You invested in a infrastructure fund because you felt this area was going to be big in the years to come. It's a very specific sector for a fund to be in and so it will be volatile. In the long haul the country has to invest more in infrastructure. The current one is in bad shape.
There is lots of talk here in what are called strategic income funds. Since you brought up some interest in fixed income funds I would direct you to the excellent resources on this website to search for funds. The threads are full of fund symbols if what posters have bought recently.
I'm a dog lover too. I'm away from home at the present but a Doberman and a dingo are waiting for my return.

I don't often agree with Cramer, but he talked the other day about how people come up to him on the street and ask him constantly about stock xyz and rather than telling them what to do he tells them to tell him why they bought it in the first place. He said that often they don't know what the company even does - they heard about it somewhere, heard it was hot, etc. I'm not saying that's the case here at all but I agree with him to a large degree. Why did you buy infrastructure funds? What has changed about infrastructure?
I bought Brookfield Infrastructure (BIP), to use an example, because I wanted an investment that can be a pure play on vital infrastructure with ability to be nimble - the portfolio of projects it has now may look very different a few years down the line. In the meantime, I get a nice dividend. It went down this week. Nothing has changed with the reasoning - I enjoy owning vital infrastructure, hard/strategic assets. Agricultural infrastructure and rail are other examples. These are things that I can see owning for years.
I'll also continue to own INF and happily just reinvest the nice dividend every month. I guess what the question becomes is why did you buy infrastructure funds? If there wasn't a core reason and you're going to try to move on because its cooled off in the very recent short-term I just think that style of investing - trying to move in and out of what's hot RIGHT NOW quickly becomes tedious for most people, not to mention the iffy longer-term record of most who try to sit and time the market day in/day out.

Bagels, Pizza, Bakeries - hard to find good ones these days.

NYC is the magic word. I lived for 2 years in Manhattan. I'm ruined for pizza and bagels.

All these fancy schmancy annuities. I still think if you go that route nothing beats an immediate fixed annuity. I mean it sounds crazy (at least to me as a 67 year old male) for a 65 year old male to buy something that doesn't kick in until they turn 85 in 20 years. I don't know many 85 year old males. Albeit one guy in my Asheville hiking group is 84 and still goes on 10+ mile hikes several times during the week.

As I mentioned in another thread listed below:
Be aware that other Central Banks (Bank of Japan for one) are ready to open up their own liquidity spigot as the Fed tightens down their own. Prepare for burps, air bubbles and more burps as markets react to these changes.
If the US stock market's performance is correlated in anyway with five years of Fed support I can imagine the Japanese stock market and stocks closely tied to Japan being the next benificiary of BofJ's new round of money printing.
Ted's link to a most recent Wealth Track interview with Jason Trennent mentions Japan as a market to consider investing in as the Fed hands over the printing press to the B of J.
Here's the Interview link:
mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/14835/wealthtrack-q-a-with-jason-trennent#latest
Finally, an interesting chart compares HJPNX (Hennessey Japan Fund) to the performance of the S&P 500 (SPY) going back to the beginning of the Fed's support. I give Hennessey's managers a lot of credit for keeping this fund's performance up while other Japanese-centric funds have lagged miserably.

My take from the interview:
Japan.
Be aware that other Central Banks (Bank of Japan for one) are ready to open up their own liquidity spigot as the Fed tightens down their own. Prepare for burps, air bubbles and more burps as markets react to these changes.
If the US stock market's performance is correlated in anyway with five years of Fed support I can imagine the Japanese stock market and stocks closely tied to Japan being the next benificiary of BofJ's new round of money printing.
Finally, an interesting chart compares HJPNX (Hennessey Japan Fund) to the performance of the S&P 500 (SPY) going back to the beginning of the Fed's support. I give Hennessey's managers a lot of credit for keeping this fund's performance up while other Japanese-centric funds have lagged miserably.

Hi Blitzer. I guess my point is I don't care about an obligatory index comparison.
So, you go out and search for a fund that has beaten an index for the last 3 years. You find the perfect fund. Will that index beating performance continue? Maybe, but probably not. More likely that great fund you just bought will under perform, revert back to the mean. That's the way it works. The Yacktman funds are a good example of that.
What I've noticed is that most fund mangers either excel in hot bull markets and that manager gets noticed as that fund you need to be in, or lose less during pull backs and now that is the fund people want. There may be a slim few that can do both. If you find one you are very lucky. My own personal preference is that guy who focuses on principle protection. I don't care if he beats the S&P500. I don't want to be invested in the S&P500.
I'm comfortable with a fund manager who explains his or her process and sticks with it. If you understand and are comfortable with that manager, stick with him. Maybe the perfect example of that guy, for me, is Romick and FPACX. Is it the best performing balanced/allocation fund out there? No, but I like and understand the process and his conservatism.
Damn the manager who's sole purpose is to beat and index. Give me the mix of funds that will get me to my goals with the least amount of turbulence.
(sorry I got to rambling, and I know my opinion doesn't fit all.)

FYI: Copy & Paste 8/2/14: Lewis Braham: Barron's
Regards,
Ted
If ETFs are like the Protestant Reformation to the fund industry, Fidelity is the Catholic Church. The House that Peter Lynch built is famous for its active management. That's why to fund insiders it was as astonishing as Vatican II when the $2 trillion money manager launched 10 sector index ETFs of its own last October. Prior to that it had opened only one other ETF, Fidelity Nasdaq Composite Index (ticker: ONEQ), which it let languish for more than a decade.
No one can dispute the new ETFs have been a success. In less than a year, they've gathered $1.2 billion in assets. That's one of the most successful launches since Pimco opened an ETF version of Bill Gross's Pimco Total Return fund (BOND) in 2012, says Dave Nadig, chief investment officer of ETF.com. Yet the ETF evangelist argues that Fidelity did this out of desperation. "Fidelity is trying to stem the tide of outflows," Nadig says. "Over the last five years, there's been nearly $750 billion of inflows into ETFs and net outflows from mutual funds. To not do something like this is to cede the field to ETFs."
The truth is more nuanced. Fidelity's foray into the ETF world wasn't capricious; its index-based sector ETFs are an outgrowth of the actively managed sector funds it's been running for more than 30 years. Moreover, despite the generally bleak outlook for mutual funds, Fidelity's 39 "Select" sector funds experienced $7.1 billion in inflows in the last five years, according to Morningstar, and the firm has seen overall inflows in that period -- there's no tide of outflows. And given the challenges of active management, it's impressive that 22 of those 39 funds have beaten more than 70% of their peers over the past decade.
Anthony Rochte, who oversees Fidelity's sector-fund division, sees the new ETFs as more of a complement to the mutual funds, meant for a different kind of investor, rather than a substitute for the shop's existing products. "We realized that ETFs are critical to investors who might want to be more tactical," he says. "Mutual funds may not be the perfect fit for a financial advisor or individual investor who wants to trade intraday." Of the $600 billion invested in sector-based portfolios industrywide, more than 40% is invested in such aggressive ETF trading strategies, Rochte says.
CERTAINLY, THE NEW ETFS have many features that will appeal to sector rotators -- especially those who are already Fidelity customers. If you buy shares at Fidelity, there are no transaction fees, although like other brokers who offer such free trades, Fidelity will impose a $7.95 short-term penalty if you hold your shares less than 30 days. Longer-term investors will also appreciate the ETFs' 0.12% expense ratios, the lowest for their sectors. The ETFs also represent their sectors better than competitors by holding more small companies. Fidelity MSCI Health Care Index ETF (FHLC), for instance, has 311 holdings, including many small, rapidly growing biotech companies, compared with the 55, mostly blue-chip stocks in the better-known Health Care Select Sector SPDR (XLV).
That said, volumes in the 10 ETFs have only ranged between 36,000 and 93,000 shares a day over the past three months -- good enough for individual investors but not large institutions. "Those volumes are nowhere near enough for a hedge fund to make major allocations," says Nadig. "But that will come with time." He thinks the ETFs will be successful because Fidelity has a "captive audience" at its brokerage. The firm has more than 15 million retail brokerage accounts and 10,000 financial advisors trading on its platform.
FOR LARGE INVESTORS there is also a workaround to buying shares in bulk. David Haviland, who runs $1.1 billion in ETF strategies at Beaumont Capital Management, bought $162 million of Fidelity ETFs in one day earlier this year when trading volumes were much lower than now. Instead of buying the ETF shares via the exchange, his traders contacted market-maker Knight Capital Group, which creates baskets of stocks underlying the ETFs. If you're willing to buy enough shares -- 40,000 in Fidelity's case -- KCG or another market-maker, like Goldman Sachs, will essentially purchase the underlying stocks and create a new batch of ETFs. Dealing directly with a market-maker like this ensures big purchases won't affect the share price on the open market.
Because Haviland employs an aggressive, momentum-based strategy, Fidelity's actively managed mutual funds never held any interest for him. He needs to exit on a dime when an ETF loses momentum to protect clients' capital. So in his case there really is no question of Fidelity ETFs appealing to a different kind of customer, one that is cannibalizing Fidelity's core business.
Other experts believe that whether you substitute Select funds for ETFs depends on which sector you're invested in. Jim Lowell, editor of the Fidelity Sector Investor newsletter, thinks investors might be better off in Fidelity's energy ETF than its active funds because the sector is so volatile and driven by rapidly shifting commodity prices. "You want to be nimble and quick with an energy ETF because you'll more likely be trading out of your position quickly," he says. "The benefits of an active manager aren't there in that space from my perspective."
Still, Lowell favors Fidelity's Select funds overall. "It will be very difficult for any sector ETF that's using a passive index to outperform Fidelity's active managed sector funds over any meaningful investment timeline," he says. While the academic research suggests indexing wins in general, choosing between active funds and passive ETFs at Fidelity remains a matter of belief.

Grandeur Peak:
"Regarding our Global and International Opportunities funds, coming off of a couple of great years of performance, we’d normally be feeling OK about having a few average quarters. But as we dig into the reasons for the average type of results we’re disappointed in our performance and ourselves and we want to be open about this."
Two pages of single spaced, equity by equity exposition follows.

@ MikeM I agree that YAFFX would be a good candidate to provide consistent returns with downside protection. However,
YAFFX has underperformed (using my arbitrary S&P 500 benchmark) over the past few years. Assuming newer shareholders haven't bailed yet, will YAFFX make up "lost ground" during the next downturn? YAFFX did well during the last downturn...will that happen again next time? (ie will the Yacktmans call it correctly?)
Personally, I bailed on YAFFX and purchased VTI...only time will tell if I made the correct move.
@ MJG I enjoy your commentary, Would you consider posting your portfolio in detail? Obviously, not dollar amounts, but I am interested to see how your commentary translates into actual holdings. I understand that each person's needs are different, past performance does not guarantee future results and that nobody should "copy" your actions.

FYI: The Five-Year Rally in Stocks Has Bolstered Workers' Nest Eggs. But Consider These Six Issues First.
Regards,
Ted
http://online.wsj.com/articles/can-you-afford-to-retire-early-1406912729#printMode
Are You Saving Enough For Retirement ? Copy & Paste 7/31/14: Walter Updegrave: WSJ
Fueled by surging stock prices, average 401(k) balances have come back from the beating they took in the financial crisis and now stand at or near record highs.
But hold the confetti.
The tailwind of stocks' nearly 18% of annualized gains of the past five years—almost double the stock market's long-term average—clearly isn't sustainable for the long term. Indeed, given today's low interest rates and high stock prices relative to earnings, average annual stock returns over the next decade or so could come in at well below half the pace of recent years.
Which means if you want to accumulate enough savings during your career to sustain you in retirement, you will have to do it the old-fashioned way: by saving diligently.
On that front, the news isn't quite so upbeat. A survey of 144 large 401(k) plans covering some 3.5 million employees released in July by benefits consulting firm Aon Hewitt found that the annual contribution for employees and employer matching funds combined averaged just under 11% of salary last year, down a tad from the year before.
And although the survey also showed that the average employee-plus-employer contribution rises with age—starting at 7.6% of salary for participants in their 20s and climbing to 10.1%, 11%, 12.7% and 13.4% for participants in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, respectively—not a single age group averaged the 15% a year that retirement experts generally recommend if you want to maintain your preretirement lifestyle after calling it a career.
Fortunately, it doesn't take a heroic savings effort to appreciably boost the eventual size of your nest egg and enhance your retirement prospects.
Let's assume you are 25 years old, earn $50,000 a year and receive 2% annual raises, and that you make an "average" effort to fund a retirement account such as your 401(k). That is, throughout your career the total of your contributions plus employer matching funds mirrors the age-group averages in the Aon Hewitt survey.
If you invest your savings in a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds that earns a reasonable rate of return—say, 6% a year after fees—your 401(k) balance would total roughly $1.1 million at age 65.
That is a tidy sum, to be sure. But it probably isn't enough to replace enough of your income over at least 30 years of retirement.
Generally, advisers say personal savings should generate 50% to 60% of your preretirement income, so that withdrawals from savings plus another 20% to 25% from Social Security and other sources (part-time work, a pension) replace at least 75% to 80% your preretirement income—a level experts generally consider the benchmark for maintaining your preretirement standard of living after you retire.
Increasing the amount you save by even a relatively small amount can significantly improve your chances of reaching that level.
For example, if instead of saving at that average level, reported by Aon Hewitt, you set aside just an extra 1% of salary each year, your 401(k) account's value would climb to just under $1.2 million at age 65. Assuming a 4% initial withdrawal of $48,000, your savings would now be able to replace nearly 45% of pre-retirement income from savings alone. Boost your savings rate another 1% each year, and your account's projected value rises to almost $1.3 million, which allows for a withdrawal of $52,000, bringing you just within reach of replacing 50% of your preretirement income from savings.
And if you manage to stash away the 15% a year that advisers recommend, you would have a nest egg at age 65 valued at almost $1.6 million, providing for an initial withdrawal of $64,000, or about 60% of preretirement income. Throw in an additional 20% to 25% from Social Security and other sources, and your retirement income now meets or exceeds that 75% to 80% benchmark.
Aside from the obvious benefit of a larger nest egg generating more income in retirement, saving at a higher rate during your career also makes your retirement strategy less vulnerable to setbacks from financial shocks.
For example, the hypothetical 25-year-old in the scenarios above saved like a machine each and every year over four decades. In the real world, job losses, health problems, unexpected expenses and all manner of other unanticipated events can prevent even the most diligent saver from sticking to a savings regimen uninterrupted over an entire career. By making the effort to save at a higher rate when things are going well, however, you effectively will build a cushion that will help you better absorb any financial setbacks and get your retirement planning back on track.
Such a cushion can come in especially handy late in your career. For example, if you are on the verge of retiring and the stock market takes a dive, having $1.6 million in savings instead of $1.1 million could mean the difference between scaling back your lifestyle a bit but still going ahead with your retirement plans versus having to postpone your employment exit and spend extra years on the job.
The single best way to maximize your savings effort is to sign up for your company's 401(k) or similar plan. Aside from the benefit that your contributions and investment earnings in a 401(k) account go untaxed until withdrawal, the fact that money is automatically deducted from your paycheck makes it more convenient to save, and more likely you actually will do so.
That said, some features in 401(k) plans that were designed to spur savings can sometimes have the opposite effect. For example, the lure of "free money" in the form of company matching contributions clearly creates an incentive to save. But the Aon Hewitt survey shows that nearly a third of 401(k) participants contribute just enough to get the full company match.
While doing that may seem smart, in that you get the largest company match while you shell out as little as possible, it also can leave you short of the savings rate required to assure a secure retirement.
Keep in mind, though, that while 15% is generally a reasonable goal, the actual amount you should be setting aside can vary considerably depending on your salary, how much you already have stashed away and the number of years until you retire.
There are many online retirement planning tools that can help you home in on the right annual savings target for you. Whether you use a basic calculator or a more comprehensive one that allows you to vary such assumptions as how you invest your savings and your planned retirement date, you will want to reassess every year or so to see whether your current savings rate is adequate.
As exciting as it may be to watch the value of your nest egg swell as stock prices soar, over the long run it is how much you save that will determine how well you can live in retirement.

". In the US world, only 14% of the actively managed funds outperformed an Index in both excess returns and in reduced risk. Another 21% also generated excess returns above Index returns, but at a higher risk level. So 65% of the active portfolios delivered less than their Indices."
To me this doesn't sound too bad. I've got a strong stomach and was able to add to my high beta funds during 2008 and 2011. I'm willing to take higher risk if I get long-term outperformance, and this quote seems to indicate that about 35% of funds do that. Then again I expect not to retire for at least another 20 years. If I were retired already or planning to retire in the next fews, it would be a different story.

Hulbert will quote anyone to spin out yet another "article". The three indicators are subjective anyway. I for one do not consider the overall market to be overvalued. Plenty of blue chip dividend stocks have p/es in the low teens. My mutual fund has a p/e of 15. And according to M* the Russell 2000 p/e is under 20. So where are these lofty valuations?
Also it should be mentioned that the US energy picture is the brightest that it has been for many years. Which is a boost for the economy and markets.

I thought I’d comment on a few things. They follow.
Item 1) In reviewing IRNIX which was presented by the Vintage Freak although it is a fund of funds it does carry a four star M* rating and has a duration on 3.35 years. So with this it appears good performance can be had form a fund of funds just as good performance can be had form my sleeve system that holds a number of funds … usually three to six. I expect this fund to continue to perform well and if one or even a few of the funds that it holds falters then there are the others that can still propel the fund. Its turnover ratio is 43% so it appears some active trading and positioning occurs. In 2008 it lost about one half of what its category lost.
Item 2) Some say I have way too many funds … perhaps so, perhaps not! In comparing my portfolio’s performance to Morningstars Moderate Target Risk as a benchmark … well I have handily bettered the benchmark. The results follow listed by period with the portfolio being listed first within the results and then the benchmark for a market close of August 1, 2014 in its current configuration.
1 Week) Portfolio -1.8%, benchmark -1.8% … 1 Month) -2.1%, -2.0% … 3 Month) 1.5%, 1.4% … YTD) 5.0%, 3.7% … 1 Year) 11.9%, 9.6% … 3 Year) 10.7%, 9.4% … 5 Year) 12.5%, 10.9% … 10 Year) 8.4%, 6.6%.
Closing comment: With this, there seems to be some added value by using the sleeve system along with selecting only quality funds and when one of them does falter replacing it with another. Seems this is what IRNIX might be doing and it seems to be doing it just fine as it only lost about one half of what the average strategic income fund lost in 2008.
I think one needs to ask themselves this question ... Does your portfolio meet your needs? And, if it does, from my thoughts, then the rest really does not matter if you are happy.
Have a good day … and, most of all I wish all … “Good Investing.”
Old_Skeet

I thought I’d comment on a few things. They follow.
Item 1) In reviewing IRNIX which was presented by the Vintage Freak although it is a fund of funds it does carry a four star M* rating and has a duration on 3.35 years. So with this it appears good performance can be had form a fund of funds just as good performance can be had form my sleeve system that holds a number of funds … usually three to six. I expect this fund to continue to perform well and if one or even a few of the funds that it holds falters then there are the others that can still propel the fund. Its turnover ratio is 43% so it appears some active trading and positioning occurs. In 2008 it lost about one half of what other funds in its category lost.
Item 2) Some say I have way too many funds … perhaps so, perhaps not! In comparing my portfolio’s performance to Morningstars Moderate Target Risk as a benchmark … well I have handily bettered the benchmark. The results follow listed by period with the portfolio being listed first within the results and then the benchmark for a market close of August 1, 2014 in its current configuration.
1 Week) Portfolio -1.8%, benchmark -1.8% … 1 Month) -2.1%, -2.0% … 3 Month) 1.5%, 1.4% … YTD) 5.0%, 3.7% … 1 Year) 11.9%, 9.6% … 3 Year) 10.7%, 9.4% … 5 Year) 12.5%, 10.9% … 10 Year) 8.4%, 6.6%.
Closing comment: With this, there seems to be some added value by using the sleeve system along with selecting only quality funds and when one of them does falter replacing it with another. Seems this is what IRNIX might be doing and it seems to be doing it just fine. After all, it caught the Vintage Freaks attention and carries a four star rating by M* ... and, it only lost about half of what other strategic income funds lost in 2008.
Have a good day … and, most of all I wish all … “Good Investing.”
Old_Skeet

I agree the commentary is worth more than one pays for it, but the Gross and Double-Line sections could have been covered by a link to one of the many articles in the past month covering the issues, although I did check out the Disneyland employee link. I suppose I should have skimmed them, as suggested above, but I assumed if it was worth writing, it presumably was worth reading.
HOWEVER, a listing of the 17 5* funds for the past 1-10 years would have been appreciated, perhaps even worth a subscription. Did Ted link this when I wasn't looking? (Or did I miss the link in the commentary?)
I have found that the talks I spend more time preparing are shorter than the rush jobs, and the audience is more likely to stay awake. Suggesting tighter construction is not a personal attack.

@VintageFreak,
I have been doing the same thing. American Century made it easy for me by opening a new fund ASDVX. Short duration of less than 3 years. Investment grade and high yield instruments from anywhere including emerging markets. Preferred stocks. I had been looking at Schwab but since this was in a rollover account the paperwork was a consideration.
I was 80/20 stocks to fixed, now after a couple of moves including the above I am about 65/35.

For some reason, and I can't find the information anymore, but I thought I had read they believed their firm-wide capacity was $3 billion. With $2.3B already in their current funds, and I believe 3 more funds to come, they are either going to have to be tiny funds or they must have decided they could manage a little more money. Luckily I have investments in 2 of the 4 funds so far and I will invest in any others that they launch because I think these guys are fantastic, but at such small sizes its conceivable that most of these funds may not be available even to existing investors for many years to come. Although I'm a big fan of the way they're managing their business, it doesn't make life easy when it comes to asset allocation.

Hi Guys,
A few days ago I was shocked by the number of mutual funds owned by a wise and loyal MFO member. I didn’t examine the incremental diversification benefits accrued by the overall funds or their individual investment philosophies; I simply counted.
I’m sure the owner had excellent reasons and logic when these funds were originally added to his portfolio. I’m equally sure that the styles and the strategies deployed by such a competitive group tend to cancel each other out and neutralize a potential high excess returns.
Diversification is a cardinal investment rule; it is the stuff of successful investing. Well maybe, but more likely it must be exercised prudently; it has its own set of limits. Safety in numbers is a residual human characteristic from our hunter-gatherer days.
J. Paul Getty opined that “Money is like manure. You have to spread it around to make things grow”. Warren Buffett proffered the other viewpoint with “Buy two of everything in sight and you end up with a zoo instead of a portfolio”. Economist and financial advisor Mark Skousen summarized both sides with this wealth-linked compromise: “To make it concentrate, to keep it diversify”.
Assembling a huge number of actively managed mutual funds in multiple categories is almost a 100% guarantee of underperformance relative to any reasonable benchmark. That failure guarantee is mostly tied to active fund management fees. It is true that some superior fund managers do overcome the fees hurdles, but these are few in number and even this minority subset is further eroded by persistency problems over time.
A recent study that illuminates this issue was released by Rick Ferri a year or so ago. It is a Monte Carlo-based parametric study that has been referenced on MFO earlier. Here is a Link to it:
http://www.rickferri.com/WhitePaper.pdf
You can use these study results to estimate your likelihood of selecting a group of active fund managers that potentially might outdistance a passive portfolio, and importantly, by how much.
The overarching findings from this extensive analysis is that the odds are not especially satisfying, and that the likely excess returns are negative. Notwithstanding these unhealthy findings, they do not completely close the door for active portfolio elements. However, these results do put a hard edge on the low probabilities and the negative expectations.
To illustrate, assume that an investor has somehow increased his likelihood of choosing a positive Alpha fund manager to 70 percent by applying an undefined meaningful fund manager selection process. That’s actually quite high given the poor historical record of individual investors. Using Ferri’s numbers for a 3-component portfolio (40% US equity, 20% International equity, 40% Investment grade bonds), the likely outperformance median return is 0.52% while the underperformance median is -1.25%. That asymmetry reflects cost and fee drags.
The prospective excess returns coupled to a 70% chance of selecting a superior active manager is (0.7 X 0.52) + (0.3 X -1.25) = -0.011. So, an investor needs to have a higher than 70% active fund manager selection probability before he can anticipate a net positive excess return for his efforts. That’s a tough task.
The situation deteriorates rapidly as more active managers are added to the mix within each investment category. In the sample scenario, the likelihood of hiring two successful active fund managers is simply 0.7 X 0.7 = 0.49 without impacting the median expected excess return numbers.
The probabilities of generating excess rewards from active management falls from neutral to bad to worse very rapidly. The bottom-line is that hiring a ton of active fund managers adds to investment risk without substantially enhancing the rewards side of the equation. Charles Ellis might well characterize this as a Losers game.
Twenty years ago the investment game was a lot easier to play. Market efficiency has improved over time and has reduced the opportunities for excess profits just like improvements in baseball pitching staff depth has improved to lower overall batting averages.
At that time, it was investor against investor on trades; today the trades are much more commonly executed on an institution against institution basis. And these institutions are populated by well educated, smart professionals who are supported by extensive research staff and super computers for numbers crunching. The chances for an individual investor to outplay these titans has dimmed over the decades.
I don’t mean to say that it can’t happen because it does happen. But it’s not an easy chore. Institutional agencies have their own set of hobgoblins to battle. Since retirement, I have been benchmarking my private portfolio against an Index benchmark that I vary as my asset allocation changes, and against a nice pension that is tied to a portfolio maintained by a highly regarded financial service organization.
Anecdotally, over most of my retirement, my personal portfolio was dominated by active fund holdings. I slightly underperformed the Index benchmark, but I frequently outperformed my pension portfolio. I don’t have access to the pension portfolio’s specific allocations, but I suppose they are more widely and more conservatively distributed than my personal portfolio. They have access to alternate investment products that I can not touch.
One takeaway from all this is that some active managers can deliver the goods, but they are a rare breed. So choose carefully, monitor diligently, and very definitely limit the number of active managers that you hire for your portfolio(s). That’s just my amateurs opinion.
Simplifying is wonderful. It will certainly add to your free time; it will likely enhance your portfolio returns, especially if you use active fund management.
Best Regards.

Good piece, backing up the clear tendency of market-cap indexes to be great on the way up and very un-great on the way down. It's amazing how something as simple as the clearly documented record of those indexes in up- and down-markets escapes the cognition of the 'indexes are all you need, now and forever' commenters.
I'd been thinking the reason there's been so much of that sentiment flying around the finance sphere is that many of those making said comments must be thinking only in terms of the standard return periods, and any of those from 1-5 years show market-cap indexes as brilliant choices because the last 5y neatly coincides with the latest bull market - clearly the sweet spot of a market cap index.
One of the best analyses of an optimal stake in stock indexes in a long-term portfolio came from, believe it or not, Gus Sauter, former bigwig at Vanguard (sorry, no link, haven't been able to find it recently), which took into account many years of data and concluded that something like 30%, but no more, of a stock portfolio in index funds made an optimal contribution to long-term returns.