FYI: Jamie Dimon’s (CEO of JPM) definition of a financial crisis is “something that happens every five to seven years.” It’s been eight since the last recession. As you get old enough to observe cycles, as actual cycles, you begin to recognize the economic time you’re in is a point on a curved line and, sooner than you think, the direction of the line will change. Better or worse.
An asset bubble is a wave of optimism that lifts prices beyond levels warranted by fundamentals, ending in a crash. I promised myself that I’d be smarter the next time. “Next” meaning on the cusp of a pop or recession. So, how do you ID when we’ve entered the danger zone, and should you adjust your behavior / actions?
Regards,
Ted
https://www.l2inc.com/daily-insights/no-mercy-no-malice/every-seven-years

I have no reason to believe Foster has suddenly taken dumb pills. He has ably managed dollars for my clients and me for about 10 years, first at MAPIX and with SIGIX since he started that fund. I frankly do not care if the fund under-performs during an EM bull market. It is up about 12% year to-date. I'll gladly take that. The way bigger test for me is when EM is struggling, as they did in 2013, 2014, 2015, and even 2016 to some extent. In those years, SIGIX came through as I expected it would. If you bought SIGIX for outsized gains during EM bull markets, you bought the wrong fund. That is not how the fund is run. While I am sure Andy would like to be at the top this year, and that he is frustrated to be near the bottom, that does not bother me one bit.

Another way to play the "Innovators" Concept is with IWIRX , more than just Asia, it is global and beats MATFX in 1, 3, 5 10 and 15 years. It has not done as well as MATFX ytd, but worth looking at if you like the Innovators concept. I own it and plan on keeping it for the long haul, recently added to it. There is an interview with David Snowball a few years ago on MFO.
http://www.mutualfundobserver.com/2014/08/guinness-atkinson-global-innovators-iwirx-august-2014/

It looks like they all did only that some did it better than the others. The only trouble I have is the usual and customary past performance is ..... blah-blah.

Yeah - Me too. If humans lived to be 300 and spent 100 years in retirement these kinds of simulations would be a lot easier. Market cycles are more predictable over 100 years.
Just for fun, from January, 1992:
Dow - around 3000.
NASDAQ - around 600
10-year Treasury - around 7%
Gold - around $350
Never considered PRPFX an income fund. Not sure why it was included. If anything, it's a "wild card" - liable to do almost anything over 25 years - with the potential to hold up better during periods of unusual financial stress due to investments in precious metals (25%) and Swiss Francs (10%).
Personally, I don't think in these terms (generating income in retirement). Probably because my overall positioning is quite conservative, having a lot of hybrid products, I pull distributions "off the top" without the concern about market fluctuations many voice. (That's not to say I don't include income generating investments for diversification within the whole mix.) Guess my approach is quite unorthodox - based on board discussions.
@Mark - I hope @ Old_Joe gives us the color of those things he never thinks about. :)

@catch22 - I think you misconstrued the point of the article/exercise. The exercise was to determine how these 4 funds would hold up over a 25 year withdrawal period assuming a 4% withdrawal rate with a 3% inflation kicker each year of withdrawal.
Set up another way lets say you decide to quit working in 1992, so you take all of your savings ($100K), plop it down in one of these funds, and then withdraw the 4% and the added 3% of that over the next 25 years. Will any or all of the funds hold up?
It looks like they all did only that some did it better than the others. The only trouble I have is the usual and customary past performance is ..... blah-blah.
It was just a barebones look at the numbers, a "what if" if you will.

Hi again @bee
Opps, you did have the question; which fund?
I would vote VWINX, too. We have some money in this fund.
A chart compare of the 4 funds starting with Jan. 1999.
A few points:
---one may see the market melt area
---also reactions to the U.S. AAA downgrade in July of 2011
---there was also a bond blip/psuedo sell off in mid-July, 2015
Also, that after the begin of the U.S. recovery in markets in March of 2009; Europe in particular, but also Japan were still very twitchy markets for several years after and for whatever reason, as I recall, most of the market jerks were in the late spring months. We know that Europe has just began to find some favor within the last 9-12 months.
PRPFX seems to have had a stumbling time since early 2011.
USBLX and GLRBX appear to have flattened a bit from early 2015.
Jan. 2015 to date:
---USBLX = +15.3%
---VWINX = +14.7%
---PRPFX = +7.7%
---GLRBX = +3.6%
The last two above remind me of VILLX , which was a very decent fund and then fell on its face in 2014 and 2015 and has not been very happy since. I read about investment rotations with this fund moving more into sm/mid cap and apparently the fund is still stuck in a funk.
http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?VWINX,PRPFX,USBLX,GLRBX&n=4662&O=011000
Regards,
Catch

My daughter starts college this fall and it is completely funded by a 529 account. Knowing that we have only 18 years investment horizon, we started a month after arrived once we got her social security number. We continue to invest through the ups and down including the 2007 downturn. Thanks to monthly automatic investment and many discussion on this board. And it all pays off now.

Hi @bee
A few quick observations, with a quick read of the article, as outside chores await.
---Writer didn't note whether the investments are all, any or partial IRA monies
---Writer didn't note any other income/living sources
---Writer didn't state age....over 59 1/2 ???
I don't follow why the writer moves the dividends to a money market account. This move skews all of the data work he did with his graphics. How the hell does he think the 25 years of data he noted arrived? Not from removing distributions.
If these monies were rollovers into IRA's or mostly IRA's at the time of his write, he wold be required to pull about 4% after age 70 1/2. We don't have any reference to any of this.
I could not offer any opinion or suggestion to this writer, as there isn't enough information provided.
Regards,
Catch

The following Article was posted here at MFO back in February and I wanted to rekindle the conversation regarding your strategies for generating retirement income from your investments.
The article looks at 4 open-end mutual "conservative allocation" funds using the following criteria:
VWINX, USBLX, GLRBX, PRPFX
The Retirement Income withdrawal will be 4% of the beginning investment value with each successive year's withdrawal increasing by 3% to allow for inflation. Any dividends collected in excess of this will be accumulated in a money market account (MMA) until the year the mutual fund produces less in dividend income than is required and the difference between the next year's household income need and the dividend collected is taken from the MMF. I'm assuming the interest rate on the MMA is zero. If the collective cash reserve is not sufficient…or non-existent…and the dividend collected that year is not sufficient to meet household income need, then sufficient shares will be sold at the end of the year to provide the required cash. This is repeated each December at the end of the month (last trading day).
The clear winner over the the last 25 years?
Read on:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4050402-long-term-growing-income-open-end-mutual-fund-possible

Hi @Catch22,
Thanks for your inquiry.
Since, your question references back many years know at the time I was in my early teenage years. Here is how I remember things. The two fund families that I had investments in were Franklin and American Funds with the two first funds being FKINX and AMECX. Latter on as I aged into my mid teens I begin to build the number of yards I serviced during the summer months cutting grass. At this time I began to pay more attention as to how my father moved some of his money around from time-to-time (seasonal strategy). Most of his money was invested in stocks and bonds but he did hold a couple of mutual funds he used to play the seasonal strategy. This is where he'd make seasonal shifts between the stock fund and his bond fund. With this, I started doing the same and started purchasing bond funds during the summer and did as he did moving some of it to stock funds during the fall, winter and early spring. I still do this today with part of my portfolio. I remember, my father saying that the bonds funds cost less to buy than the stock funds but I should buy some of each along the way when I had the money. Since, I had the money during the summer months ... I purchased mostly bond funds although I did buy some stock funds as well.
Then ... you guessed it ... I followed the seasonal strategy that I learned form my father and started moving money between my bond fund and stock fund through nav exchange transfers based upon the calendar. And, through the years I learned more strategies and thus the number of mutual funds owned grew along with my asset base.
I don't remember the exact year that I had to start filling income tax returns but it was before I entered college.
There you have it as I remember it.

Hi @Derf,
Not all the nav transfers were in retiremnt accounts as ira accounts were not available (I believe) until sometime in the 80's. And, I started investing during my early teenage years around 1960. Therefore, some nav transfers were subject to capital gain taxation on profits.
Skeet

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.