LPEFX has been one of Old_Skeet's holdings for now better than five years with an average annual return, for me, of around 15%. I hold this fund in the specialty sleeve found in the growth area of my portfolio.

Hi Guys,
The tidal wave of mutual fund money storming away from actively managed funds and towards passively managed products certainly is a cause for concern among the actively management contingent.
So is the fact that fund fees are being reduced, that investors are becoming better informed, that the managers themselves are better prepared limiting any potential advantages, that the competition is more uniformly challenging, and that the community is numerically shrinking. Wow, that's formidable headwind!
All these are combining to make active managers perspective's significantly dimmer. But the referenced article is not written in a nasty, non-reversible trend sense. It inspires some hope. It highlights the investment strategies of a few attractive individual investors who use both active and passive components when assembling a portfolio.
I say attractive because the mixed management investment styles of those profiled are very similar to my own investment rules of engagement. It is a battle. And everyone likes to be a part of a group and not an outlier when doing battle or when making investment decisions. There is comfort in not being alone.
Although the active management community is struggling through a tough,abandon ship period, it will not totally disappear. It's needed for price discovery purposes, and because there will always be some folks who will never be satisfied with only earning average market returns. These folks covet superior returns as their guiding goal.
Tom Petruno is an excellent financial writer. I like his work. I have read his measured articles for countless years. He rarely disappoints and always includes data that is easily understood. Good for him; good for us.
Best Wishes

FYI: Today’s infants may gasp in wonder 20 years from now at tales of how humans once were trusted to drive cars. They may also be shocked that humans once were trusted to pick stocks for investment portfolios.
The soaring popularity of “index” or “passive” mutual funds in the last few years has dealt another blow to the ranks of traditional “actively managed” funds — the ones with human portfolio managers who are supposed to ferret out the best stocks and beat the market average return.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-investing-quarterly-active-funds-20170409-story.html

Morn'in @VintageFreak
From a post or two I linked over the years, from Nov. 2009, per Mr. Lloyd Blankfein.
http://www.businessinsider.com/lloyd-blankfein-says-he-is-doing-gods-work-2009-11

SPECX is Old_Skeets largest holding in the growth area of my portfolio and has been for a good number of years. Indeed, it has been a good fund through the years. However, there are other good large cap growth funds as well. Some that I follow are SBLGX, LGRRX and NEFSX (which I have owned in the past as a spiff).

FYI: To beat the stock market and mutual fund peers, having the right stocks isn't enough. It's having them at the right time that counts. And Alger Spectra Fund (SPECX) has done that in spades in the past 10 years and is doing so again this year.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/mutual-funds/blue-chip-tech-names-help-fuel-this-red-hot-fund/
M* Snapshot SPECX:
http://www.morningstar.com/funds/xnas/specx/quote.html
Lipper Snapshot SPECX:
http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/fund/specx
SPECX Ranks #139 In The (LCG) Fund Category By U.S. News & World Report:
http://money.usnews.com/funds/mutual-funds/large-growth/alger-spectra-fund/specx

Matt, PYMDX/PHMIX and MMHAX are the two I normally have money in, going in and out, partially, in steps, based on T rate trajectory and trading ranges. They're both up 4%+ ytd.
Fyi, MMD is a top-performing muni cef run by the same managers as MMHAX. Bob DiMella, one of the management team (and I think the lead, though he's not id'd as such by M*), has been on WealthTrack in the past, the last time maybe a year or two ago - you could get the flavor from that interview if you want to search for it.
Found my way to HY munis about two years ago, and until the markets change, I'm done with ~ all investment-grade muni oef's. Cef's (which the article emphasizes) are a different animal; I usually own one or two, but opting for the oef's right now.
Like the article says, HY muni funds aren't nearly as junky or default-risky as corporate HY; the default rates on the former are much lower, and the muni funds typically have higher average quality than corporates. For example, Pimco and Mainstay are about 60% and 50% investment grade, respectively.
Best -- AJ

I don't worry about "go anywhere" but I have owned WHGIX for many years and it has served me fairly well; of course, you must keep this fund in perspective. As wm72 stated it does not hit home runs, but it is fairly steady, good safety and tax-efficient for its category.
If it fits into your overall portfolio objective, then it is a solid choice (IMHO).
Good luck and profitable investing going forward to both of us wm72 and any others invested!!
Matt

"I'm looking at the 5-year tax adjusted returns for RPHYX and it's 1.40%. Three years is 0.90%. "
Okay, but what are you saying? That this is better than cash, or that it's worse than more volatile funds?

I wasn't saying anything other than what was stated - the numbers provided by *M. People can make their own conclusions based on the numbers. Taxes may play a part in returns so I think it's important to keep that in mind, especially for those holding these types of funds in taxable accounts.

I checked with my favorite site for total return ...
I also checked performance at M*, with their closest return indicator at 5 years and the total return numbers since inception are a match within .02%.
I fired up my handy-dandy HP-12C and did rough numbers.
RPHYX is 6.38 years old and has a total return of 17.75% in this time frame. The math indicates an annualized return of 2.78 (M* reads 2.76% at the 5 year return), before any taxes if held in such an account.

M* has all the data, you just have to know how to coax it out. If you go to the chart page, you'll get a chart for the lifetime of the fund. $10K grew to $12,137.31, for a total return of 21.3731%. (You can also see this on the summary page chart.)
http://quotes.morningstar.com/chart/fund/chart?t=RPHYX&region=usa&culture=en-US
The Stockchart link you gave appears to go back only to March 24, 2011 (just over 6.0 years). The fund started Sept. 30, 2010 (just over 6.5 years). Not sure where 6 3/8 years came from.
The M* chart can be adjusted for any dates. If I adjust it to begin on March 24, 2011, I get a total return of 19.17%. I don't yet have an explanation for the discrepancy.

"I'm looking at the 5-year tax adjusted returns for RPHYX and it's 1.40%. Three years is 0.90%. "
Okay, but what are you saying? That this is better than cash, or that it's worse than more volatile funds?
If someone was in the top marginal tax bracket (that's how M* computes tax-adjusted returns), then they probably owned RPHIX that gave an extra 1/6% or so in return (after taxes). You can also add another 0.1%/year to the after tax return to account for the capital loss writeoff when cashing out. (Shares were around $10/share until about 3 years ago; they're now around $9.75.)
So over five years, the after tax return looks closer to 1.65%. Not bad compared to a five year CD (offered five years ago). Even before taking out the 30+% (top rate) taxes on that CD.
http://www.bankrate.com/banking/cds/historical-cd-interest-rates-1984-2016/
The after-tax return also looks good compared to short-intermediate muni funds like BTMIX, VMLUX, or FSTFX. (I'm inclined to look in this duration range for muni funds; anything shorter doesn't seem to pay enough to beat cash, and anything longer seems to have too much interest rate risk.)

I don't have any money with this horse and will not; but was curious. I checked with my favorite site for total return, and the graphic is at the below link.
I also checked performance at M*, with their closest return indicator at 5 years and the total return numbers since inception are very close.
I fired up my handy-dandy HP-12C and did rough numbers.
RPHYX data is for a time period of 6 years; and has a total return of 17.75% in this time frame. The rough math indicates an annualized return of 2.89 (M* reads 2.76% at the 5 year return), before any taxes, if held in such an account.
Stockcharts by default, uses adjusted calculations for returns. The adjustments are for common items as; dividends, cap. gains, splits and assumes everything reinvested; whatever affects total return. I prefer this method versus the commonly used price/NAV only shown at many charts. I want the whole picture for the investment return. If one wants price only appreciation, an _ is placed in front of the ticker symbol.
The below linked chart is "active", meaning that you may add up to 9 more tickers separated by a comma; if you want to compare something else. Save the page for future use, if you have not. Lastly, Stockcharts will not chart a ticker that has not yet attained an age of 2 years.
One may move the slider bar under the graphic to change the begin and end period if you want to view a particular period.
Pillow time here,being a bit to the tired side ......hoping for no errors in the above; .
http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?RPHYX&n=1519&O=111000

I'm looking at the 5-year tax adjusted returns for RPHYX and it's 1.40%. Three years is 0.90%.

"The instititional version is a tad better but not that better."
True. Just the very little bit better that's needed to give the institutional class an extra star. (An artifact of star ratings being discrete; 1.99 stars are not given out, only 1 or 2.)

Since inception it is 3.31 vs. 3.02. So closer to what David was speaking of. I was speaking of the past three and five years. It is not unusual for a new fund to outperform its first year or two with small AUM and this fund is no exception. RPHYX hasn't done 3.5% to 4.5% since 2012. What dragged its 3 and 5 year returns down was 0.86% in 2015 when junk had its worst year since..... I am not trying to start a fight with David. I have said it is great as a sub for cash and retirees. It has been on an up trajectory with about as least volatility as you can find.

I'm confused as to how it can be both "2.20% over the past 3 years" and "3.5-4.5% every year except 2012". Surely one of these two statements may be in error?

I am going by Morningstar and the retail class RPHYX. The instititional version is a tad better but not that better.
http://www.morningstar.com/funds/XNAS/RPHYX/quote.html

I'm confused as to how it can be both "2.20% over the past 3 years" and "3.5-4.5% every year except 2012". Surely one of these two statements may be in error?

Right. It's part of a cash-management portfolio. Roughly 3.5-4.5% a year with negligible volatility.
The reasons we offered for folks to consider it were: 300-400 bps more than a money market, minimal volatility, protection against rising interest rates and shareholder-friendly management.
I admit to sometimes being purposely a bit provocative. But this time not. Just my OCD about detail.
This fund is not going to give you 3.5%-4.5% a year. I mean 2.20% over the past 3 years and 2.76 over the past 5 years. This year it is on track for around 2.80. Some of the Fidelity money market funds are now yielding over 1% (of course you will need a million dollars) And lesser money market funds yields are rising and will continue to rise with the increase in the fed funds rate. So no way 300-400bps over money market. Otherwise a fine fund with negligible volatility and way above money market returns (for now) This we can agree on.

"The response you will get is that it is mischaracterized as a high yield fund by Morningstar."
Not quite. My response is that it has few if any peers, so it is not a mischaracterization by Morningstar (an extrinsic error). Rather because of its unusual nature (and perhaps unique investment strategey) intrinsically any characterization winds up being inadequate.
(Sometimes M* could do a better job in selecting a bucket for a given fund; this is not one of them. As Junkster wrote, it's not as though this fund doesn't share attributes with other HY funds.)
In such situations one is better served by looking at category-independent metrics. That's what David did in pointing out RPHYX's superb Sharpe ratio.
FWIW, the duration of the fund, at 1.28 years, is below all but a few other HY funds that you could count on one hand. The category average is 3.6 years (from M*).
Of that handful of short duration HY funds, perhaps the one that has been most talked about here is ZEOIX. A more conventional fund, with admittedly better performance. (It lands in the 96th percentile over five years, so it beats RPHYX's 97th percentile.) But to achieve that "outperformance", it endures a standard deviation nearly double that of RPHYX. If I'm looking for an enhanced cash fund, I'm quite willing to give up a bit of performance for a more stable fund.

From Ted's link:"The hypothetical employee in the study started working for $10,000 a year in 1975 and got annual raises equal to 1.5 percentage points above inflation.
It seems to me that might be hard to ingest for the year(s) where cds were paying 15 - 16 %. What kind of raise would that work out to ?
@Bee : Did you post some thoughts on this glide path idea last year? I looked at doing something like this , but never pulled the trigger.
After many bond beating years, this glide path may not work as well if interest rates keep rising !?
Thanks for your thoughts.
Derf

I believe Target Date Funds could be used in a totally different manner than they are typically advertised which usually means these funds "target a retirement date".
I propose using these funds to provide a glide path of risk that "targets income needs in retirement" over future 5 year time periods.
Let's say I am 57 years of age in 2017 and I see a need for my investments to provide me an income of $X/month (adjusted for inflation) starting in three years (age 60).
So, a 2020 Target Date Fund would be funded with 5 years of spending (for age 60-64). So in 2020, I would begin disbursements from this 2020 fund and spend this fund down over the next 5 years (2020-2024). A Target Date Fund remains invested very conservatively after it reaches its target date which is perfect for spend down.
At age 57, I also would fund a 2025 Target Date Fund to begin disbursement in 2025 (from age 65-69).
I also would fund a 2030 Target Date Fund to disburse in 2030 (from age 70-74)
and so on...
Beyond the first 15 years I would then use 10 year increments such as,
2040 Fund for years 75-84
2050 Fund for years 85 - older
5 Funds all done.
For emergencies I might conservatively fund an additional 3-5 years of spending and replenish as needed.
All other resources could be aggressively invested without the worry of spending these resources at the wrong time (a bear market).
The beauty of a Target Date Funds is that they glide away from risk as they approach the spend down date (target date) and remains low risk during the 5 year spend down period.
Longer dated funds have time to deal with the risk/reward of the market serving as the inflation hedge.