@sfnative Elaborate. State the manifold reasons in your view. They're worthy of discussion. If it's falling interest rates, that's done. If it's attractive valuations, gone too. If it's America's economic dominance, that is up for grabs. Maybe, maybe not. There is one reason, though, I can think of that is very important and still valid--the constant need to make the rich and powerful grow even more rich and powerful, provide them whatever they need to keep the stock market rising--tax breaks, Fed bailouts, interest rate cuts, anti-competitive monopolies that would never have existed in the trust buster era, union busting, gutting environmental regulations and pretending climate change doesn't exist, minimum wage supressed, 17-year patents on me-too drugs that have one molecule of difference with the last me too drug.
Our government has tilted in that direction since the 1980s and I don't see any real difference in the current administration. In fact, I think the phrase "income inequality" is baked into the "in the long run stocks go up" thesis. So you may be right. In fact, in the other discussion on Grantham's bearish predictions being wrong one thing not discussed is a rather famous mea culpa he made a few years ago about not realizing how corporate power has grown in recent years so that monopolistic dominance that wouldn't have been tolerated in earlier eras is now permitted. That dominance is baked into the returns of bellwether tech stocks and the benchmarks themselves. In other words, there aren't too many search engines people use besides Google's. The fact that market-cap weighted index funds keep buying those bellwether tech stocks creates a kind of feedback loop, making them more powerful and driving their stocks even higher.

Also, @FD1000 might better explain SVARX (ER around 3%).

This is mainly a fund of funds. In their top 5 holdings they have IOFIX+BDKNX both expense ratio about 1.5%. Then they use leverage, and they still want to make money.
The only explanation that I care about is performance which is after expenses + risk attributes(SD, Max Draw, Sharpe, Sortino, others).
I never invested in SVARX because I do my own trading + going to cash and my performance + SD in the last 3 years is better. My portfolio max loss from any last top was lower than 1%.

Is there more to this remark or just how one reads it ?
"Since 2018, there have been outflows of roughly $300 billion from equities, excluding share repurchases by companies. But there have been inflows of $1 trillion into bonds, she said. “If there is a bubble anywhere, it is not in the equity market, it is in the fixed-income market,” she said.

Few fund managers have been more successful than Cathie Wood, the chief executive of ARK Invest and fund manager of the ARK Innovation ETF ARKK, 2.32% and ARK Genomic Revolution ETF ARKG, 1.51%, which according to FactSet have drawn in more inflows than any other actively managed stock exchange-traded fund over the last 12 months. In a monthly webinar, Wood made the argument against stocks being in a bubble.
“If there is a bubble anywhere, it is not in the equity market, it is in the fixed-income market,” she said.

stocks-arent-in-a-bubble-but-heres-what-is-according-to-fund-manager-ark-invests-cathie-wood

@wxman123 You're right, I read too quickly. My apologies (though the graph is correct and in fact matches your later sentence).
It's okay to misread to oneself, but I should have been more careful before going further and writing that numbers were different.

Seduction of Pessimism (By Morgan Housel):

Pessimism is intellectually seductive in a way optimism only wishes it could be.
Tell someone that everything will be great and they’re likely to either shrug you off or offer a skeptical eye. Tell someone they’re in danger and you have their undivided attention.
Hearing that the world is going to hell is more interesting than forecasting that things will gradually get better over time, even if the latter is accurate for most people most of the time. Pessimism can be hard to distinguish from critical thinking and is often taken more seriously than optimism, which can be hard to distinguish from salesmanship and aloofness.

the-seduction-of-pessimism/

Yes, and this is generally true for most CEF's but with caveats...most significantly some CEFs can trade at premiums or discounts for a very long time. I look at the history on MS, and you have to really get a feel for a fund before making significant purchases. One recent example is MPV, a CEF that historically has traded at a premium but since the pandemic at a discount. Its price over the past year is down 25% but its NAV is down under 1% (based on the most recent valuation, this one is not valued daily). I've been buyer here. Another caveat, some CEFs can be thinly traded so if you're patient you can place "stink bids" (limit orders well below the current price) that will randomly execute.

PIMIX still has the highest Sharpe ratio, lowest drawdown and no down years
The following performance graph is from PIMIX's 2009 statutory prospectus. You can take it on faith that this is for the institutional class shares for calendar year 2008 or you can find it yourself on p. 58 of the 21MB prospectus.

MSF, I think you may have misread my comment. I said "Go ahead and compare PIMIX to many of the funds mentioned here back to January 2016. PIMIX still has the highest Sharpe ratio, lowest drawdown and no down years."
After that I said "The same holds mostly true back to 2009 (except PIMIX was down a modest 5.47% in 2008)." I should have said back to 2008 but the point is the same.

I owned IRL back in the 1990s. I think what's here is a different iteration since then. And there's been lots of water that's passed under the bridge in the years since.
Policy:
"The Fund pays quarterly distributions at an annual rate, set once a year, that is a percentage of the Fund's net asset value ("NAV") on December 12. The Board has determined that the annual rate will be 8% per annum payable in quarterly installments. " (OOPS! No Divs. in 2019 at all?)
Currently trading at a -20% discount to NAV.
https://www.morningstar.com/cefs/xnys/irl/quote

To wit: I own 11 dedicated, actively managed stock funds. All 11 easily beat-to-blow away their bogeys. 10 of 11 do the same vs the S&P, the only one being a SCV fund that I bought last year. This scenario has been the case with my port for about 40 years now.
When I say blow away, I mean blow away....

Stillers!
I thought we were friends. I thought we were ALL friends at MFO. Lynn Bolin for example, shares and shares, as do so many others. You know of 11 funds that blow away their benchmarks, just make them look like fools, and you won’t share one? Not even one? I am sad!

Here is what David Giroux, the wunderkind manager of one of the best asset allocation funds, PRWCX, said in a recent M* interview about rising interest rates and duration:
"So, now, everybody's convinced the yields are going to go up 1% to 2%, but not above 2%. We'll see. What I would tell you about rates today is that the risk/reward on Treasuries or IG [investment grade] is so poor, it gets a situation where if rates stay static, you make very, very low returns. If rates revert back to more normalized levels, you lose a lot of money. And if rates go down, you don't have a lot of room for rates to go down. So, it's really hard to get a really great return. [...] even if rates rose 100 bps over two years, you made zero return. [...] So, as a result of that, we have a very short duration in our fixed-income portfolio, probably the shortest duration we've had since I've been running this strategy.
Our duration today is 1.5 years, just because that skew is so negative on a lot of traditional fixed income. [...] So, this is a time to be short duration in your fixed-income portfolio. [...]"

Since I basically agree with Giroux's current outlook, I will not invest in "reliable" intermediate core/core plus bond OEFs at this time. Rather, I am using multi-sector OEFs like RCTIX, TSIIX, or even PIMIX, which have excellent risk/reward profiles but durations of less than 3.0.
This may be off-topic, but I have also been investing in alternative funds like ARBIX, a "market neutral" fund according to M*, that has exhibited a bond-like low risk profile with a SD of 2.97% and a Sortino Ratio of 2.38. Its YTD total return is 1.43% and its 3-year return is a pleasing 6.23%. During the recent market crash, the fund lost 3.1% during the month of March, and over its 3.5 year history its largest monthly loss was 0.38% in November 2018. So far, so good.
These are very uncertain times and, as another poster said, "with rising interest rates in 2021, it seems that [...] Investment Grade Intermediate bond oefs are struggling". Hence, I have decided to look at other low risk opportunities outside the conventional bond OEF box.
Good luck,
Fred

Question for wxman123- So the best time to buy GTO is when the share price is less than the NAV(discount) and sell when the premium approaches its historical average ?

@MikeW Thanks for the heads up. It looks intriguing. I found a brief article on Kiplinger’s from December 2020 about DSCPX:
Davenport Small Cap Focus (DSCPX) Clobbers the Broader Market
It shows it fell right between the two Paradigm funds performance-wise for the past five years. The only concern I have is that its higher turnover (v. PFSLX) might be more of an issue for a taxable account.

This is such a great tool. I do have to substitute some of my funds with Vanguard comparable to get it to go back far enough. For example FXAIX only goes back to 2011 or 2012 while VFIAX back to 2000 I believe. I like backtesting porfolios that includes 2008. This can be challenging or impossible if you have a fair number of "newer" funds or funds less than 13 years old.

@MrRuffles Yes agreed on PFSLX... I will read up on it over next few days. Also, you should take a look at Davenport Small cap focus fund. Just had a write-up in Barrons over the weekend by our own @LewisBraham. If we're lucky, Lewis might comment on this. Definitely beats to its own drummer with strong performance. https://www.barrons.com/articles/small-cap-mutual-fund-tech-stocks-51612307908

PIMIX still has the highest Sharpe ratio, lowest drawdown and no down years
The following performance graph is from PIMIX's 2009 statutory prospectus. You can take it on faith that this is for the institutional class shares for calendar year 2008 or you can find it yourself on p. 58 of the 21MB prospectus.

@wxman123 thanks for providing your strategy on this one. I haven't done a lot with CEFs so will need to do some reading. Have you added to this recently or are you sitting tight? A week ago when financials sold off probably would have been a good entry. I've been looking at this CEF, and then IAI which is a broker/dealer ETF (GS, and MS are big positions) for purchase. thanks.

@gk3105gklm. Thanks much for sharing this. Will take a look. Paradigm Select comes up also on my screen

Coincidentally, I was just coming on to see what people’s thoughts were on PFSLX. It’s a long-term Great Owl, good Martin/Sortino ratios, MFO rating of 5, and tax efficient with two female advisors with a decent amount of skin in the game. I’m surprised it’s never been discussed here.

It's a day full of positive chatter. Here is another way to make some money during the Easy Money Bubble (a rerun of the turn of the century?). Let's hope the MMT folks are right and the Fed can successfully pivot:

“Given the amount of liquidity in the system thanks to the U.S. Fed (Federal Reserve), all asset prices are inflated. We see prices reaching $80 per barrel next year and there is an outside chance of a $100,” said Amrita Sen, co-founder of the Energy Aspects thinktank.

Oil Hits 13 month High

@observant1 thanks for sharing the spiva pdf. Page 4 is interesting - the table shows that over a 15 year period, 92.35% of all Large Cap Growth equity funds failed to beat their benchmarks. I guess that is what you and others are trying to say. I understand that data and agree it’s not easy and there’s a strong compelling case to just index.
If you choose some active LC growth funds and set and forget them for 15 years, 92.35% of the time you will be disappointed as they won’t beat their benchmarks. Since you and I own active funds, aren’t we saying that by using our tools, we think that we can maneuver in and out of these funds before we are disappointed and thereby beat the benchmarks? Not often - just when performance “consistently” underperforms.
I don’t mean to be simplistic, it’s just that I was an index only investor for a number of years and I’m constantly second guessing myself since owning active-despite positive results. This discussion and the feedback is helpful to me.