I stopped using PIMIX on 01/2018 and never looked back. Its risk/reward stopped doing as well as before.
STIP + FIGXX are so behind the best bond funds in the last 1-2 years such as THOPX,CLOZ,ICMUX. I'm also looking for low SD bond funds and why I stay away from any who have had more than -1% peak-to-trough in the last several months.
(https://schrts.co/VMvtuPZn)

Barron's has also raised concerns, https://www.barrons.com/articles/social-security-checks-doge-cuts-musk-0862aa39?mod=past_editions
My summary for those who cannot access Barron's article (LINK):
"RETIREMENT. DOGE is now going after the SSA. The charges of massive fraud have been discredited by accounting for dependent and survivor benefits that are tracked under the original Social Security recipient who may have passed away. The SSA expenses are only about 1% of the benefits the SSA pays out (It would be lower on the so-called SSA assets that are really Treasury IOUs; moreover, all of the Medicare application processing is also through the SSA, while states process the Medicaid applications). The SSA Inspector General found that between 2015-2022, only 1% of the SSA payments were improper. Those who have gone through the process of getting SSA benefits realize how difficult it’s to cheat the system.
There are problems with the SSA, but those don’t include fraud. There is a mismatch of the FICA revenues and benefits paid out that the Congress must address within 10 years. Take Administration’s promise to protect Social Security with a grain of salt – just look at how its promises to protect Medicare and Medicaid went in its recent budget. If your SSA check suddenly stops, DOGE probably ate it. So, keep an eye on your SSA direct deposits, signup or login to My Social Security and print your work earnings history and information on benefits. Fraudsters are already exploiting the situation by sending fake emails or making fraudulent calls – beware that the SSA doesn’t do that unless it has sent you a formal notification via the USPS."

@Crash
Have you tried the MSN link WABAC posted above?
Works for me...
Edit/Add:
"Shown above are the rankings for 2024 and 5 years (all #1 to #5, then only selected families).
There are also tables for 10 years and for each category - 5 best and 5 worst."
The MSN article shows the top 5 families for 2024 but does't include data for 5 years, 10 years, or categories.

Yes, I was able to read at MSN. Thank you. Understanding the metric by which they did the rankings would be key, eh? Rearranging one's portfolio based on that article = shooting yourself in the foot. If you own any of those funds, it will make you feel good...

Yesterday I received a flyer from Vanguard inviting me to open their CashPlus account.
I have *never* received a marketing mailer from Vanguard before, and my only experience with them was holding one of their funds (at TD) for a brief time many years ago.
Interesting they must be reaching out to former clients/fundholders to generate more AUM?

These are annual fund family rankings that Barron's has published for years. These are based on asset-weighted fund family performances over multiple timeframes - but the story lead is always with annual rankings.
So, one wouldn't expect, say, a bond house like Pimco, to do well in them (Doesn't mean one should sell Pimco. In fact, I own several Pimco funds that are best in class). Fidelity is well rounded now (it used to be growth heavy years ago) and does well (I have Fido 403b). But what's wrong with Vanguard (home for my IRAs)? There are lot of negative stories about Franklin Templeton and its poor showing could be expected. But look at how well Nuveen/TIAA has managed its fund business - that isn't even its main business (I have TIAA 403b).
Changes in ranking are also of interest.
Ratings are controversial - whether for fund families, funds, colleges, restaurants, many consumer products (credit cards, insurance, bank accounts). But ratings sell and many websites exist just for ratings. Barron's has its own suite of ratings.
Use rating info to ask questions, and that's what posters here have done. This story will be in Part 2 of my weekend digests that are posted elsewhere.
MFOP has its own fund family rankings with different criteria for eligibility - 5+ funds of any type. These are also performance based, but weightings used are unclear. As both Barron's and MFOP use Lipper's database, it may be interesting to compare those ratings. Within MFOP, there are also many types of rankings, so there isn't any single MFOP ranking. May be @Charles can comment. https://www.member.mfopremium.com/definitions/
"The Fund Family Rating represents quintile ranking of percentage of funds in family that have beaten their peers since inception (or back to 1960), based on absolute return, oldest share class only. A rating of 5 represents "Top" family, while 1 represents "Bottom." Ratings apply to families with at least 5 funds (up from 3 as of June 2023), age 1 calendar month or more. Since January 2022, families are also rated for the past 1, 3, and 5-year performance periods (ala Fund Alarm) to better assess near-term performance of more established families."

Barrons’ ranking is not much different from the Morningstar’s.
Thanks to @Charles and company. One can get more useful data from MFO Premium on OEFs and ETFs over 1, 3, 5, and 10 years periods.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/889284/000139834425004334/fp0092518-1_497.htm
497 1 fp0092518-1_497.htm
Filed pursuant to 497(e)
File Nos. 033-49098 and 811-06719
STERLING CAPITAL FUNDS
SUPPLEMENT DATED FEBRUARY 28, 2025
TO EACH OF THE CLASS A, CLASS C, INSTITUTIONAL SHARES, AND CLASS R6 SUMMARY PROSPECTUS, THE CLASS A AND CLASS C SHARES PROSPECTUS, THE INSTITUTIONAL AND CLASS R6 SHARES PROSPECTUS, AND THE STATEMENT OF ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, each DATED FEBRUARY 1, 2025, as supplemented
This Supplement provides the following amended and supplemental information and supersedes any information to the contrary in each of the Class A, Class C, Institutional Shares, and Class R6 Summary Prospectus, the Class A and Class C Shares Prospectus, the Institutional and Class R6 Shares Prospectus (collectively, the “Prospectuses”), and the Statement of Additional Information (“SAI”) each dated February 1, 2025, with respect to Sterling Capital Mid Value Fund:
Sterling Capital Mid Value Fund
The Board of Trustees of Sterling Capital Funds has approved a proposal by Sterling Capital Management LLC (“Sterling Capital”), the investment adviser to Sterling Capital Mid Value Fund (the “Acquired Fund” or the “Fund”), to effect the merger of the Acquired Fund into the Sterling Capital Mid Cap Relative Value Fund (“Acquiring Fund”) (the “Merger”) on or about May 12, 2025 (the “Merger Date”).
The Merger is expected to be a tax-free reorganization for federal income tax purposes. On the Merger Date, any investment in a share class of the Acquired Fund will, in effect, be exchanged for an investment in a corresponding share class with an equal aggregate net asset value in the Acquiring Fund. Therefore, as a result of the Merger, shareholders of the Acquired Fund will become shareholders of the Acquiring Fund. Acquired Fund shareholders will not pay any sales charges, purchase premiums, or redemption fees as a result of the Merger. Prior to the consummation of the Merger, the Acquired Fund expects to reposition certain of its portfolio holdings and expects that it will dispose of approximately 89% of its investments and invest the proceeds of such dispositions in securities currently held by the Acquiring Fund, or in other securities, cash and/or cash equivalents. Accordingly, the Acquired Fund may no longer be implementing its investment strategy in the time period leading up to the Merger. The Acquired Fund will incur transaction costs in connection with this repositioning, and the repositioning is expected to result in the recognition of net capital gains and the distribution of net capital gains to Acquired Fund shareholders. These distributions would be taxable to shareholders. You can find information about the Acquiring Fund and its investment policies and risks, including a prospectus, summary prospectus and Statement of Additional Information, online at sterlingcapital.com/investments/mutual-funds/. You can also get this information at no cost by emailing a request to [email protected], by calling 1-800-228-1872 or by asking your financial representative.
Acquired Fund shareholders will receive shares of the Acquiring Fund’s corresponding share class as part of the Merger. The Acquired Fund and the Acquiring Fund pay the same annual management fee rate. Each class of shares of the Acquiring Fund currently bears Total Annual Fund Operating Expenses that are lower than the Total Annual Fund Operating Expenses of the corresponding class of shares of the Acquired Fund. Each Fund’s Class C Shares are subject to a Contingent Deferred Sales Charge (CDSC) of 1.00% on such shares if they are redeemed within one year of purchase. Each Fund’s Class A Shares purchased in the amount of $1 million or more for which a front-end sales load was not charged at the time of purchase also are subject to a CDSC of 1.00% if such shares are redeemed within two years after purchase. Class A Shares and Class C Shares received as a result of the Merger will continue to be subject to the CDSC schedule of the shares of the Acquired Fund you originally purchased.
Shareholder approval of the Merger is not required. At any time before the close of the Merger, you may redeem your shares as described in the Prospectuses. Such redemptions may be taxable transactions.
In addition, effective immediately Andrew T. DiZio is appointed as co-portfolio manager of the Mid Value Fund, joining William C. Smith and Lee D. Houser as co-portfolio managers of the Fund. Effective April 1, 2025, Messrs. Smith and Houser will no longer serve as co-portfolio managers of the Fund, and Mr. DiZio will be the sole portfolio manager of the Fund.
Mr. DiZio is an Executive Director of Sterling Capital and Portfolio Manager and currently serves as portfolio manager of the Mid Cap Relative Value Fund (the Acquiring Fund), and information regarding Mr. DiZio can be found in the prospectuses and statement of additional information relating to the Mid Cap Relative Value Fund.
SHAREHOLDERS SHOULD RETAIN THIS SUPPLEMENT
WITH THE PROSPECTUSES AND STATEMENT OF ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FOR FUTURE REFERENCE.
-1-
STAT-SUP-MVSUPP22025

@Crash
Have you tried the MSN link WABAC posted above?
Works for me...
Edit/Add:
"Shown above are the rankings for 2024 and 5 years (all #1 to #5, then only selected families).
There are also tables for 10 years and for each category - 5 best and 5 worst."
The MSN article shows the top 5 families for 2024 but does't include data for 5 years, 10 years, or categories.

"Barron’s has conducted its annual survey of fund families for more than 20 years,
focusing on one-year performance across a range of actively managed funds for its primary ranking."
"Because the Best Fund Families results are asset-weighted,
firms’ largest funds have the biggest impact on their rankings."
"This year’s top five families showed some significant changes in the top two spots,
with Lord Abbett jumping from No. 39 to No. 1 and Sit Investment Associates rising from No. 11."
I believe it's unwise to select the "Best Fund Families" focusing on one-year performance.
Consider also that the largest fund(s) may have produced excellent returns (luck?)
while the vast majority of funds in the firm's stable may have greatly underperformed.
This article is an interesting read but Barron's rankings provide little value.

Barron's Best Fund Families, 2024
https://www.barrons.com/articles/best-fund-families-nvidia-market-810af9e6?refsec=mutual-funds&mod=topics_mutual-funds
Top Families for 2024: #1-Lord Abbett, #2-Sit, #3-Fidelity, #4-PGIM, #5-Nuveen/TIAA, #7-Capital Group/American Funds, #8-JPM, #10-MS, #12-DFA, #14-T Rowe Price, #20-Invesco, #23-BlackRock, #30-Pimco, #31-BNY Mellon, #36-Franklin Templeton, #37-Vanguard,...to #50.
Top Families for 5 Years: #1-SIT, #2-Fidelity, #3-DFA, #4-Pimco, #5-Thrivent, #7-Nuveen/TIAA, #9-Capital Group/American Funds, #12-JPM, #21-BNY Mellon, #24-MS, #26-T Rowe Price, #29-BlackRock, #30-Vanguard, #36-Invesco,...to #50.
In 2024, most active equity funds lagged major indexes. Those without much exposure to Magnificent 7 also lagged. But there are a few strong performers beyond the Magnificent 7. Securitized debt did the best among fixed-income, but bonds did fine too. Most investors had decent returns (and if they lagged major indexes, so what?).
Eligible fund families required at least 3 active equity OEFs/ETFs (including smart-beta), 1 global equity fund, 1 allocation/hybrid fund, 2 bond funds and 1 national muni fund. Scores in each of these categories were combined using category asset weights to determine the overall rankings. Shown above are the rankings for 2024 and 5 years (all #1 to #5, then only selected families). There are also tables for 10 years and for each category - 5 best and 5 worst.

@Old-Joe
Thanks. My wife and I were talking about this this morning. She was going to wait 2 1/2 more years before filing but maybe we should file now before it becomes almost impossible.
I believed until recently that they would not attack things that were critical to their MAGA base but I am not longer so sure.
Does anybody know calculator that can tell you how much you gain or loose by filing a few years early? We know what her two payments would be, and could figure our the return on the early money sorta but it is complex

Following are excerpts from a current NPR report:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) announced Thursday that it "will soon implement agency-wide organizational restructuring that will include significant workforce reductions."
The planned cuts, which are in line with an executive order from President Trump to broadly slash the federal workforce, are raising concerns about staffing at the agency that disburses retirement savings, as well as disability and survivor benefits, to tens of millions of Americans.
Advocates say long wait times for services have plagued the agency for years, and its staffing of some 60,000 employees is already at about a 50-year low. Ahead of the looming broader cuts, at least five of eight regional commissioners have recently resigned, according to a senior SSA official who was not authorized to speak to the press.
Morale at the agency is extremely low, the source said, as staff are crying in meetings and managers are trying to reassure their employees during a time of great uncertainty.
"The public is going to suffer terribly as a result of this," the source wrote to NPR. "Local field offices will close, hold times will increase, and people will be sicker, hungry, or die when checks don't arrive or a disability hearing is delayed just one month too late."
Trump has said that Social Security "won't be touched" as he continues to make sweeping cuts to the federal government.
Until now, the SSA has been largely spared from efforts, mainly overseen by billionaire Elon Musk, to slash the size of the federal government. That includes a federal hiring freeze and more recent dismissals of large numbers of mostly newer workers. But in the last week or so, the agency has faced much of the same chaos and disruption that has been experienced by other federal departments. Changes at the agency are also leading to worries among employees and cybersecurity experts about the protection of sensitive records.
The agency's prior acting commissioner, Michelle King, was recently replaced after clashing with associates of Musk's Department of Government Efficiency who sought access to sensitive personal data held by the agency. King has been replaced by Leland Dudek, who was being investigated internally before being promoted, according to the SSA official.
The protection of sensitive data is one of the top concerns for SSA employees: "SSA is incredibly risk averse. And for good reason," the SSA official said. "The data we house is intimate and comprehensive. Every U.S. man, woman and child (living and dead), has a Social Security Number and records of their work, income, tax, disability and civil relationships. And now DOGE has access to all of it."
The SSA's servers are vast, complex and archaic, processing billions of data points a day, often using programming languages that few people are familiar with, the source continued. Those systems are already under constant attack by digital adversaries from around the world, creating a constant challenge for those tasked with protecting the systems.
There are no indications that the engineers working with DOGE have gone through required training to protect federal records, the source said, nor specific agency-level training to work in each department's unique systems. Lawmakers have already begun to raise the alarm about cybersecurity concerns of DOGE's access to federal systems, while legal cases about DOGE's access are ongoing.
Max Richtman, president & CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, told NPR that the process to get disability benefits, in particular, is "so cumbersome and difficult to navigate" and insufficiently staffed that in the last couple of years, "about 10,000 claimants who appealed for their benefits die waiting for their claim to be resolved."

Nice post & link @WABC
“Globalization” was, I think, unjustly scapegoated as a cause of lower income workers’ distress in recent years. A lot of these swing voters felt they could help their situation with an administration that imposed heavy tariffs. Those people may have been wearing blinders, as some are beginning to realize that the “cure” for free-trade / globalization is going to be worse for them than the “blight” they railed against.

Not that it matters, but this "bug" was not well reported.
The way many of the reports came out (COBOL, ancient people supposedly getting benefits) made it sound like a Y2K problem. A lot of business programs, often written in COBOL, represented years as two digits (e.g. 1945 would be represented as 45). So the system would get confused with anyone over age 100. For example, is someone born in '01' 24 years old or 124 years old?
Yogi may have had this in the back of his mind, since he suggested that SS stops paying for people over 100 years old. Actually, the SSA system stops paying benefits at age 115. So it isn't a Y2K issue, or even a COBOL issue per se.
1875 may have been programmed in as the default year of birth for unknown years, but it is not something designed into the COBOL language. Unlike, say, Jan 1, 1970 00:00:00 is designed into the C language as the "epoch tine".
The takeaway from this nonsense is that the DOGE "whiz kids" didn't care about what SSA's programs really do, and also that tech reporters seem hardly more enlightened. My mother was a COBOL programmer (one of multiple careers) and would likely have been laughing at all of this.

The consequences of both layoffs (government and freezing funding) could be much bigger than initially thought of on the economy. Consumer spending in 2008 was very bad and it took several years before people want to spend. The worst part is that it is all self-inflicted!

@FD1000, I was comparing returns the last few period, and want to ask you of the bond players here why for the last several years you did not simply combine FIGXX or similar at Fido with STIP, instead of putzing around w PONAX and all of the other bond funds you do?

Were you investing in 1986, 2000, 2008, 2020 and 2022? Market drops happen much faster than rises. And sometimes they take many years to recover. The S&P actually lost money from 2000-2010.

@Anna

Oh my, all this time I thought/assumed that, originally, it was set up this way so as to avoid taxing state governments. 76 and not to old to learn. ;)

Still a youngster - we can collect SS until 150 years old, like those collecting now. ;)

I suspect all of us on the board, followers of David and MFO, me since 2011 and before that with Fund Alarm, look to build our own FOFs.
David publishes his periodically.
In recent years, the proliferation of model portfolios, do essentially provide FOFs.
Ditto most FAs or RIAs, either those they download from their platforms, likely sponsored, or those they create on their own ... the more independent and thoughtful ones, perhaps.
Target Retirement Funds are essentially FOFs too.
At quick search on MFOP shows there are presently 1719 FOFs offered in the US: 1276 are Mixed-Asset, nearly all "actively managed," including 386 Insurance Funds.
Focusing just on actively managed OEFs and ETFs, Federated Hermes Global Allocation (FSTBX) is the oldest at 65 years. And, not surprisingly, Vanguard Target Retirement funds are the largest, followed by American Funds Target Date Retirement funds.