PIMIX had a sizable drawdown in 2020, -11.3% and finally recovered for the year. So the risk aspect is higher than expected. Performance-wise the fund is way way too big and trailed other bond funds for last several years.
PRSNX had a smaller drawdown and recovered quicker. 2020 was a unusual year where the boring total bond index fund performed quite well. Will see how bonds will do this year with higher inflation, but Fed will keep rate flat for another year.

Pretty much disagree with your take on PIMIX (though I know most share it). The bond market is enormous. While funds having billions in assets can't take advantage of niche opportunities like a very small fund can, most of the funds discussed here are in that same boat. That's OK if what you're looking for in bonds is mostly stability with some decent distributions. 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. The same holds mostly true back to 2009 (except PIMIX was down a modest 5.47% in 2008). Hartford strategic may look great now but it suffered a hair-raising 21% drawdown and was also down 17% in 2008. There are no free lunches here. If you want to take on more risk it's simple, a no-brainer really, DHHIX.

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

I own both active and passive funds.
Investors should be mentally prepared for active funds to periodically underperform their relevant benchmarks.
I agree with @LewisBraham that it is difficult to find active funds which will outperform their benchmarks over the long-term (10 yr, 15 yr, etc.). PDF
Many intelligent, highly-educated portfolio managers compete against each other.
Company* and stock market information is now readily available to all.
This makes it extremely challenging for anyone to gain an edge.
The higher costs of active funds are also an important factor since they detract from returns.
*Regulation FD was enacted in October 2000 to prevent selective disclosure of material nonpublic information. Link

M* currently places FSMAX in the Mid Blend category but in the Mid Growth style box.
Category placements are based on three years of style box data.
This article discusses recent fund style box moves at M*. Link
It appears that Fidelity, Lipper, and M* all use different criteria for determining fund categories.
Sometimes certain funds won't fit neatly within the available categories.
For example, M* classifies NWFFX as a Diversified Emerging Markets fund but developed markets comprised 48.7% of its assets as of September 2020.
These type of anomolies can make fund category comparisons challenging.

This is a good discussion. If we ignore bonds for the moment. Buffett and the Index proponents say don’t try and beat the market. Just own the market. Most say an S&P 500 or Total Market Index.
Ok, so if we ignore bonds (for diversification or income etc) and we just consider equity funds.
Is it not possible to find equity funds that consistently best the S&P 500 or TSMI on a long term basis? Not sometimes but consistently? Over 10-20 year periods. Maybe they miss 1 or 2 years but over the life... they beat the S&P. The BFGFX did for 14 years. I don’t own this fund.
That’s my goal. Identify and invest in mutual funds that outperform the S&P 500. Yes I look at APR vs peers BUT... if the smartest investors in the world like Buffet and Bogle... advise to just index... that’s my real benchmark. So, even though some funds may handily outperform their peers, if they don’t consistently beat the S&P and I’m not using it for diversification purposes (like a bond fund or allocation), then I look elsewhere. Thoughts on this strategy for equity funds?

I have PVIVX since 11/10/20 (this cycle). It was one of small cap funds I had when small cap was running 5-6 yrs ago.

Hi Guys,
The historical data suggests that outperformance on the plus side persists in the short term but ultimately it regresses to the average. Underperformance is far more persistent.
Here is a useful Link:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2329556?seq=1
Here is a good summary quote from that article:
“The only significant persistence not explained is concentrated in strong underperformance by the worst-return mutual funds. The results do not support the existence of skilled or informed mutual fund portfolio managers.”
Luck happens but doesn’t persist. Poor invest decision making does seem to persist unfortunately. It seems like the negative outcome always seems more robust. I wish good luck to all, even for the short term.

Another sign of the times:

The measure for the Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Corporate High-Yield index dipped to 3.96% on Monday evening, making it four straight sessions of declines.
Issuance conditions have been so conducive that some of the riskiest types of transactions come to market, such as bonds that are used to fund dividends to a company’s owners and so-called pay-in-kind bonds that allow a borrower to pay interest with more debt.

Junk Bonds

PRBLX's poor years against its large-blend benchmark were 2017 especially, but also 2015 and 2016. Yet another strong fund overall.

I hold a large position in this index through my 401k plan. It really is a small/mid cap blended fund. It's a great fund to get exposure to the rest of the U.S. market that isn't the S&P 500 and that's how its used in my 401k. It's done quite well over the long term. Do any of you have any recommendations on actively managed small cap blended funds that you hold or like? I've been running some screens but haven't located one that I really like yet. I'm looking for blend fund here -- not growth -- because I want some exposure to financials, industrials, consumer cyclical, etc. thanks!

Using Portfolio Visualizer from 1/1/08 to 2/05/2020-$10000 beginning balance PRBLX 34,714
VFIAX 27,452. Since I'm a tech-luddite I can't link to the screen. Maybe use 2 different funds in case 1 turns into the next Sequoia or Third Avenue Value !

What I'm saying is the funds that routinely beat their bogeys and/or the S&P are relatively easy to find because they pretty much do it ALL THE TIME.

No, they aren't easy to find and no they don't do it all the time.
https://spglobal.com/spdji/en/spiva/article/us-persistence-scorecard
In fact, if you include 2008 into any stock benchmark comparison and go until 2021, you probably won't find a single large-cap blend fund that beat the S&P 500 every calendar year. Even the best managers have fallow periods and performance tends to be lumpy. I doubt you've looked at the truly long-term history of most funds and I doubt you've made apples-to-apples comparisons for funds investing in similar style/size stocks to the benchmark. FLPSX is an exceptional fund, but it is not a fund to compare to the S&P 500, but to a mid-cap value benchmark currently and shifting benchmarks throughout its history, but almost never large-blend like the S&P 500 I bet. And it too has had lagging years versus its Morningstar benchmark, 2016 notably. In fact, if you look at the three-year period of January 1, 2014 through December 31, 2016 of FLPSX versus the IWS mid value index ETF, you would've seen IWS produce a 32% return versus FLPSX's 17%--a significant underperformance during a three-year period. And yet FLPSX remains a great fund.

It's really not that hard to beat the market. Simply BUY the funds in the smaller percentile that ALWAYS do.

OK, that's funny, like saying It's easy to get a 100 on a test. Just don't get anything wrong.

Hmmm...it's not intended to be funny, rather instructional.
What I'm saying is the funds that routinely beat their bogeys and/or the S&P are relatively easy to find because they pretty much do it ALL THE TIME.
FIND them. BUY them. Repeat.
HINT: Perform screens to identify the funds that are 5* funds for 3, 5 and 10 years, appear at/near the top of the screens in ALL of those columns and the 1-yr, YTD and Life of Fund columns. Dig a little deeper with your DD, especially regarding the PM(s), and select the very best.
Fido even assists investors by identifying "Fund Picks from Fidelity." You can probably even routinely beat their bogeys and/or the S&P if you just bought those.
But no, I'm not inclined to spoon feed them here. Several though are littered throughout my posts. If you swing and miss on one, not to worry as you likely blew away their bogeys and the S&P with the others.
Just don't EVER think you can pick THE ONE fund that's the best. Select 2-3 in each cat and if you did it properly, you very likely scored BIG on at least one or two of them. How many mistakes you think you could have made and STILL outperformed bogeys/S&P if you would have JUST bought and held FLPSX (see my prior post) from its inception?
Many investors have been coded to think that this is either impossible or will take too much of their time. And that's unfortunate.

@observant1 et al - revisted this thread by searching for FSMAX - Fidelity calls it a Mid-Cap Value fund and M* a Mid Cap Blend but MFO Premium categorizes it as a Small Cap Growth - which complicates things because if you look at FSMAX against the small cap growth peers - it trails a lot. Anyone know why? It it just a Lipper category thing?

M* portfolio lists PTIAX maturities with 30% over 20 years and 20% between 15 and 20 so likely duration is high

It's really not that hard to beat the market. Simply BUY the funds in the smaller percentile that ALWAYS do.

OK, that's funny, like saying It's easy to get a 100 on a test. Just don't get anything wrong.

@JonGaltIII
Great post.
It's a tired old debate that at best provides confirmation bias to those who want to believe it or just don't want to try to beat the market.
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....
I don't own it any more, but take a look at FLPSX, which I bought near its inception and owned (as my only fund for about five years circa early 90's and) all the way up to the last couple of years.
Value of $10K, 12/27/89 to Current:
VFINX: $208,480
S&P 500 TR: $215,986
FLPSX: $495,523
Note: There are no typos there and your eyes are NOT deceiving you.
True, LOTS of funds fail to beat their bogeys and many come nowhere close to matching the S&P. That's why statistically writers can truthfully pump out hair-on-fire (Thanks, Dick!) articles like these.
It's really not that hard to beat the market. Simply BUY the funds in the smaller percentile that ALWAYS do, or at least ALWAYS do over time.
Also, use of the word "NEVER" is usually not a good idea in these contexts. LOTS of PMs and analysts last year predicted Small Caps, Value, Foreign and EMs were places to be this year. So far, they weren't right, they were very right.

Thanks for sharing. If I understand the premise of the article - it's really about Index Funds vs. Active Management. It makes a compelling case for just investing in the S&P 500 Index and not trying to find the "hot hand" or chase a portfolio manager because they can't consistently beat the Index 95-97% of the time. It's what Warren Buffett is doing with his money when he passes away.
I understand the Index vs. Active discussion and I own some index funds. I agree that it's very difficult to have a portfolio that consistently beats the S&P over the long term.
Using MFO Premium ... let's take BFGFX as an example. The fund has been around for 14 years. It's +4.8 to the S&P over the life of the fund. It's APR has never trailed the S&P in it's history and last year it beat the S&P by 96.7 and +31.7 the year before.
Would it be safe to assume that this fund is part of the 3-5% that found a way to beat the S&P 500 Index (at least over the last 14 years)? What am I missing? Or is that the point? We won't be successful at trying to beat it over the long term. Genuine ?