another, subtler way to think about these things
https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1048598/how-rich-was-babe-ruth

Since I'm rather tired of the constant discussions about cryptocurrency as some great advancement in humanity and a supposedly good investment, I thought it was important to provide an illustration of why blockchain technology is far more interesting than cryptocurrency and could impact many other fields: https://biotechconnection-sg.org/the-applications-of-blockchain-technology-in-drug-discovery-and-development/
To me the investment opportunity will be in companies using blockchain to do other things such as drug discovery. The idea of "open science" and blockchain being used as the world's greatest supercomputer to solve real problems, not to trade in an imaginary currency, is significant. It also can have numerous security applications with traditional currency. So why focus so much on bitcoin, ethereum and the rest?
Here's another interesting one about other blockchain applications and its risks in science:
https://nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08589-4

I modified catch's charts to include "the market", VTSMX. In the context of investing, that pretty much is the market, and its performance over the past decade has not been much different from that of the S&P 500.
Granted that investing, finance, business, and the economy are all different, so depending on the context, 'S&P index =! "the market"'.
FOCPX, SPY,VTSMX January 2000 - present
From the FOCPX semi-annual report dated January 31, 2000:

TOP TEN STOCKS AS OF JANUARY
31, 2000
% OF FUND'S  NET ASSETS  % OF FUND'S NET ASSETS  6
MONTHS AGO
Microsoft Corp.                 9.7                      8.8
Cisco Systems, Inc.             5.3                      2.7
Amgen, Inc.                     3.6                      3.7
Intel Corp.                     3.0                      1.2
Dell Computer Corp.             2.5                      0.5
BEA Systems, Inc.               2.3                      0.0
Immunex Corp.                   2.3                      1.4
EMC Corp.                       1.9                      0.0
Telefonaktiebolaget LM          1.9                      0.2
Ericsson sponsored ADR
Comverse Technology, Inc.       1.7                      1.8
34.2                     20.3

I recall the "dot.com" unwind clearly. The "psuedo" tech. wanna-be's of that period were seriously overpriced and hoping to provide a profit. Bon Jovi, Wing and a Prayer, flyers. Many were not the mature tech. organizations of today.
Anyway, I placed Fido's Over the Counter fund for a view compared to the whatever the composition of SPY may have been at the time. I dug through old paper documents, but could not find any info for the top 10 holdings of FOCPX at the beginning of 2000.
The chart shows the story in the high pricing and the steep drop. You will also note moving across the chart, the time frames for recovery periods. And 2008 was just around the corner.
FOCPX versus SPY January 2000 - 2007

all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base.
If we use GDP as a proxy for the tax base (I'm open to better suggestions), then the US is not growing its debt more slowly than its tax base. Quite the opposite. Debt has outstripped tax base (GDP), growing from 40% of GDP in 1966, and from a post-war low of 30.6% in Q3 1981 to 129% in Q4 2020 and 127.5% in Q1 2021 (most recent data). That's significantly higher than even the WW2 peak of 112.7%.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/the-long-story-of-us-debt-from-1790-to-2011-in-1-little-chart/265185/
If you want to ensure that debt grows more slowly than the tax base, you have to either reduce the rate of growth of debt (slow or reverse increases in spending), make the GDP grow faster (either expand the economy faster or inflate your way out since we're looking at nominal dollars), or expand the tax base, i.e. broaden what is subject to taxes. Hence the wealth tax that Lewis mentioned.
Here's the most current Fed chart for household net worth. The dip at the end of Lewis' chart is Q1 2020, when the figure was $111K. Since then it has soared, as seen in the tail of the current chart. In Q1 2021, household net worth is $137K, as he noted.
A rise of over 23% in a year, "despite the devastating economic effects of the coronavirus ... driven in large part by surging stock and home prices after interest rates were lowered to combat the financial fallout of the pandemic."
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/542791-us-household-wealth-hits-record-130-trillion-despite-pandemic

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TNWBSHNO

+0.02
ENIC is killing me. Best was PRWCX. +0.18% which is 32.62% of portf. WORST = PRIDX, down - 0.42%.

DJIA +.24 S&P500 +.24 NASNAQ +.03 RUSSELL 2K +.33 MY PORTFOLIO (-.18) 7/26/2021
What did you're portfolio say ?
Just wondering, Derf

@rforno,
From your chart the "Lower 490" look as though they have not even made it back to Jan 2020 levels. Also, I believe historically the "Top Ten" stocks have regularly out weighed and - in good times - out performed the "Lower 490". Isn't that how market cap weight indexes work?
Market Cap-Weight verses Factor-Weight Indexes:

Longtime market watcher and Wharton School professor Jeremy Siegel has argued for decades that investors should consider alternatives to popular market cap-weighted funds, particularly ETFs that weigh their holdings based on fundamental factors such as earnings growth, dividends or momentum.
Now, that tide is slowly turning. Though market cap-weighted funds are still the most widely held in the $5 trillion ETF market, issuers are growing increasingly comfortable offering factor-weighted and other niche products.

market-cap-vs-fundamentals-etf-weighting-and-the-average-investor

It is amazing that these FAANG stocks have been dominating the broader US stock index for the last 10 years. Few mutual funds managed to be competitive without holding one or more of the FAANG stocks. They are not consider bad but only from the sake of diversification perspective. Value and smaller cap stock funds have fewer exposure to FAANG stocks. BTW, is BRKB is Value stock ever though it holds 40% Apple stock?
M*'s X-ray tool reveals stock overlaps between funds and their percentages. I have not able to do that on M* site directly as in that past.

by Andrew Bary, Barron's article:
The biggest keep getting bigger and more dominant.
The five technology giants that dominate the S&P 500 index -- Apple ( AAPL ) , Microsoft ( MSFT ) , Alphabet (GOOG), Amazon.com ( AMZN) , and Facebook ( FB ) -- accounted for a combined 22.9% of the index Friday, an apparent record. The data are from S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Three of the tech leaders -- Microsoft ( MSFT ), Alphabet, and Facebook ( FB ) -- hit new highs Friday as the S&P 500 reached a record.
Rarely has the S&P 500 been so concentrated at the top. The Big Five were a combined 21.7% at the end of 2020.
At year-end 2019, the five largest stocks in the index totaled 17.2% of the index. At that time, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) was No. 5., not Facebook ( FB ), which now ranks fifth. At year-end 2018, the top five were 15.4% of the S&P 500 index (Berkshire again was fifth).
It is notable that at the end of 1999, right before the peak in tech stocks, the top five companies were 16.8% of the S&P 500. Those five stocks in order of size were Microsoft ( MSFT ), General Electric (GE), Cisco Systems (CSCO), Walmart (WMT), and Exxon Mobil (XOM). GE, Cisco, and Exxon are now nowhere near the top.
So far this year, Microsoft ( MSFT ) (up 30.2% through Friday), Alphabet (up 57.3% based on the nonvoting shares, GOOG) and Facebook ( FB ) (up 35.4%) are powering the leaders. Apple ( AAPL ) and Amazon ( AMZN ) were up about 12% year-to-date through Friday, behind the S&P 500's 17.5% gain.

"One man's spending is another man's income"...mentioned here, regarding the long & short term debt cycles.
So might our governments debt (spending) be a component of our citizenry income and a mechanism (debt) to grow the economy?

EDUCATION BURDEN
Goldman Sachs said in a research note its one year price targets on the listed tutoring stocks would be cut by 78% on average. The impact, the note said, would be mostly due to the ban on weekend and winter and summer holiday tutoring, which brought in up to 80% of the firms' revenue.
China's for-profit education sector has been under scrutiny as part of Beijing's push to ease pressure on school children and reduce a cost burden on parents that has contributed to a drop in birth rates.
More than 75% of students aged from around 6 to 18 in China attended after-school tutoring classes in 2016, according to the most recent figures from the Chinese Society of Education, and anecdotal evidence suggests that percentage has risen over recent years.
"In the long run, it is definitely good news for the children as they don’t have to immerse themselves in endless homework," said Zhu Li, a Chinese parent in Haidian District in Beijing.
"But on the other hand, it might not be so good if they fail to enter a good university."

https://reuters.com/world/china/chinas-tal-education-expects-hit-new-private-tutoring-rules-2021-07-25/

@sma3. You should soon be able to use MultiSearch to screen on your namesake ... top quintile ratings for sma3, sma10, trend3, and trend10 ... along with about 200 other parameters, simultaneously ... super-fast even for tables with hundreds of results, once initial screen is loaded ... now that the default view is set to summary metrics only. How about we set-up an impromptu Zoom session to demonstrate? Give me some possible times, say this Wednesday or Thursday? You can post or email me. Will open it up so that others can listen in or participate without registering. Will post shortly when latest version goes live. It's really powerful! Promise. c

Moreover, ... governments don’t [have to pay back their debt] — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew and with it the income subject to taxation.
Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — ... U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.
[Krugman 2012]

More of the same from the China tech crackdown: https://cnbc.com/2021/07/26/asia-markets-wall-street-friday-closing-highs-covid-currencies-oil.html

Risk seems harder to narrow down but I have always found Maximum DD and Ulcer Index understandable and helpful.

How well a fund do and recover relative to its benchmark during downturn is important. Those funds recover in shorter duration tend to do better in the longer term. MFO Premium allows screening each asset classes over several drawdowns dated way back. Like funds with higher % active shares and having top 10 holdings differ than those found in S&P500.

+1.

I'm puzzled by the question. ...

I asked the question because so far we have had a dropping yield environment from 1982 through today. Also in the 1970s, we had to deal with the spike in interest rates. Most of the great funds covered on this site are relatively new. This chart shows the historic environment.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=FFm0

The latest U.S. household net worth is $137 trillion--https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-10/u-s-household-net-worth-reaches-fresh-record-on-homes-stocks--so this graph is a bit old, but the point is there are always these cries about how the government is spending too much as though there isn't really a source for paying back some of that debt, i.e, a wealth tax. The majority of that household net worth is owned by the wealthy