I moved from MACSX to SFGIX a couple years ago. It made sense to me personally not to have 2 funds following similar agendas, especially when one of those funds (SFGIX) was using a larger geographic scope to accomplish that agenda. Just trending the 2 fund's returns for any time span pretty much proves that was the right move.
But that said, I'm not a proponent of multiple funds in any cap-size or sector type fund. I believe many-of-the-same funds detract from total return. Might as well go with the index since you watered down the managers skills. But that's just me.

I have most of my accounts at E*TRADE as a legacy BrownCo customer and have been pretty happy with the collection of NTF funds they have. Customer service seems to be the main issue. For years I dealt with a guy who was great. He got things done, he went to bat for me when I needed or wanted something like making Grandeur Peak Emerging Markets fund available quickly after launch, and he always followed up on questions I had.
More recently it's the opposite and I find customer service much more stressful because not only are more of the answers bad answers for me, which has to be expected sometimes, but I have to chase after them more for answers. Sometimes they've provided answers that seem more like they just want to be done with my question and move on to the next one rather than actually trying to make the customer experience better- even if the answer isn't what I might hope for.

Though I would go elsewhere for TF funds (e.g. Scottrade $17, E*Trade $20, or Fidelity with $5 to add shares to an existing position).

@msf, is your comment about Fido pricing when adding to an existing position their general approach? I can't find that anywhere on their website or in my account documents. I have a small account at Fido and have always avoided TF funds because I mostly like to add to positions over time, but if the $50 fee was just on the first purchase and each additional purchase was only $5 I might reconsider in some cases.

VF - not sure if you're reading this correctly. Years ago, TDA had no NTF funds, plus a high transaction fee; the combo meant I didn't even take a look at them.
But that was years ago. These days, it's got a very respectable stable of NTF funds. Though I would go elsewhere for TF funds (e.g. Scottrade $17, E*Trade $20, or Fidelity with $5 to add shares to an existing position).

Hi @Old_Joe
Recall doing the mean, median, average and likely other identifying words for math questions with our daughter in middle school.
Now, the median age of our and 9 neighbor vehicles is 8 years. Some of us have more repair items and dependability problems than others. Do you need more info?...... :)
Lastly, if you see Mr. Stumpf cruis'in around town; please give him the appropriate Italian salute from me........
Take care of you and yours,
Catch

Interesting. I would have expected modest distributions because it seemed we got hefty distributions last year. That was a year of small growth after some hot years, so I thought those distributions would have cleared out much of the capital gains.
Apparently a culprit is people fleeing actively managed funds generally. (This leaves the same amount of gain to be distributed among fewer shareholders.)

Hi Guys,
I'm a sucker for presentations that are in the heavy weight statistical category. I'm often surprised by the survey numbers. That was again true as I read the referenced mutual fund owner report.
Not much to my surprise, I'm doing quite well on a comparison basis. I am more than comfortable on an absolute basis. I'm not surprised that the so-called GI generation is at the bottom of the curve in terms of mutual fund ownership. That industry was just making a positive market penetration during our meaningful earning and saving decision years.
I was a very lucky and fortunate soul during those years. In a totally random event, I was introduced to Jack Bogle. He is a very convincing advocate and salesman. He won that day and continues to win.
The most surprising statistic for me is that the median fund owner only has 3 funds. That's a basic minimum for portfolio diversification. I typically have a fund number that bounces around 10. But I also have a portfolio,size that greatly exceeds the averages presented in the survey report. I trade infrequently and am very much into cost control. I suspect many MFOers practice the same general policy.
Best Regards.

FYI: (I will link intereview as soon as it becomes available for free, generally early Sat. morning)
Regards,
Ted
September 30, 2016
Dear WEALTHTRACK Subscriber,
Few money managers have the conviction, wherewithal, stamina and independence to stick with positions that remain unpopular and unprofitable for years before paying off. This week’s guest is one of the few! We’ll be joined by Bruce Berkowitz, a deep value, long-term investor who rarely gives interviews. I have been interviewing him on WEALTHTRACK since 2007 and he has always generated a great deal of interest.
Berkowitz is Founder and Portfolio Manager of the three Fairholme funds - his Flagship Fairholme fund, launched in late 1999, the Fairholme Focused Income fund started in 2009, and the Fairholme Allocation fund begun in late 2010.
The Fairholme fund, for which he was given Morningstar’s Domestic Stock Fund Manager of the Decade Award in 2010 has delivered 10% annualized returns with dividends and distributions reinvested since inception, nearly triple the market’s total return.
However, the last decade has been much more difficult. The fund has badly lagged the market over the past 10, 5 and 3 year periods despite having several stellar years including 2012 and 2013 when it crushed the market and led its Morningstar Large Value category, gains that were offset by a big decline in 2011 and then another subpar performance in 2014, hurting its track record. The fund, which once had over $20 billion in assets, is now a fraction of that.
Berkowitz is famous for taking big positions in a handful of companies that are generally shunned and panned by Wall Street when he is accumulating them. He has made a fortune over the years in concentrated stakes in health care, energy and financial services. He has also poured a fortune in recent years into companies such as Florida real estate company The St. Joe Company and retailer Sears, as well as financial firms such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have yet to pay off.
There’s a well-known saying “Don’t fight city hall”… but Berkowitz is taking on the entire U.S. federal government. Fairholme is engaged in a multi-year lawsuit against the U.S. government over its handling of the conservatorship of the two mortgage giants, which although hugely profitable, are still under government control and paying enormous dividends to the government - but not to preferred shareholders like Fairholme. I began the interview by asking him why he is so committed to fighting this battle.
If you are unable to join us for the show on television, you can watch it on our website, WealthTrack.com, starting over the weekend. If you’d like to see it earlier, it is available to our PREMIUM subscribers right now. We also have an EXTRA interview with Berkowitz about his views on the presidential candidates. He says it is more about the team than the candidate.
Thank you for watching. Have a great weekend and make the week ahead a profitable and productive one.
Best Regards,
Consuelo

Many of the remaining jobs now require additional schooling. For ex, housekeepers in a hospital in the state I lived in used to be trained on the job. Now they have to be certified by taking a 9 month comm. college course. The job I had was on the job apprenticeship back in the 70's. Now it's a 2 year course and talk of making it 4 years is ongoing.
Commoners and peasantry might be the new term for the middle class.

That is a good point on how worker are actually getting paid less then the past. Workers got paid while being trained. Now workers have to pay for their work training.

The middle class benefited from manufacturing and production jobs that could be had right out of high school. These were decent paying jobs too. Automation and outsourcing to other countries has pretty much eliminated those jobs. Many of the remaining jobs now require additional schooling. For ex, housekeepers in a hospital in the state I lived in used to be trained on the job. Now they have to be certified by taking a 9 month comm. college course. The job I had was on the job apprenticeship back in the 70's. Now it's a 2 year course and talk of making it 4 years is ongoing.
Commoners and peasantry might be the new term for the middle class.

Like virtually all other bonds, munis have enjoyed the many years of lower rates. I check individual muni prices regularly, and seldom if ever find an investment-grade muni that is not selling 2-3% above par. While I won't say there is a bubble, it is clear that the easy money was made over the last 10-20 years. Most managers will tell you they would be happy to be able to pay investors their coupon and just hold NAV steady in coming years. We are quite cautious with all bonds right now, using shorter-duration funds and going with short-to-intermediate term funds. And bond fund expenses are a critical component. A fund that charges 75-100 bps or more has a huge headwind facing them as rates move higher. M* lists 222 short-term muni funds, with fully one-third of them having expenses of 75 bps or higher, some higher than 150 bps. Of course, these funds were SOLD to investors by banks and other commission-driven entities.

I agree. Parnassus should unwind their position in WF as quickly as they can. Not doing so attaches the WF stain to Parnassus. If the fund company had discovered that WF had been refusing to hire African Americans or had quietly been letting LGBT employees go over a period of years, rest assured Parnassus would have dumped them like rotten potato salad.

These disasters usually just drip on and on, unless senior management takes immediate responsibility ( remember this scandal has been known to CA newspapers for three years) and accepts appropriately severe personal punishment.
Stumpf did none of this, and deserves to loose all of his salary and delayed compensation since the process began... Of course he wont, not will the chief of retail banking, who will be allowed to retire on a little less..
We can hope that the AGs and DOJ go after them for conspiracy and fraud and, having ignored the criminal implications of the 2008 crisis, decide that enough is enough and file criminal charges.
As far as your or my investment in WFC I would ( and did ) sell now. Nothing good is going to come out of this for months to come and the stock will likely drop 10 0r 15% as the true legal and distraction costs start to mount

Honestly, I pay no attention. Don't see what gender or sexual orientation has to do with anything.
Have had many excellent female money managers, attorneys, surgeons, etc. over the years. And more than a few males who were real "clunkers."
We're still playing catch-up of course. That's because the stereotypes that existed unfairly many decades ago take time to change. When I was in high school counselors (and parents) were more likely to steer girls into careers in nursing and teaching and men into science, engineering or accounting. Helps explain why even today there are higher proportions of the genders in certain fields. So much has changed for the better. But it will take many more years to overcome the effects of those stereotypes.

Check out this article:

Thanks for the article. If I am reading this chart correctly.

The chart illustrates that a 25 year old has 9x as much human capital as financial assets. A 40 year old has an equal amount of human capital as financial assets and at 60 year old should have financial assets equal about 9X their human capital. This chart seems like a pretty good way to gauge where a worker needs to be in the process of using human capital to accumulate financial assets which I assume is the intent of this chart.
I'll assume we're equating human capital (income producing activities moment by moment) to accumulated financial wealth.
As a simple example, if human capital at 25 years old is say, "$50K", then by 40 years old financial assets should equal "$50K". A 25 year old has 15 years to save some of his/her human capital each year to reach this goal at age 40. This amounts to investing about $2100 / yr with an average return of 4%. Seems very achievable.
If at age 60 your human capital is say "$100K", your financial assets should equal "$900K". A 40 year old has 20 years to invest some of his/her human capital each year to reach this goal at age 60. This would amount to investing about $25,500 / yr with an average return of 4%. This seems a bitt more challenging especially when things like college tuition, weddings, and elderly parents (or unemployed kids) are siphoning off some of your human capital.

Year old article, but relevent.
Getting Into The Unicorn Boom: 10 Mutual Funds With Stakes In Pre-I P O Tech Stars
by Steve Schaefer , FORBES STAFF
Of course, for most investors there’s little need to chase the rich valuations brewing in private markets. Almost every high-profile I P O in recent years has revisited its offering price, including Facebook, Twitter TWTR +21.42% and Alibaba . But for those keen on getting early exposure, mutual funds that allocate a portion of their holdings to the space, without betting the farm that every billion-dollar startup is going to be a long-term success, is a reasonable strategy.
According to Pitchbook’s 2015 Unicorn Report, T. Rowe Price owns stakes in 14 unicorns, outpaced by only Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horiwitz, Kleiner Perkins and SV Angel. Wellington Management has participated in funding for 12 unicorns, while Fidelity has been involved in eight such capital raises.
The table below shows 10 of the funds that own stakes in the tech world’s unicorns, and even though the businesses have lofty valuations, they still represent a small piece of the funds’ overall portfolios

http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveschaefer/2015/10/14/unicorns-funds-fidelity-trowe-uber-dropbox/#76f71c9f57f4
Crony Capitalism for the Private Equity and Investment Banking Set ?
This is listed as an opinion piece,but still worthwhile for further background.
Startup Valuations, Mutual Funds, And The Saga Of Blue Bottle
June 16, 2016 - By Max Cherney
...mutual fund valuations are one of the few hard data points the public has to assess what the company’s shares are worth, or at least what mutual funds think they are. And that’s important—more than it has been historically—because of changes introduced by a 2012 law: the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act
Sold as a way to make the growing practice of crowdfunding legit, the JOBS Act also contained a provision that has had a profound impact on how companies are funded and at what point they go public: the fed axed the 500 rule—requiring a company to go public after it had more than 500 shareholders—and now only requires a company to I P O after it hits 2,000 accredited investors (though the number remains at 500 if those investors are not accredited).
Without the JOBS Act, Airbnb and Uber would likely have been required to go public (as Facebook was). Hence the number of large, private companies has swelled—why put an enterprise at the mercy of Wall Street’s grueling quarterly expectations if not absolutely necessary?
https://mattermark.com/startup-valuations-mutual-funds-saga-blue-bottle/
The coffee wars of San Francisco are back on!
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/25/blue-bottle-coffee-is-raising-another-a-big-round-of-funding/?
Silicon Valley is known for plenty unusual investments, anywhere from alternative food products to space exploration, and the coffee industry is certainly no exception. But there’s logic to it: there’s a huge coffee market and a near-perfect comparable in the market, with Starbucks hanging out at an $80 billion valuation. For any coffee company, capturing even a fracture of that market already means the company has hit unicorn status

UNITED STATES SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
Washington, D.C. 20549
FORM D
Notice of Exempt Offering of Securities
Name of Issuer
Blue Bottle Coffee, Inc.
Jurisdiction of Incorporation/Organization
DELAWARE
Year of Incorporation/Organization
Over Five Years Ago
X Within Last Five Years (Specify Year) 2012
Yet to Be Formed
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1560324/000156032415000001/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml
https://techcrunch.com/unicorn-leaderboard/
Boy ! Did we miss this one !
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/theranos#/entiy
SCIENCE
Lesson of Theranos: Fact-Checking Alone Isn't Enough
AUG 8, 2016 10:00 AM EDT
By
Faye Flam @ Bloomberg
Elizabeth Holmes,at just 32, is the founder and chief executive officer of the high-tech diagnostics company Theranos, a startup valued at $9 billion that promised to revolutionize blood testing. Until recently, she was the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire..
Aug 8, 2016 Bloomberg - Lesson of Theranos: Fact-Checking Alone Isn't Enough
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-08/lesson-of-theranos-fact-checking-alone-isn-t-enough
TECHNOLOGY NEWS | Fri Sep 23, 2016 | 6:52pm EDT (Reuters)
Twitter initiates talks with tech companies over sale: sourceA sale of Twitter has been the subject of on-again, off-again rumors for many months as the company grapples with stagnant user growth, soft advertising sales and losses running at hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
The company's business struggles have come even as the 10-year-old service has evolved into a potent global source of news, entertainment and social commentary.
CNBC, citing anonymous sources, reported on Friday that Twitter is in talks with companies including Google (GOOGL.O) and may receive a formal bid soon. A source told Reuters that Salesforce.com (CRM.N) is also in pursuit.
TECHNOLOGY NEWS | Fri Sep 23, 2016 | 4:29pm EDT (Reuters )
Facebook apologizes for overstating key ad metric
Facebook has made a significant strides into video, which has attracted significant advertising interest and has benefited from the shift in advertising spending toward the internet and other mobile platforms.
Revenue from advertising was the biggest driver to company's total revenue in the latest quarter, surging 63 percent to $6.24 billion. "This could pose a serious blow to Facebook's video proposition, which has had so much of momentum over the last two years," said Sarah Wood, co-CEO of ad tech company Unruly, which is owned by News Corp.http://www.reuters.com/news/archive/technologyNews

Hi @MOZART325,
Thank you for your sugestion to look at GSVC and SVVC.
The first screen that I took these to task was a performance screen test.
Here was the results with their respective performance ... ytd ... 2015 ... 2014 ... 2013 ... & 2012.
LPEFX ... 1.65% ... (-0.56%) ... 0.44% ... 41.26% ... 29.70%
GSCV ... (-18.35%) ... 8.57% ... (-28.62%) ... 43.42% ... (-39.57%)
SVVC ... (-14.53) ... (-56.19%) ... 5.78% ... 34.67% ... 21.70%
Negative years are in (-x.xx%)
After review of this analysis I went no further since LPEFX was the better performer and goes to show how tough of space private equity and business development operates with the losses the other two have had. And, it makes me feel better about my pick to invest in this space through LPEFX.
Thanks again for you suggestion to review the subjects.

@MSF, Agreed BlackRock still has a long way to go, but is somewhat ahead of the curve relative to Vanguard in acknowledging that climate change is a material financial risk. This is why of the three big indexers I say State Street is now the best choice for both the environmentally conscious and the cost conscious. For those who are primarily concerned about ESG factors, smaller boutique shops like Pax World and Parnassus are light years ahead of any of these big firms. Perhaps Deutsche Bank's funds might represent an interesting compromise between concern for ESG and cost.

I give more weight to performance 3 years and a few funds I've owned over 10 years.. At age 82 I don't have a alot of time. Other than index funds I only own VWINX-HBLIX, PRBLX, POGRX, PRWCX, VEIPX and GTLLX and 2 bond funds PIMIX and TGEIX.

Annualized - take a cumulative figure over any time period, and scale it to one year.
Investopedia's got this right:
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/annualized-total-return.asp
Note that I cite Invesopedia here not as an authoritative source, but as a readable one, in case my writing/typing/formulae below are unclear.
For example, if you have a cumulative return of 21% for two years, you scale it to one year by taking the square root (1/2 power): sqrt (1 + 21%) - 1 = (1.1) - 1 = 10%
In general, given a cumulative return over a period of Y years,
annualized return = (1 + cumulative return) ^ (1/Y) - 1
You'll notice a striking resemblance to geometric average:
1 + cumulative return = (1 + first year return) x (1 + second year return) x ...
Unfortunately, figures under a year are often "annualized" without compounding, e.g. a six month return of 5% is "annualized" to 10%, not to (1.05 * 1.05) - 1 = 10.25%.

Somewhere I've still got M-W's 2nd unabridged, on onion skin (from my parents). The last edition before they started including slang. If I can find it (not likely), I'll see what it says.
If one insists that average means (no pun intended) arithmetic mean: What was the average annual return of a fund that produced 50% and -50% returns over the past two years? 0% or -13%? Sure it's still a mean, but it's not the "usual" mean.
As for me, I'm still bothered by flammable. I get inflamed whenever I hear it :-)

I hate when people us the term "average annual return" in place of "annualized return." The two are nowhere near synonymous.