Thanks for posting, @larryB
https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/autocracy-is-bad-investment
Using Russia and China as prime examples a few years back, perhaps it strikes a cord with autocratic supporters here in the US. Anyway, returns in those countries' markets had suffered as a result of heavy handed leadership, higher risk of war, corruption, human rights abuses, etc.
Much of it seems like common sense.
"There's also the lack of transparency in autocratic or authoritarian regimes."
"Morningstar's Hale thinks that with investors being burned in Russia and China, perhaps awareness of regime risk will grow among investors. That could extend to countries such as Turkey and Hungary. "I think it will be considered more prominently than it has been in the past couple of decades," he says."

Here is the email I received this evening from GP:
Feb 13, 2025
Dear Fellow Investors,
Mark Madsen, portfolio manager (PM) for our Global Contrarian strategy and the industrials tranche of our Global Reach strategy, has decided to leave the firm to pursue a new opportunity.
Robert Gardiner, Grandeur Peak’s chairman and co-founder, is nearing the conclusion of his three-year service sabbatical. When he returns this summer, he plans to be a PM on Global Contrarian, as well as a PM on the Global and International Opportunities Funds.
Robert is a strong believer in Global Contrarian, having pioneered the idea of a value fund in a growth shop and launching small and micro-cap value funds over two decades ago while at Wasatch Global Investors. He was the driving force behind the launch of Global Contrarian in 2019 and acted as its Guardian PM for its first three years.
Until Robert’s return, Blake Walker, CEO, will serve as the interim PM on the Global Contrarian Fund. He’ll be joined by Dane Nielson, who has worked directly on the Fund for most of its five-year life.
Our Industrials sector research will continue to be covered by Matt Kaelberer and Cyrus Crockett. Matt and Cyrus will report directly to Randy Pearce, CIO, who will provide oversight and support.
As we frequently explain, one of Grandeur Peak’s most distinguishing features is that all of our portfolios rely heavily on the work done by our sector and geography teams. This team-driven structure allows us to fully leverage our “multiple minds” investment philosophy and mitigate key person risk.
If you have any questions related to this news, please reach out to a member of our Client Relations Team.

I have used two factor authentication with Vanguard for a couple of years.
It works great for me (set up two phone numbers to chose from to receive texts).
Never had a problem..

Published October, 2024. Author: John Sindreu
“The performance record isn’t great. Over the past 15 years, these vehicles have delivered an average annual return of 12.4% in U.S. blue-chip stocks, compared with 13.5% for their passive brethren, or 12.6% for active open-ended mutual funds. Fees, which average 0.31% for active ETFs and 0.07% for their passive counterparts, add to the performance drag.”
MSN Link (originally WSJ)

Seniors often have nothing but there nest egg to crack over inflation (higher prices).
IMHO this is one of the strongest reasons to defer taking SS as long as possible. Rather than taking SS at full retirement age (FRA) or earlier and investing the extra assets in, well, fixed income, one might spend down those assets when they are worth more and implicitly "invest" in a larger future SS income stream. That stream is designed to keep up with inflation, more or less, as opposed to being fixed.
Of course this assumes that one has those assets to spend down (or is working more years) to be able to defer SS. Many people cannot do that.

relatedly:
Springtime for Scammers
Financial predation now has friends in high places
Paul Krugman
Feb 11
Just over two years ago Wells Fargo agreed to pay $3.7 billion — $1.7 billion in penalties and $2 billion in damages — to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As the New York Times report put it, the payments were
to settle claims that it engaged in an array of banking violations over the last decade that harmed millions of consumers
The Times went on to explain:
The consumer protection bureau said Wells Fargo did not record customer payments on home and auto loans properly, wrongfully repossessed some borrowers’ cars and homes and charged overdraft fees even when customers had enough money to cover purchases they made with their bank cards.
This settlement followed earlier scandals at Wells Fargo, notably the “cross-selling scandal” in which, among other things, bank employees opened as many as 2 million accounts in customers’ names without their authorization. Altogether the bank has paid $6.2 billion in penalties since 2016.
Overall, according to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who conceived of CFPB, the bureau “has returned over $21 billion to families cheated by Wall Street.”
But now the agency that won those settlements has been effectively abolished. On Monday Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget and now CFPB’s acting head, sent the email above to all of the agency’s staff telling them to stay away from the office and do no work.
What’s this about? Let’s start by asking why CFPB was created.
The truth is that defending oneself against financial fraud is hard work. Do you carefully go through your bank statement every month, looking for possible unjustified fees? I know a few people who do, but most of us have too much else going on in our lives. When you take out a car loan, or invest for your retirement, do you go over the fine print with a magnifying glass, making sure you understand everything? Probably not. People have children to raise, jobs to do, lives to live. Cognitive overload is a real thing, and it’s worse the further down the income scale you go — the cognitive burden of poverty has been extensively documented.
So what we do, most of the time, is trust financial institutions to be relatively honest, if only to protect their reputations. And we expect government regulators to step in when financial players abuse that trust.
What we learned in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis was that much of this trust had been misplaced. Corporate cultures in the financial industry came to prioritize short-run profits over long-term reputation. Deregulation and lax regulation permitted widespread abuses. Most notably, the boom in subprime lending led to many families being sold financial products they didn’t understand, with lower-income borrowers receiving the worst treatment. As the late Edward Gramlich, a Federal Reserve official who tried in vain to warn his colleagues about the dangers, wrote:
Why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers? The question answers itself — the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped into taking these products.
But why create a new agency to limit these abuses? Don’t we already have bank regulators? Yes, but these regulators are primarily focused on securing the stability of the financial system. Protecting consumers from fraud is at best an afterthought.
Warren’s insight was that protecting consumers required creating a separate agency with its own institutional imperatives. And she was right: By any reasonable standard, CFPB has been an outstanding success story.
Why, then, rush to shutter the agency? By the way, this action, like much of what the Trump administration is doing, is almost surely illegal. It probably also won’t surprise you to learn that DOGE appears to have illegally been given access to much of the agency’s data.
Well, it’s illuminating to read the section on abolishing CFPB in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. According to the Mandate,
the agency has been assailed by critics as a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist nonprofits
Notice the careful wording: The document doesn’t assert that CFPB actually is a “shakedown mechanism” (which might have led to a lawsuit) but merely that “critics” have made that accusation. And if you follow the footnotes, the assault by critics appears to consist solely of three opinion pieces, one in the New York Post, one in the Wall Street Journal and one in Investors’ Business Daily.
Incidentally, that Investors’ Business Daily article accuses CFPB of funneling money to “radical Acorn-style pressure groups.” Does anyone not deeply mired in the fever swamps of right-wing conspiracy theory even remember what Acorn — a political association that was disbanded in 2010 — was?
Overall, Project 2025’s attack on the CFPB bears a family resemblance to Elon Musk’s claim that USAID is a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” It’s a bit milder, but equally absurd, and is clearly not the real reason for killing the agency.
So what is the real reason? It seems fairly obvious. CFPB was created to protect Americans from financial predation, and has done a very good job of doing so. But now we have government of, by and for financial predators. Trump has famously left behind a trail of bankruptcies and unpaid contractors, and is furiously grifting even now. Musk has faced multiple lawsuits from vendors and former employees over unpaid debts.
And let’s not forget that crypto, which has gained a lot of influence with this administration, has yet to find a real-world use case other than money laundering.
So the best way to explain the sudden closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as I see it, is as part of an effort to make predatory finance great again.

If any other US president had pulled this type of stunt, they would have hung him on the spot. The words "conflict of interest" means nothing to MAGA, but it should still mean something in a non-fascist society.
Not sure which one we live in now...

I’m trying to sidestep politics on the board, while realizing the current environment makes that difficult. I do think there are some esteemed members here who might wish to invest with the man - a “heads-up” for them. Different strokes for different folks. Not my cup of tea.
The Trump name is a recognizable brand. Has been for many years. Love it or hate it. There’s always a big jet with “Trump” painted on the side at LaGurdia whenever we taxi for takeoff. Maybe a relic of an airline he once operated? Or, possibly his personal jet - his having various connections with NYC.
Shucks - This thread seems headed for the Trumpster dumpster!

The following link may work for a limited time - or may not work at all. It’s a thoughtful interview. Some relevant excerpts in case the link fails to work.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/stock-market-investing-risk-jp-morgan-asset-management-e7e3e686?st=quL7MV&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
On Staying Invested: “Staying invested is the best strategy. If you missed the 10 best days in the past 20 years, you would have cut your return in half.”
Best Opportunities Now: “We see opportunities to broaden toward value in large-cap stocks and across all sectors. And, we see opportunities in mid-caps relative to large-caps …. Fixed income, on a relative basis, is more attractive than equities. We see opportunities in high-yield, where yields are topping 7%, and in securitized credit.”
Current Environment: ”There is room in every portfolio for some position in liquidity. In a market like this, we are going to have higher levels of volatility. Having dry powder to redeploy, as you see more volatility and trade-offs, is good.”
Next Frontier: ”Multi-asset is one of the next frontiers that hasn’t been fully offered to investors in ETF structures. It is difficult for individual investors to make decisions about relative valuations of asset classes in periods of high volatility.”
On Bitcoin & Crypto: ”Bitcoin ETFs and cryptocurrency generally have high levels of volatility. Bitcoin is four times the volatility of the S&P 500 index. There is no income and no intrinsic value, and we don’t see how they would fit into a diversified long-term strategy.”
Article Title: ”Investing Offers a Free Lunch, Says This Wall Street Veteran. Take It.”
Published in Barron’s February 10, 2025 issue

Part IV: There is a more striking contrast: in Why Globalization Works, he argued that most of the charges of the antimarket critics—whom he called, quoting the economist David Henderson, “new millennium collectivists” and who included people ranging from the British philosopher John Gray to the journalist Naomi Klein to the right-wing demagogue Pat Buchanan—were the result of too little rather than too much globalization. In The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, he finds that the many problems of today’s rentier economy are “principally the outcome of failures of liberalization—above all, a failure to think through the institutional context for markets. The prevailing assumption was that the free pursuit of self-interest is enough on its own: it is not.” Wolf does not say that any of his earlier critics have been proved right by subsequent events. He was not wrong; “the prevailing assumption” was.
In these moments, Wolf uses the distinctive elite construction that the journalist William Schneider named the “past exonerative.” It’s that unmistakable mix of passive voice and past tense that people with power use to say things like “mistakes were made” or that extrajudicial drone murders “have been authorized.” Wolf does this both when his side has done something horrible that he cannot admit and when the other side has done something undeniably good that he cannot acknowledge. Thus we find that “colonial empires disappeared,” “trade unions have greatly weakened,” and “the factories disappeared in the old industrial locations.” The revolutionary struggles for power that these phrases embody are thus rendered invisible.
Wolf’s favored method of historical investigation is to begin with a reference to the ancient world free of any contextual background, followed by an ideological generalization about the nineteenth or twentieth century. Here’s one:
The principal answer [to the crisis of democratic capitalism] is the hollowing out of the middle classes, identified by Aristotle almost twenty-five hundred years ago as the core constituency for a constitutional democracy.
Or another, but in reverse order:
The idea of the perfectly ecological human is quite as much a delusion as Trotsky’s communist superman. Just consider the mass extinctions that followed humanity’s first arrival in Eurasia and the Americas back in prehistoric times.
These adventures in historical analogy and the frequent absence of any human agent serve to make Wolf’s highly ideological opinions appear to be timeless facts. Policies that might otherwise seem to be expressions of ruthless class interest are reframed as basic truths known or prevailing assumptions held by competent, reasonable people, who served to implement and safeguard them from dreamers and despots. But if they are reasonable truths, Wolf is left unable to explain how they have led to such unreasonable ends and empowered such unreasonable people.
Our elites have not suddenly become morally abhorrent; the financial globalization that Wolf championed has allowed them to remove themselves from democratic accountability, state regulation, and communities of obligation. It has also decimated countervailing powers such as organized labor, working-class political parties, and capital controls. The market never was “permeated” by the values of duty, fairness, and decency: it was constrained by nonmarket forces. Wolf has spent his career arguing that reason and freedom demanded the removal of those constraints. And here we are.
The epigraph to chapter 8 of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism is Warren Buffett’s famous quote that “there’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” In the twenty years since the publication of Why Globalization Works, the rich have won their war on the working class, and as Polybius famously did not write about the Romans at Carthage, they have sown the fields with salt so that nothing can grow. Now their tribune wanders the desert they have made, and urges moderation.

https://nybooks.com/articles/2025/01/16/never-too-much-the-crisis-of-democratic-capitalism-wolf/
Never Too Much’
Trevor Jackson
If globalization has allowed elites to remove themselves from democratic accountability and regulation, is there any path toward a just economy?
January 16, 2025 issue
Reviewed:
The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
by Martin Wolf
Penguin Press, 474 pp., $30.00
Illustration by Matt Dorfman
Something has gone terribly wrong. In his 2004 book Why Globalization Works, the economics journalist Martin Wolf wrote that “liberal democracy is the only political and economic system capable of generating sustained prosperity and political stability.” He was articulating the elite consensus of the time, a belief that liberal democratic capitalism was not only a coherent form of social organization but in fact the best one, as demonstrated by the West’s victory in the cold war. He went on to argue that critics who “complain that markets encourage immorality and have socially immoral consequences, not least gross inequality,” were “largely mistaken,” and he concluded that a market economy was the only means for “giving individual human beings the opportunity to seek what they desire in life.”
Wolf wrote those words midway through a four-decade global expansion of markets. Throughout the 1980s in Britain, the United States, and France, governments led by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and François Mitterrand set about privatizing public assets and services, cutting welfare state provisions, and deregulating markets. At the same time, a set of ten policies known as the “Washington Consensus” (because they were shared by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the US Treasury) brought privatization, liberalization, and globalization to Latin America following a series of sovereign debt crises. In the 1990s a similar set of policies, then known as “shock therapy,” suddenly converted the formerly Communist economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to free markets. Around the Global South, and especially in the rapidly industrializing countries of East Asia after the 1997 financial crisis, “structural adjustment” policies that were conditions for IMF bailouts again brought liberalization, privatization, and fiscal discipline. The same policies were enforced on the European periphery after 2009, in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain, again, either as conditions for bailouts or through EU fiscal restrictions and restrictive European Central Bank policy. Today there are far more markets in far more aspects of human life than ever before.
But the sustained prosperity and political stability that these policies were meant to create have proved elusive. The global economy since the 1980s has been riven by repeated financial crises. Latin America endured a “lost decade” of economic growth. The 1990s in Russia were worse than the Great Depression had been in Germany and the United States. The austerity and high-interest-rate policies after the 1997 East Asia crisis restored financial stability but at the cost of domestic recessions, and contributed to political instability and the repudiation of incumbent parties in Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea, as they did again across Europe after 2009–2010. Global economic growth rates in the era of globalization have been about half what they were in the less globalized postwar decades. Around the world, violent racist demagogues keep winning elections, and although they all seem very happy with the idea of private property, they are openly hostile to the rule of law, political liberalism, individual freedom, and other ostensible preconditions and cultural accompaniments to market economies. Both democracy and globalization seem to be in retreat in practice as well as in ideological popularity. Or, as Wolf writes in his new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism:
Our economy has destabilized our politics and vice versa. We are no longer able to combine the operations of the market economy with stable liberal democracy. A big part of the reason for this is that the economy is not delivering the security and widely shared prosperity expected by large parts of our societies. One symptom of this disappointment is a widespread loss of confidence in elites.
What happened?
Martin Wolf is probably the most influential economics commentator in the English-speaking world. He has been chief editorial writer for the Financial Times since 1987 and their lead economics analyst since 1996. Before that he trained in economics at Oxford and worked at the World Bank starting in 1971, including three years as senior economist and a year spent working on the first World Development Report in 1978. This is his fifth book since moving to the Financial Times. The blurbs and acknowledgments are stuffed with central bankers, financiers, Nobel laureates, and celebrity academics. The bibliography contains ninety-six references to the author himself.
Wolf’s diagnosis is impossible to dispute: “Neither politics nor the economy will function without a substantial degree of honesty, trustworthiness, self-restraint, truthfulness, and loyalty to shared political, legal, and other institutions.” But, he observes, those values have run into crisis all over the world, and, especially since about 2008,
people feel even more than before that the country is not being governed for them, but for a narrow segment of well-connected insiders who reap most of the gains and, when things go wrong, are not just shielded from loss but impose massive costs on everybody else.
He describes in detail the mistaken policies of austerity in the US and Europe, the rise of a wasteful and extractive financial sector, the atomization and immiseration of formerly unionized workers, the pervasiveness of tax avoidance and evasion, and the general accumulation of decades of elite failure.
Most people have accurately realized “that these failings were the result not just of stupidity but of the intellectual and moral corruption of decision-makers and opinion formers at all levels—in the financial sector, regulatory bodies, academia, media, and politics.” And thus his conclusion: “Without ethical elites, democracy becomes a demagogic spectacle hiding a plutocratic reality. That also is its death.” Forty years of the corruption of our plutocratic elites has now led to what he views as an alarming populist reaction. Voters, especially young ones in the core democratic capitalist countries, have lost faith in the power of markets and liberalism. Serious international rivals have also emerged, in the forms of “demagogic authoritarian capitalism” in places like Turkey and Russia, and “bureaucratic authoritarian capitalism” in China, and Wolf views these systems, unlike earlier systemic rivals like communism, as serious threats. Liberal democratic capitalism is in danger both from within and without.
It’s a grim picture, and one that nearly any reader of any political persuasion can agree with. But for Wolf, these epochal global crises do not require radical change. The motto of the book (as he puts it) is “Never too much,” and he maintains that “reform is not revolution, but its opposite.” He is consistently contemptuous of any sort of structural change, quick to invoke despotism as the inevitable outcome of utopian thinking and to cite Edmund Burke on the inhumanity and impossibility of rebuilding society around first principles.
Instead, he prefers “piecemeal social engineering,” an idea that he adopts from the unconventional libertarian philosopher Karl Popper, and that he takes to mean “change targeted at remedying specific ills.” His targeted solutions for the specific ills that constitute the global crisis of democratic capitalism run from the anodyne to the surreal. Examples of the former include the idea that “public sector cash-flow accounts should be complemented with worked-out public sector balance sheets and accrual accounts,” or the need for corporations to have “excellent accounting standards” and diligent, independent auditors. Both are very reasonable proposals, and perhaps, at the margin, they really would erode the grip of plutocracy.
Others are standard repressive-technocrat fare. He rejects free higher education because too many people would go to college, imposing too high a fiscal burden on governments, and he doubts whether taxpayers should have to guarantee tertiary education as a universal right. He thinks there should be “controls on immigration that recognize the potential economic gains while also being politically acceptable and effective.” He thinks that defined-benefit retirement plans should be replaced by large-scale defined-contribution plans run by trustees who “would be allowed to adjust pensions in light of investment performance.” It is difficult to imagine many people democratically choosing a system in which unelected trustees could cut their pensions when the stock market does poorly, and there are good reasons to think that education is advantageous to both capitalism and democracy.

Dana Emery, Chair and CEO of Dodge & Cox, will retire on 12/31/2025.
Dodge & Cox has thoughtfully planned for this transition.
David Hoeft will become the firm's Chair while continuing to serve as CIO.
Roger Kuo will succeed Ms. Emery as CEO and Chair of the fund board while continuing to serve as President.
Hoeft has been with Dodge & Cox for 31 years while Kuo has been with the firm for 26 years.
https://www.dodgeandcox.com/individual-investor/us/en/about-us/news-and-firm-updates/2025/dodge-and-cox-leadership-and-investment-committee-updates.html

@bee
Yes, I passed the Optimal Retirement Planner around to several people when you placed that in a link a few years back. It really was valuable.
Related to that, in a Rob Berger post I was reading this morning regarding Tax-Efficient withdrawal strategies, he mentioned a Kitces piece on tax smoothing, which Kitces calls tax equilibrium. That's where you drawn down an IRA even before RMDs to prevent a large future tax bill.
If I recall, you posted that Kitces study in the same link with the ORP, and I've been following that strategy ever since.
Here's the Berger item as an FYI:
https://robberger.com/tax-efficient-retirement-withdrawal-strategies/

The Trump coup d'etat continues. Is this investing? Or off-topic material? We will ALL be affected by Regulators removed from the gov't grid. Clearly, the strategy is to simply destroy everything, and let the courts catch-up, if they are able. Things will have to be re-constructed again----- if enough votes can be found in the Congress to do it, in years to come.
"Stoopid is as stoopid does." ---Forrest Gump.
https://www.westernmassnews.com/2025/02/09/trump-official-orders-consumer-protection-agency-stop-work/

msf: "ETFs can't be closed."
What is the law or rule that says an ETF is not allowed to close inflows?

There's no rule of law that gives ETFs an advantage over OEFs when it comes to taxes. In fact, the law that says a fund can make embedded gains vanish by offloading them onto investors was written many years before ETFs ever existed.
It's not a rule of law, but a rule of reality - pragmatism - that prevents OEFs from doing this. In order to dump cap gains onto an investor redeeming shares, a fund must redeem those shares in kind. A few OEFs are even known to do this, e.g. Sequoia. But generally only for larger redemptions.
Similarly, it's not that ETFs are prohibited by law from closing, but as others have explained above, pragmatically the chaos it would cause is an effective bar.
Sequoia fund gives departing shareholders stock instead of cash (Investment News 2016)

A provision in the 1940 Investment Company Act allows funds to pay redemptions in securities, rather than cash, but it's a provision that's rarely used, in part because in-kind redemptions could damage a fund's reputation. ... Under the law, the fund doesn't have to distribute in-kind redemptions in proportion to the fund's holdings.

Sequoia prospectus, May 1, 2024

• Unless otherwise prohibited by law, the Fund may pay the redemption price to you in cash or in portfolio securities, or partly in cash and partly in portfolio securities.
• The Fund has adopted a policy under which the Fund may limit cash payments in connection with redemption requests to $250,000 during any ninety (90) day period. As a result, the Fund may pay you in securities or partly in securities if the amount of Fund shares that you redeem is more than $250,000.
• It is highly likely that the Fund will pay you in securities or partly in securities if you make a redemption (or series of redemptions) in an amount greater than $250,000

That change amounts to "old wine, new bottles". Small shops are facing of flat or declining asset are ding the same in order to survive.
We used to invested with Tweedy Browne 30 years ago and learned there are better choices out there. High fees and continuing poor performance are the main reasons.

In the past we owned all the Vanguard funds mentioned in this tread. We have since left majority of them awhile back for the same reasons that pr viusly mentioned. How times have changed for Wellington and Primecap funds that trail their peers for a long time, even with low fees. I suspect the dominance of growth stocks in particularly the Mag 7 in the last 10 years contributes to this.
In our taxable account, we still hold their index funds. As we transitioned to ETFs and there are many solid choices, our index funds will be replaced gradually.
At Fidelity's transaction-fee platform, Vanguard and Dodge & Cox funds will cost $100 to buy, whereas the typical fee is $49.95. Not sure with Schwab's purchase policy.

I am not aware of any example of an etf closing creation/redemption voluntarily.
But there have been some country ETFs that had these mechanisms disrupted due to the imposition of sudden currency controls. I think that both creation and redemptions were frozen in some cases.
One really strange example was GLD a few years ago when gold was hot and GLD ran out of shares (!; so no creation) because someone at the sponsor had forgotten to get timely SEC approval for issuing additional shares - a routine procedure but it still takes a few days.
If the creation/redemption mechanism is active and working, high demand will tend to drive premium up, but APs would control that by creation of more shares and that will increase the etf AUM until the demand is satisfied; reverse for sharp selloffs.

You wrote: "some arrogance involved. primecap and wellington had many years to ask vanguard to adopt an etf structure for tax\trading benefits."
Seems a bit presumptive to infer that they didn't ask vanguard to adopt an ETF structure merely from the fact that Vanguard didn't do so.
Regardless, if Primecap had wanted to run some funds with an ETF structure it had its own company to do this.
I wrote that AUM didn't seem to be a major concern of Primecap. Perhaps I should have written that growing AUM doesn't seem to be a major objective. Primecap has always been concerned about the size of its AUM being too large. That's why both Vanguard and Primecap Odyssey funds have had multiyear (even multidecade) closures. Even though that impeded "how they get paid". Responsible managers do things like that.
ETFs can't be closed. Why would Primecap open wide the inflow spigot with ETFs while simultaneously keeping their OEF funds closed?
primecap and wellington dont care bout their fund AUM plunges
What AUM plunge? Despite closures, despite outflows, Vanguard Primecap's AUM stands at or near its all time peak:
Current: $75.9B (per M*)
Sept 2024: $78B
Sept 2023: $65B
Sept 2022: $56B
Sept 2021: $74B
Sept 2020: $64B
Sept 2019: $63B
Sept 2018: $69B
Sept 2017: $58B
Sept 2016: $47B
Sept 2015: $42B
Prospectus Jan 31, 2025 and Prospectus Jan 31, 2020

”US consumer sentiment slumped in early February to a seven-month low on a spike in short-term inflation expectations related to concerns about tariffs. The preliminary February sentiment index slid 3.3 points to 67.8, according to the University of Michigan. The latest reading trailed all forecasts of economists surveyed by Bloomberg.
“Consumers expect prices to rise at an annual rate of 4.3% over the next year, up a full percentage point from the prior month, the data released Friday showed. And they saw costs rising at an annual rate of 3.3% over the next five to 10 years, up slightly from the previous month.”
Sourced From Yahoo Finance (as reported by Bloomberg)
Related: The rate on the U.S. 10-Year Treasury jumped .051 ppt to just below 4.5% after the report’s release today. That’s still down sharply from a recent high of around 4.8% reached 2-3 weeks earlier.

@zenbrew, the issues mentioned don't apply to margin a/c.
I have had margin a/c for years, but I don't use margin loans anymore.
Without margin a/c, you are relying on good graces of the brokerage to extend you a penalty-free overnight overdraft.
Of course, margin is N/A or very limited in IRAs, and I do face similar issues there.