds-treasury-yields-move-lower-as-investors-await-economic-data.html
Currencies:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/forex-market-brexit-extension-sterling-in-focus.html
Oil:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/oil-market-opec-supply-cuts-us-sanctions-in-focus.html
Gold
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/gold-market-us-economy-brexit-extension-in-focus.html
WSJ: Markets At A Glance:
https://markets.wsj.com/us
Major ETFs % Change:
https://www.barchart.com/etfs-funds/etf-monitor
SPDR's Sector Tracker:
http://www.sectorspdr.com/sectorspdr/tools/sector-tracker
SPDR's Bloomberg Sector Performance Pie Chart:
https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/sectors
Current Futures:
https://finviz.com/futures.ashx

In a separate but related article, The Wall Street Journal also reports that "factory output in the eurozone fell in March at the fastest pace in six years, while a gauge of U.S. manufacturing activity slipped to its lowest level in nearly two years. The data sent bond yields tumbling, with the German 10-year bond yield trading in negative territory for the first time since 2016 and the yield on the 10-year Treasury note at 2.453%, a fresh low for the year. "
Additionally, the article notes that "stocks across the world retreated, with the S&P 500 losing 1.7% and benchmark indexes in France, the U.K. and Germany ending down more than 1% apiece.
“The global economy has clearly become an issue, with big headwinds there,” said Tim Anderson, managing director at broker-dealer TJM Investments, pointing to mounting worries particularly in Europe and China.