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.

AKRIX was a suggestion from an advisor several years back and I've been generally happy with its moderate, consistent performance. The CGs have been consistent as well for the past 5 years.
Question for anyone who has experienced an MF to ETF conversion: Are the divs distributed over the year anything compared to the prior EOY CGs?
I guess we'll see. The board seems overwhelmingly supportive of the ETF conversion.

crash

The Repugnant Party, as has repeatedly been noted, stopped being a political Party years ago. It is no longer operating in good faith with regard to the workings of government and the separation of powers.

Is DEI actual implementation based on merit/qualifications?
Was the coup against Trump in his first term (the fake Russia collusion) in good faith?
Is an open border a good faith operation?

Saw a quip today, don't rightly remember where but possibly SA which stated that institutional investors are selling in the afternoon what the retail investors are buying in the morning. Anyone else noticing this?

Interesting observation @Mark. Don’t know. Whacky markets for sure. GDL which I sold this morning seemed to fit that pattern recently. Steady or rising most of the day than sharp pull-backs at day’s end. But my more diversified CEF collection has been flat-lining recently. Not much excitement no matter time of day.
I follow Fleckenstein - have for years. He’s of the “bubble” school of thought, but thinks the insanity could go on for years before a break. Market’s too dangerous in his view to short. Still likes the miners even at these levels as they lagged the metal on the way up. In general, I want nothing to do with either. A couple of my funds, however, hold 5-10% of the glittery stuff.

Good to see the funicular in Bergen is still going. A month in Norway, with skis, at the end of winter/beginning of spring 20 years ago is still the best foreign trip ever for this kid.

I have the fax machine story beat by a country mile. I once submitted order for a cd labeler and duplicator. Six months went by and order was lost. I resubmitted and months later a boss was asked by IT (their answer is always no) why couldn’t I just use a sharpie? Needed to print over 300 characters on CD so magic sharpie was a no go. Order was held up because IT was under infamous audit. 6 months later new IT resubmitted and things looked like they were moving along. 3 months later order rejected because machine was not assembled in “right” place. End of year budget was used up, so another delay till fiscal year budget. IT found another machine and machine showed up few months later. However, couldn’t use machine because IT rules required support contract, which took another 6 months. Then went to use machine but software to make labels was not approved or was having problems being installed. IT made a workaround and made first CD over 2 years after my initial request for this $3,000 machine.
Guess what type of industry I worked in.

I feel confident in saying that car payments might be the #1 wealth killer for middle class americans. and I made that declaration 7-8 years ago!

A very close friend of our family back when I was still in high school (60s) held a pretty good job at Ford in Dearborn. A service rep who handled in field problems for the corp. Smart cookie. I’ll never forget his telling us one day that buying a new car was “the worst investment you can ever make.”
We all have our indulgences I suppose. If I had to finance or lease (I don’t) my autos would be bare bones basic. Good used ones are an alternative, but I’ve been burned enough times with “crème-puffs” that I stick with new.
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/ford-courts-riskier-borrowers-with-lower-rates-for-f-150-pickups-5fb81965?st=jKSLfa&reflink=article_copyURL_share

Indeed. I've turned to ETFs for all new investments for the past few years. My basis in these "surprise" mutual funds goes back decades. RYPNX has alway been right on the edge of my personal "efficient frontier" (return vs volatility) map, so I've always considered the tax inefficiency to be a sign that the fund managers are doing their job :-)
Morningstar published a "Potential Capital Gains Exposure" figure but it ranges from zero to low 70 percent even for SP500 index funds (and minus 3% for SPY??). It's 26% for RYPNX, but much higher for funds with lower turnovers, which is sort of consistent, but my guess is that these stats are all over the map since the market's been seeing record highs since the start of the year.
It will be fun to see if Copilot or ChatGPT have any insights. They aren't afraid to tell you your numbers are meaningless. But they are very good at making plots, you just paste in some CSV-format data and boom you get a PNG image of your graph. Copilot even posts a code fragment so I can regenerate the graph myself with Matlib.

I taught FPU for a good while and after working with people for those good number of years, I feel confident in saying that car payments might be the #1 wealth killer for middle class americans. and I made that declaration 7-8 years ago! Today it seems even worse.
I would routinely run into peoples who's total car/toy payments were 2X what they paid in rent/mortgage. mind boggling.

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"

That's ok, Donnie will just declare the US is bankrupt and reset his ledger to zero. You know, like he did in most of his (failed) business ventures over the years. He 'loves' bankruptcy, remember.

Like others here, we hold and drive our vehicles for many years. Generally, proper maintenance keeps trouble away, barring manufacturer problems; of which, there have been many in recent years.
Current monthly auto payment and lease
For an auto loan, the average monthly payment in the U.S. during the first quarter of 2025 was $745 for new cars and $521 for used cars. For a new lease, the average monthly payment was $595. These figures can vary significantly depending on several factors, including your credit score, the loan amount, interest rate, and the loan or lease term.
Here's a breakdown of average auto payments and leases by credit score range (Q1 2025 data from Experian):
Superprime (781-850):
New car payment: $727
New lease payment: $595
Prime (661-780):
New car payment: $753
New lease payment: $590
Nonprime (601-660):
New car payment: $784
New lease payment: $610
Subprime (501-600):
New car payment: $762
New lease payment: (Data unavailable for this specific range and category)
Deep Subprime (300-500):
New car payment: $736
New lease payment: (Data unavailable for this specific range and category)

my guess is the move from defined benefit to defined contributions have tremendously hurt the PE world.
I read that 88% of pensions invest in PE at an average allocation of about 14%. and the amount of assets available to pensions has been cut in half as a percentage of the market over the past 30 years or so.

Biden”s 8 years of massive inflation wrecked our country.
Thank goodness we have new policy so that Prices will finally go down after we punish countries with massive tariffs.

These software use geometric averaging of returns. So, if period returns (daily, weekly, monthly) are d1, d2, d3,....,dn, then total-return (TR) is,
TR = (d1*d2*d3*......*dn)^(1/n).
For 30 years, with monthly returns, n = 30*12 = 360 only, for daily returns, n = 30*252 = 7,560.
Daily data are more prone to errors due to ex-div date errors and rounding.
So, I am OK with TR, CAGR being close enough.
I would be more concerned about tiny differences among the software that use monthly data (MFO, PV, M*), but there could be minor discrepancies in TR, CAGR with those that use daily data (TestFol. Stock Rover).
BIG differences for SD, Sharpe Ratio, Sortino Ratio, Drawdowns have already been explained.
I mentioned in my post on 8/3/25 that weekly data would be a good compromise (n = 30*52 = 1,560) but that's isn't used by many (StockCharts has Daily, Weekly and Monthly (paid version) views and so are the related data, but that's a charting software, so it wasn't included in my review).
I can predict that all these FREE software will use us, the users, to debug and then flip to subscription software. Morningstar is doing that, PV and StockCharts already charge arm-&-leg for their paid versions.

I don't think it can be done so early. As you have noted, there is no pattern seen from past history. Many funds with high % of retirement a/c don't manage the fund at all for CGs - Fido, etc. As the funds are allowed to close books for the year at October-end, November is the earliest this info is available or may be modelled.
If a fund has high UNREALIZED gain and/or high turnover, it's a potential candidate for high REALIZED CGs. Market down years when there can be lot of redemptions can lead to high realized CGs.
One thing is certain - ETFs have no/low realized CGs.

Does anyone have a method for estimating fund capital gain distributions this
early in the year? I need to keep my income below a certain level for 2025
and have a few mutual funds that sometimes throw a big surprise at
the ends of the year. Normally this is not a problem :-)
What drives distributions? I figure it would be some function of turnover, NAV,
fund inflows and outflows, and of course fund policy.
Any ideas? Also where I might be able to see more timely
turnover and inflow outflow data - funds and Morningstar seems to report it only at
year end.
An an example, I looked up 5 years of data for RYPNX (Royce Small Cap
Opportunity) and plotted turnover vs change # of shares vs the CG distribution for 5 years.
[I tried to post an image, didn't work.]
Not much of a pattern, they have reported 35% turnover for the past three years.
The 2021 distribution was a whopper, about 25% of NAV, turnover was 69%.
But the 2020 distribution was 0 even though turnover was 53%. Q1 2020 was the pandemic big correction
and then the fund had a big spike in Q2-3 2021, even though the asset unders management was
still nearly double a YE 21 vs 20.
Maybe I should calculate the upside volatility of my funds and pay attention to that.
Or I could use volume of a similar ETF as a proxy. So far, this year, RYPNX has been meh,
so I don't expect a big distribution for 2025.
The cool part if that Microsoft Copilot seems to want to work with me on this:
Q: "What us a useful model for predicting mutual fund capital gain distributions in advance?"
A: [edited]: "Would you like help building a predictive model using historical fund data?
I can assist with data sourcing, feature selection, and model development."

JPMorgan and Bank of America stocks drop as Trump warns of payback for ‘bad’ treatment
Trump confirms plans for an executive order to punish banks for what he said was discrimination against conservatives. Meanwhile, banks praise efforts to overhaul regulations.
Do we really have to deal with another 3.4 years of this? Its disgusting.

I used to have a big position in D (as a Northern VA resident) but sold it years ago when management embarked on a strategic review, cut the dividend, pledged to restore it, and never did. Part of me is inclined to retake a position in it precisely b/c of the # of data centers popping up around here, but I still haven't pulled the trigger .... I'm already into a bunch of utes as it is.
(and D apparently still isn't earning its dividend, per M* and other places reporting of its payout ratio)