@Old_Joe
I retired in 2019 after 40 years in primary care medical practice, both self employed and as an employee.
When I was self employed, my livelihood and the salaries of all of our employees depended on the knowledge and expertise of the billing staff, who worked long hours to get us every dollar they could out of the insurance companies. Despite many hours talking to them, I still do not understand medical billing. We paid these folks good salaries to sit on the phone for hours and wrangle with other staff at Blue Cross for example, over $15 or $20. But we figured if they spent 30 minutes collecting $50 we were ahead of the game.
A lot of physicians don't bother, or hire a billing service, who just tries once. In primary care, however, the margins are so thin ( our overhead never dropped below 55%) every dollar counted.
I think we would have been better off charging $50 a visit, cash. We would have needed far fewer staff, but it was unclear ( and I could never get an answer) if we didn't take insurance, if our patients would have had any of their tests or prescriptions covered. That is where the real costs in health care are, not doctor's salaries, especially primary care.
Once I joined a hospital owned practice, it was their problem, but I can tell you collections and efficiency fell off the cliff.
It is in the financial interest of the insurance companies to make this as complicated as possible, as they live off of the 25% America spends on administrative expenses. Highest in the world!

“ There is a lot of fear mongering ….. Those are worthwhile discussions to have.”
Nicely put. Thanks for the detailed analysis @LewisBraham
I try to read as much of the popular financial press as I can - by no means a comprehensive amount. But what often surfaces in these analyses is: (1) Central banks (notably the Fed) do not want to tank the markets. (2) They do, however, want to curb speculation. Unfortunately, there’s emerged over the years a certain amount of conflict there. When they do attempt to tighten (slow speculation) the equity markets become turbulent and fall or threaten to fall. “Taper tantrum” is the phrase often used. (3) This conflict leads (it seems invariably) to stage #3 in which the central banks / Fed “cave” to the markets and loosen the reins again. Repeat the process. Market players understand the game.
So now after years (decades?) of monetary stimulus we sit at near 0 short term rates with the Fed still buying bonds (albeit at a reduced rate) and talking obliquely about needing to further stimulate until “full employment” is reached. (Have you tried having your home roofed or painted lately?) Meanwhile, the markets march merrily along, The question left unanswered is - What further can the Fed and central banks do to keep the magic market money wheel churning next time the economy and / or stock market begins to shudder? What happens to those elevated asset prices when the stimulus runs out and people begin to realize the tank is empty?
One pundit I follow expects that coming inflation will force the bond market to take control - irregardless of Fed policy. In other words, faced with growing losses of purchasing power bond investors will sell en mass, forcing rates higher and eventually toppling stocks. I don’t necessarily siubscribe to this view, But think it’s one (of many) worth considering.

I don't care if an active fund tracks an index on the upside, but I do care if it tracks an index on the downside. The SPY lost like 38% in the GFC while PRBLX was down only 22. I'll take positioning & performance like that anyday.

From M* PRILX Fund Analyst Report:
"Downside protection has been a strength for this
fund’s focused, roughly 40-stock portfolio. Since
Ahlsten became a manager on the fund, the strategy
has outperformed the S&P 500 in every market
correction, including the 2007-08 financial crisis, 2018’s
end-of-year pullback, and early 2020’s pandemic-driven
sell-off. One reason for that is that almost all holdings
have narrow or wide Morningstar Economic Moat
Ratings. While the fund typically lags in the ensuing
rallies, the managers have shown skill in picking up
depressed names that have proved beneficial in the
rebound."

Your comment above has (not surprisingly) more intelligence and substance and less unhinged alarmism than the Roth guff.
At least until you get to the '50% fall' and 'important question' parts. :)
I did not say anything about Zweig.
The article is stupid because of what it says:
Try to imagine what would happen if stocks lost 70% and stayed down for years.
What useful or actionable comes from such imagining? To anyone?
And what would have been the conditions for such? Asteroid? Worse plague?
I’m pretty certain that you’d feel a lot of regret ...
Jeez louise.
I do recognize that anxiety-churning is a major motive for journalism and especially financial journalism. But Roth is juvenile even by today's standards of mega-fret-mongering.

"Good"? A preposterous fright article seems more like it. Zero substance.
(And ... teddys include 2.5y and 1.5y dips?)
What would cause a protracted bear market? Fundamentals (overvalued) aside, if the market fell as he scarily suggests is possible but without giving reasons, the buying eventually (pretty soon) would be astonishing in its quickness, as quick as or quicker than the selling.
Q: Who here would use a financial advisor who told you with a straight face:
"... just recently, the Japanese stock market recovered from its 1989 high—that’s 30 years! If you think that can’t happen here, I suggest you rethink your position—and I’d do it sooner rather than later"
"Try to imagine what would happen if stocks lost 70% and stayed down for years. It might mean things like:
You cannot afford to send your kids and grandkids to college. In fact, you need to take back those college 529 accounts you set up for them.
You must sell that vacation house even though the market is quite depressed.
You must either sell your home or take out a reverse mortgage to have cash to live on.
You must figure out how to cut your monthly expenditures in half even though you say only 20% is discretionary. Maybe one of the kids will let you live with them?
Embrace the pain you would feel. Even if you didn’t need to cut things out, I’m pretty certain that you’d feel a lot of regret if you were heavily in stocks and lost more than half of your net worth."
" ... protect your financial independence from a bear market that doesn’t resemble the last three. "
... "I’m afraid of grizzly bears—they are fierce!"
Booga and boo!
Worthless. Is there a point? A plan? Ah: bond ETFs? Got it. Yeah, that'll work.
Maybe he just meant to say Don't use levered equity ETFs. That person he met in the lede made him lose his mind. I sure hope he did not get paid any folding money for writing this.

A new way to keep up with the latest hot stocks....

...a free list of the top 10 traded securities will be updated daily with data from the previous day, New York-based Nasdaq said in a statement Thursday....“We aim to level the playing field and make data, and by extension, the financial markets, more transparent and accessible to all.”

Retail-Trading Tracker

PDF
"In doing their outreach to "domestic and international policymakers, academics, community groups, and others" (financial and business sector actors), most respondents were concerned with the interactions of several categories of risk:
° a worsening of the pandemic,
° a sudden surge in interest rates,
° a significant reduction in the pace of the ongoing economic recovery,
° risks emanating from China, other EMEs, and Europe."

There is a write up beginning on page 18 of the FRB Assessment that focuses on Retail Investors, Social Media, and Equity Trading. They appear to be in the "monitoring with concern" phase of the evaluation process regarding meme stocks, evolving trading strategies, etc.
The main body of the report ends with a list of most sited potential sources of shock to the financial system.

Financial Stability Report

The Fed released its 6-month risk assessment yesterday. Here’s a short excerpt from the story in today’s (11/9) Wall Street Journal. The note on some types of money market mutual funds / cash management vehicles / bond and bank loan mutual funds is interesting. I’m wondering if that’s primarily in the institutional variety or whether there’s concern at the retail level?
Article - “Fed Says U.S. Public Health Among Biggest Near -Term Risks to Financial System”
“Asset prices may be vulnerable to significant declines should risk appetite fall, progress on containing the virus disappoint, or the recovery stall,” the central bank said in its semiannual Financial Stability Report. Still, other parts of the financial system appear resilient. Banks remain well capitalized, the central bank said, and key measures of vulnerability from business and household debt have largely returned to pre-pandemic levels. “Little evidence exists of widespread erosion in mortgage underwriting standards or speculative practices,” the report said. “However, with valuations at high levels, house prices could be particularly sensitive to shocks.” he Fed also warned that structural vulnerabilities persist in some types of money-market mutual funds and other cash-management vehicles, as well as in bond and bank loan mutual funds. The vulnerabilities could amplify shocks to the financial system in times of stress, as they have in prior crises, the central bank said. Fed officials monitor asset prices to gauge risks that a sudden, sharp decline might pose to the broader financial system.
Personal note: I recall that decades back some government bond funds experienced serious stress after making bets on interest rates that didn’t materialize, Recently (according to another WSJ article) some hedge funds have experienced big losses after betting that long term rates would rise when in fact those longer rates (out to 30 years) have been falling (here and abroad) in recent weeks.

I'm a little surprised that one could circumvent the $10K limit per year by using a revocable trust. For tax purposes, revocable trusts are treated as an extension of the individual. That's different from irrevocable trusts which (except for grantor trusts) are independent tax entities.
This is from an old Bogleheads thread regarding transfers of savings bonds into revocable trusts:

The transfer to our Trust account transpired, but we received the following email
"Your purchase exceeds the annual savings bond purchase limitation. Please be advised the limit is $10,000 per series and TIN per calendar year. Repeated violations mayresult in an action by this office; for example, a refund of account holdings and/or account closure may occur.

From TreasuryDirect stating that $10K limit is per TIN:

Effective January 4, 2012, the annual (calendar year) purchase limit applying to electronic Series EE and Series I savings bonds is $10,000 for each series. The limit is applied per Social Security Number (SSN) or Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN). For paper Series I Savings Bonds purchased through IRS tax refunds, the purchase limit is $5,000 per SSN.

Is purchasing savings bonds in a revocable trust legal? Yes. Is it legal to use revocable trusts to circumvent the $10K/TIN/year limit? I have my doubts. It seems to work, but that doesn't mean that it is legal.
From Nolo (regarding TINs for revocable trusts):

A revocable living trust does not normally need its own TIN (Tax Identification Number) while the grantor is still alive.
During the grantor's life, the trust is revocable and taxes are paid by the grantor as an individual, using the grantor's SSN (Social Security Number). In other words, when an institution requests an SSN or EIN (Employer Identification Number) for trust property, the grantor just uses his or her own SSN. When the grantor dies, the living trust becomes irrevocable and the successor trustee will get an EIN from the IRS to pay the trust's taxes.
For shared property in shared living trusts, the grantors can use either person's SSN. When choosing which SSN to use, keep in mind that income on trust property will be reported through the SSN you select. This won't matter to couples who file taxes jointly, but it could make a difference to couples who file taxes with separate returns. For individually owned property in a shared living trust, use the owner's SSN.

I believe it was another Fidelity study that revealed that accounts of deceased investors did better than live ones regardless of gender.

4 Things Dead People Can Teach Us About Investing

The way this story goes, one day, the chief bean counters at the financial giant Fidelity did this big study on what kinds of investors performed the best. And what they found out was, the accounts with the highest returns were classified as “dead or inactive.”
In other words, dead people do better in the stock market than living people, and it’s because dead people aren’t always fiddling with their investment accounts the way living people do.

investing/dead-investors/

Last year the SEC temporarily suspended trading of Zoom Technologies (ZOOM) partly because investors were confusing it with Zoom Video (ZM). Zoom Technologies also had not publicly disclosed any financial information since 2015.

We did an IRA transfer from Fidelity to Vanguard a year ago that went via ACAT, just as Observant1 described. When I spoke with Vanguard I was told that the medallion guarantee requirement originates with the sending brokerage. If they don't require the guarantee everything can be done electronically. Vanguard specifically commented that they have a good working relationship with Fidelity.
Regarding the hoops Level5 jumped through, the rules are different for employer-sponsored plans. With those plans, the withdrawal must be initiated on the 401k/403(b)/457 side. The assets usually have to be converted to cash. The only exception I have seen, and this is with multiple financial institutions, is that if you're transferring assets between an employer plan and an IRA run by the same institution, e.g. TRP, Fidelity, etc., then the transfer can be in-kind.
Many if not most of these plans today still send the cash only via paper check. The only way I've found around this problem is to use the exception above: transfer assets electronically from plan to a temporary IRA managed by the same institution if possible. Then have your target IRA do a customary electronic pull from the temporary IRA.

Here are notes related to my 2019 account transfer to Vanguard.
Changes may have been implemented since then...
Will I pay any fees for my transfer?
Vanguard doesn't charge any transfer fees. However, you'll need to contact your current financial firm to see if it charges transfer fees for closing an account.
If you want to move money from a CD (certificate of deposit) that's held in a bank account and the CD hasn't yet reached its maturity date, check with your firm to see if you'll be charged any withdrawal fees or penalties. Bank CDs will be liquidated at the time of the transfer to a Vanguard account.
Is there any paperwork I need to fill out?
Many large financial firms are enrolled in the Automated Customer Account Transfer Service known as ACAT (or a similar service). The majority of ACAT transfers can be completed entirely online, with assets sent to Vanguard electronically. Some cases, such as partial transfers and changes of ownership (e.g., a joint account to an individual account) may require paperwork. If forms are required, we can prefill some of the information for you.
Some asset transfers require a Medallion signature guarantee from a bank or another financial institution. A bank officer, trust company, or member firm of the U.S. stock exchange can grant this service. (Notary publics can't provide it.) If the firm you're transferring from requires a signature guarantee, check with your bank or a financial institution near you to see if they'll provide this service.
How long will the transfer take?
The fastest transfers take approximately 7 business days. They occur when firms are enrolled in the Automated Customer Account Transfer Service known as ACAT (or a similar service), when assets are moved "in kind" (or "as is"), and when the owner's name is identical on the "to" and "from" accounts. When assets are moved "in kind," it means there's no selling or buying involved, and no gain or loss is recognized as a tax consequence.
A firm that doesn't provide automated transfers may have you fill out paperwork and will send us a check once it receives your documents in good order. This may take 4 to 6 weeks.
Assets held in a money market fund are cashed out before they're moved to the money market settlement fund in your Vanguard account, so they may arrive after your other assets.
Many brokerage CDs (certificates of deposit), limited partnerships, hedge funds, and low-priced securities can't be transferred in kind. If you hold any of these investment in your account, we may contact you to discuss your options.

RPHYX of course now closed.
Here's the August 24, 2021 supplement to the fund prospectus:

August 27, 2021 (the "Revised Closing Date") ...
After the Revised Closing Date, the following eligible investors may also open new accounts:
· New shareholders may open Fund accounts and purchase shares directly from the Fund (i.e. not through a financial intermediary).
· Any trustee of RiverPark Funds Trust, or employee of RiverPark Advisors, LLC or Cohanzick Management, LLC, or an investor who is an immediate family member of any of these individuals.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1494928/000139834421016711/fp0068207_497.htm

Rono’s take much appreciated. I won’t defend or criticize the practice in itself. Most of us pick our own poisons.
Gambling is highly addictive. Some will “double-down” until destitute. Those who can least afford it will suffer the most. It’s the addictive nature (and popularity) of gambling that make the potential profitability so appealing to investors. Following up on Rono’s analogy, this isn’t quite the same as going to a casino. Folks generally go home from a casino. Wiith the online gambling they’re in a virtual casino 24/7 - provided they choose to participate.
The “winners” among the online operators will prosper - at least until tighter controls are in place or they are taxed out of existence. As an investor it’s similar to decisions we make about investing in tobacco, alcohol, gun manufacturers, fossil fuels - or perhaps a fund run by somebody whose political views and affiliations we detest - but who’s a financial genius.

This 21 year old fund’s a former board favorite. John Hussman’s writings were often displayed and discussed. Real looser of a fund however. You’d have made less than a half-percent annually had you bought the fund when it opened 21 years ago.
I owned the fund for a year or so and sold it probably 15 years ago. But can’t stop from tracking it and hoping this seemingly gifted financial analyst and writer could somehow turn his floundering fund around. HSGFX got off to a good start this year and everything looked promising. But the fund’s been in a nose-dive now for several weeks. Today’s negative 0.49% return puts the fund into negative territory YTD.
I can sympathize with him if he thinks the markets are overvalued and has pulled back./ gotten defensive. I happen to agree with that prognosis. But, managing a fund like this is “big league” stuff. More is expected.
HSGFX
ER 1.23%
Early Redemption Fee 1.50%
Lipper Link
Chart

Well, there is that Starbucks inside a Wells Fargo at 19th Ave. Talk about a disaster inside a financial disaster.

Hah! Charbucks will probably burn the beans on a drink that Wells Fargo ordered for you without your knowledge.

Well, there is that Starbucks inside a Wells Fargo at 19th Ave. Talk about a disaster inside a financial disaster.