Hello,
Thanks @carew38 for the question.
No, I was never charged an additional sales charge that I remember. This is not to say all my purchases were in bond funds which got moved to equities. The way I learned to do this was through a seasonal investment strategy where during the late spring I'd do some nav exchanges from equity funds to bond funds. During the summer months I'd buy more of the bond type funds; and, then come fall I'd move some back to the equity type funds. Nothing was ever said, to me, nor was I charged any additional commission and/or fees to do these nav transfers other than the commission I paid when additional shares of the bond or stock funds were purchased. With this, I started to purchase more bond funds than equity funds and made portfolio adjustments through more and more nav transfers from bond funds to equity funds. And, I did this for a good number of years. Now, in retirement I am doing less and less new purchases; however, I am moving a good bit of money from all equity funds to some hybrid type funds (over time) rather than to bond funds. I am wanting to grow my footprint in hybrid funds by about one percent per year while reducing all equity fund holdings by a like amount. Currently, about 20% of my portfolio is in cash and cds, about 10% in bond funds, about 45% in hybrid funds and the remaining 25%, or so, in equity funds. When Xrayed this produces an asset allocation of about 20+% cash, about 30% domestic equity, about 20% foreign equity, about 25% bonds and about 5% other. Notice I used the word "about" a good bit because the percentages are rounded to the nearest 5% whole number. As the equity allocation contines to grow I periodically rebalance and move some equity money to hybrid money through nav exchanges. In doing this the hybrid type funds generally have a broader investment universe that they can invest in over other fund types giving the hybird fund manager leadway within ranges, of course, to position into assets classes they feel will offer the better returns and/or offer a more complete investment package. This makes my overall portfolio more adaptive to the ever changing investment environment more automatic whether due to seasonal trends and/or investment activity in the markets by other investors relative to positioning.
For me, one of the better benefits for A share investors is the ability to do nav exchange transfers without paying additional sales charges. I believe the level load funds many classified as T shares do not offer the free nav exchange transfer option.
I hope this somewhat lengthy answer is helpful to understand how and why nav exchanges were made along with cost associated, for me, with these nav transfers.

Over the last dozen years, I think, one of my kids did an undergraduate econ paper analyzing Apple, then revisited it in grad school, and after that as a blogger --- and each time (so now perhaps up to 4-5 instances), I thought to myself, 'Hmm, interesting, I wonder, ... still looks awfully expensive, we better pass.'
Phooey.

In respone to a cavalier post made by another.
Two of my lonest holdings (and now largest) since my teenage years (better than fifty) have been AMECX and FKINX. Looking back ... I'd invest in them again as since high school (mid 60's) my return has been better than eighty to one plus some change to my pocket. Also, I have found, once ones pays the up front sales load they are free to do nav exchanges within the respective family of funds to other family funds without any additional cost plus Morningstar estimates on my wad of now 46 funds my overall annual expense ratio computes to only 0.87% on invested assets. In addition, I have no brokerage account wrap fees to pay so indeed this has been a low cost way for me to invest, through the years, as compared to some other investors that I know.
One of the best ways I found to reduce the sales load, years back, was to buy a bond fund with a lower sales charge and then latter on do a nav exchange to a stock or balanced fund.
Although some have said that they would never pay a sales load I'm thinking they might pay brokerage account wrap fees (which I'd never do).
For me ... swinging free ... as they saying goes. Sorry, to read, that for some of you, you might be in a twaught over sales loads.
Old_Skeet

One can never be sure of how to take comments made in this or other fora. If I attacked Foster's fund, it would be a surprise to me. I owned his Matthews fund for several years and followed him to Seafarer. I've had a sizeable EM allocation since before the Asian meltdown in the 90's. To paraphrase the guy in the Farmer's ad: "[I] know a thing or two, because [I]'ve seen a thing or two."

FYI: ( The fund is not available to U.S. investors.)
When Robert Marshall-Lee started running an emerging-market equity fund six years ago, he decided the only way to withstand the surge in passive investing strategies was to stop paying attention to them.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.fa-mag.com/news/this--3-3-billion-fund-manager-beats-world-by-ignoring-etfs-33674.html?print
M* UK: Snapshot Newton Global Emerging Fund:
http://www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/funds/snapshot/snapshot.aspx?id=F00000W50J

Yea, even with my own millennials it's hard to convince them that investing in the tried and true hitters who spray it all over the field year after year is a better bet than the hitter who cranks out a grand slam once every 5-10 years.
However, if they wanted to construct an investing motif of their five to ten best tech stock ideas I wouldn't discourage them.

Attacking the fund in this environment is a failure to understand Foster's strategy. He is a defensive risk-averse emerging markets investor. When the average emerging fund is up 21.5% in 6 1/2 months like in 2017, this fund will probably lag. Anyone complaining about its 16.5% return instead of 21.5% is suffering from a bit of irrational exuberance. Foster ran Matthews Asian Growth & Income for six years with the same defensive strategy. It too would lag in go-go markets and shine in more stable or bearish ones.

FYI: Investors are wrongly expecting the bull market to end and too risk averse, putting too little into stocks and too much into fixed income, according to BlackRock strategists.
The steady, modest expansion of the economy and the stock market's brisk increases have some years to go so stocks generally are not overpriced, they said in a new report.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.fa-mag.com/news/blackrock-to-investors--relax-the-expansion-has-legs-33666.html?print

I'm not very good at predicting market cycles so I decided to play it down the middle with index ETFs. I hope those who have held Yacktman funds over the years are rewarded for their patience.

FYI: The ease and frugality of investing in the stock market through index funds has made indexing so popular that no less an authority than John Bogle, the chairman of Vanguard and the instigator of the trend more than 40 years ago, felt compelled to issue a warning: Indexing conceivably could become so ubiquitous, albeit well into the future, that the stock market essentially ceases to function.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/vanguard-may-solve-an-indexing-problem-it-helped-create-2017-07-12/print

Since Don Yacktman retired, his son Stephan and co-manager, Jason Subotky having doing a good job running both the Yacktman and Yacktman focus funds. The Focus fund has higher allocation to foreign stocks (16% total and 14% is invested in Samsung Electronics) versus 9% in YACKX. Also both funds have 20% in cash - most defensive I have observed over the years.

@hank - "And finally, the pilot can always get on the radio and ask "where the hell am I?" ... "
I've been asking this question for years

http://www.cetusnews.com/business/Pimco’s-Daniel-Ivascyn-on-Staying-Ahead-of-the-Fed-.r1gITMEkrb.html
Since the Barrons article is behind a pay wall......
"Ivascyn’s fund (ticker: PIMIX) is Pimco’s largest actively managed bond fund, with $89 billion in assets and an enviable 99th-percentile ranking over the past five and 10 years. The fund is up 5% this year, versus 3.8% for the average multisector bond fund. Ivascyn has run the fund since its 2007 inception. He recently discussed with Barron’s his investment views and the outlook for the “new neutral,” a phrase that Pimco coined in reference to the current protracted period of unusually low interest rates."

Looking at my tracker, I notice HSGFX currently priced at $6.66. The number 666 is sometimes considered a bad omen - the sign of the beast - by superstitious people. However, if you like buying funds that have been beaten up (expecting a nice bounce) it could be a good omen in this case. :)
The fund is down 7.76% YTD and 15.8% for 1 year.
I believe a lot can be learned by watching various investment styles over time - both those that succeed and those that fail. That's why I track the fund along with a half-dozen or so other funds. Out of fairness, here's Dr. Hussman's latest weekly commentary from July 3: https://www.hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc170703.htm
In checking Hussman's more successful fund, HSTRX, I found it essentially flat both YTD and for 1 year. That one, as I recall, invests primarily in short-term T-Bills and seeks to enhance return with limited exposure to gold and utilities. The latter 2 often determine where the fund goes. Having a .79% ER, one can understand why it hasn't gained much in the current low interest rate environment.
Disclosure: I once owned both of the funds above, but haven't owned either for at least 10 years.
---
Related - Gold was hot for a couple months recently, rising to near $1280. It's tumbled over the past week and is now around $1215-$1225. Fed-Speak seems to have much to do with its fortunes from time to time.

This is going to be a hit or miss post, since I've been out and about traveling and won't be caught up for some time. Some offhand thoughts:
"If Bengen 'concluded that a 4% drawdown rate resulted in certain survival', he was wrong" and "The article is dominated by references to Wade Pfau observations. He too is a very strong advocate of Monte Carlo simulations to help arriving at retirement decisions. "
The NYTimes article has a graphic with three other spending models by Pfau. All three show 100% survival over thirty years (worst case shows money remaining for all models). That includes a model with a constant (inflation adjusted) drawdown amount.
Yet the simple Monte Carlo tools advocated (based on mean and standard deviation inputs) intrinsically contradict this - they are built on the premise that failure is always possible (since they say that a portfolio can lose value year after year after year after ...). Does that mean that Pfau, like Bengen, was also wrong in concluding certain survival?
A problem is that by design, these simple tools are unable to conclude that survival is certain. Regardless of inputs. If you build a conclusion (failure is always possible) into a tool, you've rigged the results. You can't use these tools to "prove" that 100% success is impossible. They're unable to say anything but.
It's fine to use random number generators (aka Monte Carlo) to "run" models many times and see what outcomes might result. The problem is not in how models are used (trial and error - random numbers), but with the models themselves. Unfortunately these tools conflate the creation of the models with the Monte Carlo running of the models to generate a range of possible outcomes. Don't confuse a criticism of these tools with a criticism of Monte Carlo simulations.
These tools create simplistic models that usually assume each year's market's performance is independent and that returns are normally distributed (bell curve).
But data suggest that stock market performance is a leading indicator of business cycles. Thus stock market performance is itself cyclic (not independent from year to year) albeit with an upward bias.
"stocks as a whole move in advance of the economy" = AAII Journal, Aug 2003
As to the bond market, the trivial Monte Carlo models assume that nominal returns are independent of inflation. The Fischer hypothesis suggests the opposite.
"The Fisher hypothesis is that, in the long run, inflation and nominal interest rates move together." http://moneyterms.co.uk/fisher-effect/
The first paragraph by Pfau in his Forbes column says that the models need to include correlations - something that's antithetic to simplistic free Monte Carlo tools that assume independence of inputs in building their models.
His penultimate paragraph states simply that: "the results of Monte Carlo simulations are only as good as the input assumptions, ... Monte Carlo simulations can be easily adjusted to account for changing realities for financial markets."
It's certainly easy from a mechanical perspective to adjust the models (e.g. by changing the mean return for bonds). What's not easy at all is figuring out what adjustments to make. That gets right back to the results being "only as good as the input assumptions", or as I wrote before, GIGO.
Again quoting Pfau: "Many financial planning assumptions are based on historical returns; however, these historical returns may not be relevant in the future."
https://www.onefpa.org/journal/Pages/MAR17-Planning-for-a-More-Expensive-Retirement.aspx
At best, even if a model is good and analysis sound, all you're going to get is a sense of whether you're saving enough (i.e. what MikeM wrote). It's of less help during retirement because, as hank noted, extraordinary events happen.
I'm wondering who the unnamed "professionals in this field" are. Or even what "this field" is. But for the record - I've never taken a statistics course in my life. I'm just an individual investor like most people here, albeit one who did once ace a course in writing and research.

That article starts out as a wonderful (too short) interview with Bob Rodriguez... all of which sets the reader up for a sucker-punch "plug piece" for index funds...
"All of this means that most investors should, in fact, own index funds"
Too bad the article writer had to stick in his index fundamentalism.
===
Skeet, I endorse your comments.
Anecdote: I distinctly recall at the turn of the century, investment advisors who administered my, and my spouse's employers' 401k plans, offered regular hosted lunches to 'educate' we simple employees on the plans. Invariably, the subject of asset allocation would arise. Just as invariably, they would recommend extraordinarily high (for my comfort level) equity allocations. And they kept doing so -- all the while the dot-com stocks ballooned, and when it burst.
Fast-forward.. My current employer 401k administrator (Voya) continues to recommend very high equity allocations. (Even though, their website knows I am a short 3 years away from an early retirement.)
These high-equity recommendations are the industry standard. And what amazes me, is that the equity allocation recommendations seem to deliberately ignore how cheap/expensive equities are. Valuations are not part of their allocation modeling. Bizarre! -- What other industry can you think of, where the price you pay is not factored into the purchasing decision?

Why would anyone listen to Timmer? He ran a fund for several years and got booted off due to poor performance.

MikeM : It worked looking back 3 years, but will the results look the same going to the future?
Derf

@PRESSmUP , that is a great mix of midcaps no doubt. My point, if you built a simpler portfolio and you had only one of those midcaps, which would it be? POAGX you said you love so I'm guessing that one. So if you had conviction in your best choice, you would have returned almost 11% more over the last year and almost 2% per year over the last 3 years by not over-loading with multiple midcap funds (%'s base on an equal distribution between the 3). So I guess you proved my point. But again, the comfort - sleep well factor is very important also even if return may be lower. I'm not questioning that.

http://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/mutual-funds/winning-mutual-fund-focuses
Virtus KAR Small-Cap Growth Fund (PXSGX) may not be a household name. But it's a top performer. As of Dec. 31, the fund had outperformed the S&P 500 in the previous 12 months, three years, five years and 10 years. Here's how this fund kicks butt with a concentrated portfolio. Right now, it doesn't even half any holdings in four sectors.