The OP spoke of an 18yo and "ways to mitigate that [7y hole based on GMO predictions] risk."

>> If there are ways to mitigate that risk and increase the likelihood of a better outcome then it'd be interesting to think about the options.
So what would concrete advice be? DCA? Delay starting now because valuations? Some sort of reverse glide path?
>> In the real world, workers invest money periodically over their careers. Sequence of return matters.

How do we know how and when to do act?
If people are proposing that GMO predictions are truly useful, everyone had better start paying attention to them.
Here's a paper concluding they are indeed prescient. It's from 12y and 1mo ago, middle of November '08.
http://public.econ.duke.edu/Papers//PDF/GMO_Predictions1.pdf
Of course here's the end of Q1:
https://www.gmo.com/americas/research-library/gmo-7-year-asset-class-forecast-1q-2020/

Hello
Many good funds to look at especially Fidelity schwab Vanguard families
Thank you Mr Bolin for a good read
Kind regards
Happy holidays
Best Funds To Own In 2021
https://www.google.com/amp/s/seekingalpha.com/amp/article/4394450-best-funds-to-own-in-2021
Dec. 13, 2020 12:00 PM ETAOM, ARBIX, BASIX...2
Summary
Over 300 no load mutual funds available to small investors, nearly 200 exchange-traded funds, and over a dozen closed-end funds representing 120 Lipper Categories are ranked.
The funds are ranked based on Risk, Risk Adjusted Performance, Momentum, Quality, Yield, and Consistency. They are divided into 15 investment buckets for risk, exposure, yields and trends.
The funds are reported by short-term performance including three-month returns and trends, ten-month moving average, fund flows, maximum draw downs, and yield.

"My take is So what? 40y??"
It sounds like you are thinking about a single 40 year investment. Of course if we invest money in something with an average return of X% over 40 years, it doesn't matter what the sequence of returns is. We wind up with (1 + X%) ^ 40 times the original investment regardless of how the annual returns are sequenced.
In the real world, workers invest money periodically over their careers. Sequence of return matters.
One way of thinking of the accumulation phase is as a decumulation phase in reverse. Run time backwards from point of retirement to point of hire. Instead of adding money periodically, as time goes backward you're withdrawing money periodically. (I have this mental image of someone walking backward out of a brokerage with a check in hand.)
If you have good years shortly before retirement (or shortly "after" retirement as time rolls backward), you do better. What "better" means here is that your pot at the point of retirement is larger. If you have bad years near retirement, you do worse.
This makes sense because the closer you are to retirement, the larger the portfolio and the more a bad year will hurt. This is the idea in using glide paths prior to retirement.

@racqueteer - you said "They also have a lifetime of 25-30 years, apparently; so that's a LOT of replacing which would be ongoing."
By the same token furnaces, pumps, drilling/excavating machinery, etc., etc., etc. break down and need to be replaced. Maybe the costs are a tossup and maybe they aren't I don't know. However one option leaves us with possibly a cleaner planet to live on while we figure it out or discover something better. I say we at least start to move the other way even if 15 years is not doable. It's a goal much like putting a man on the moon. Whatever we're doing now isn't going to cut it and there is no planet B.

While Dodge and Cox was buying Facebook early in 2020 (see my above post), it appears David Giroux over at TRP was selling it.
From PRWCX’s June 30 Semi Annual Report: “In addition, we have systematically reduced our exposure to COVID-19 winners such as Amazon (now a top 5 underweight), life science tool companies, Visa, and Facebook.”
Hmmm ... :(

I still have FGDFX on my watch list and continue to be quite impressed by its excellent risk/reward profile since its inception in May. Its total return since then is 41%, and over the past one and three months, it gained 5% and 15.4%, respectively, all with a fairly reasonable P/E of 24.6.
M* puts the fund in the large blend category but classifies its investment style as large growth. It's current standard deviation, according to Portfolio Visualizer, is 18%.
However, as I said previously, I am still not comfortable with the fund's current management structure. In a "team managed" environment, who, for example, is in charge of asset allocation from among the five underlying funds? What about risk control across the portfolio of FGDFX? Who has the final decision making responsibility? Wish Fidelity would provide some clarity in the fund's prospectus.
For the time being, I am still sitting on the sidelines. If this intriguing new fund continues to do well in the future, I may well pull the trigger and "test drive" it to "see where it goes".
Fred

VWINX is my "go-to" fund to benchmark this category. That's not to say there aren't comparable funds. But because it is such a solid long term performer, for me to prefer another fund to this one I would want to see something about the other fund that was significantly better.
BAMPX also looks like a solid fund. Slightly weaker than VWINX over ten years, a dead heat over five, better over the past three years, and much better over the past year. Its better numbers are due primarily to its current (2020) year's performance. For periods ending in 2019, the long term figures still look great, but not superior:
1 year (2019): 16.68% (BAMPX) vs. 16.87% (VWINX)
3 years (2017-2019): 24.04% vs. 24.96%
5 years (2015-2019): 28.97% vs. 36.41%
10 years (2010-2019): 104.79% vs. 111.41%
While I don't disregard this year's performance, I do ask whether the gap between these funds was a one off or something repeatable. In addition, you might want to discard all BAMPX history before 2016, because its current lead manager Michael Gates took over in mid 2015 and the fund shifted from being a moderate allocation fund to being a conservative allocation fund. That's a serious point to consider.
VWINX is what I might call an old school conservative allocation fund - large cap value, bond allocation hugging 60% (57% - 61% over the past five years). BAMPX is more "modern", with a growth leaning blend portfolio and a lower bond allocation, around 50% (39% to 56% over the past five years). This has resulted in performance that has been slightly more volatile. Standard deviation comparisons over the past 3/5/10 years are:
8.52 (BAMPX) vs. 7.72 (VWINX) / 6.96 vs 6.35 / 7.44 vs. 5.51
As noted above, perhaps we should disregard the 10 year figure. The volatility of BAMPX over the 3 and 5 year periods are below category average, so this comparison is not to suggest that it is an excessively volatile fund.
On the plus side, the fund is pretty small at $½B. I happen to like the fact that it invests some equity overseas (currently about ¼ of its equity); others may consider this a negative. Its cost, 0.68% ER (0.73% without waivers) is reasonable, though obviously much higher than that of VWINX.
Where it looks a bit odd is in its portfolio. This is a fund of funds, so one would expect it to have a modest turnover, tweaking allocations. But its turnover rate of 98% is somewhat high even for funds that invest directly in individual securities. According to its latest (Sept. 30th) annual report, it holds 11 equity funds, 3 fixed income funds, and 2 MMFs.
Blackrock equity funds: EM class K (5% of portfolio), Technology Opportunities class K, Master Advantage Large Cap Core Portfolio (5%)
iShares equity ETFs: Core MSCI EAFE (4%), Core S&P Small Cap (4%), Core S&P Total US Stock Market (15%), ESG Aware MSCI USA (11%), MSCI EAFE Growth (7%), MSCI Min Vol USA, MSCI USA Value Factor, US Medical Devices
Blackrock fixed income funds: Strategic Income Opportunities Portfolio class K (8%), Master Total Return Portfolio (22%)
iShares fixed income ETF: iBoxx $ Investment Grade Corporate Bond (6%)
(The Master funds are "master" funds in master/feeder configurations. MDLRX is a retail fund feeding into Master Advantage Large Cap Core, MAHQX is a retail fund feeding into Master Total Return.)
Overall, BAMPX looks like a solid fund from an excellent fund family. While its portfolio seems slightly aggressive (both in terms of a higher equity allocation and its dabbling in sectors), it manages to keep volatility in check. Based on its turnover rate and plethora of underlying funds, I couldn't guess at its strategy (spaghetti against a wall?), but it seems to work. It looks like a worthwhile fund; for me I don't see a compelling reason to prefer it to VWINX.

Found this, which seems to do a good job of summarizing the arguments for solar; both pro and con.
I appear to have been incorrect about the landmass required for solar panel replacement of fossil fuels, though problems related to transmission persist. They also have a lifetime of 25-30 years, apparently; so that's a LOT of replacing which would be ongoing. I apologize for my previous misstatement. No excuse; simply a case of something I KNOW which doesn't happen to be true.
BTW, I'm not known here, but those who DO know me, know that I'm pretty much apolitical. Either what someone says makes logical sense or it doesn't; their politics are irrelevant to me. I also don't make a habit of expressing my own political beliefs, as they don't fall into some neat box. BOTH major parties are problematic for me, as BOTH have to be seen as placating their extreme wings (my opinion), and I don't agree with extremist positions. My intent is not politically motivated; if you take offense with logical arguments I present, that is YOUR political predisposition talking, not mine.

>> Solar has the same issue; there simply isn't the landmass to hold enough panels to replace fuel burning.
Huh? Where did you get that?
I read this (from Off the Grid) years ago and knew about it prior, when I put solar on my roof.
2.8 acres per 1GWh. Solar would have to produce about 4 million GWh of electricity annually to provide enough energy to power the entire USA. At 2.8 acres per GWh, then about 11,200,000 acres of land would give us what we need to produce the 4,000,000GWh of solar power. There’s 1.8 billion acres of land in the USA, so about 0.6% of our land is all it would take. Wait, “all it would take”? 11.2 million acres is a huge amount of land, right? Yes and no. Now I probably would not want to build an 11.2 million acre solar farm, but spread out across the whole country that’s very reasonable. If every single family home roof top in America were covered in solar panels for example that would give us about half of the energy.
Drive around and look at commercial buildings and see how much rooftop acreage currently has solar. It is dumbfounding how much flat roof faces the sky with nothing on it but hvac equipment.

"Now we are in a period of high debts and deficits, high valuations, aging workforce (deflationary), falling dollar (inflationary), and COVID. I choose to be more conservative now."
Well said, Lynn.
Here is what another poster on the M* discussion forum said recently that also kind of reflects my situation as a fairly conservative and retired investor: "I don't really need a lot more money - but I certainly don't want to lose a lot. I need to remind myself to err on the side of caution."
I am currently in the process of doing a year-end review of my portfolio and found that my equity exposure is only 20%. The 20 to 25% range seems to meet my comfort level at this point. My portfolio consists of only seven funds with each holding making up between 10 and 18% of the total value:
ARBIX
JBALX
PIMIX
TSIIX
TMSRX
VLAIX
VWINX
My YTD total return through November is 8.5%, with a standard deviation of 9.7%. So far, so good.
And, thanks, Lynn, for your significant contribution to this important topic, much appreciated.
Good luck,
Fred

I said "last try"; not last post, Lewis, but obviously your reading skills are on par with your reasoning skills. I had hoped that an actual discussion on merits, not ideology, might be possible, but apparently it isn't only one 'side' which is close-minded and intractable. It's noteworthy, I think, that I hadn't responded to YOU, but to David; as it was obvious that you had no interest in undertaking any actual THINKING; only in talking points. I still hold out SOME hope that David is willing to look beyond any personal prejudices he might have, but I'm certainly done wrestling in the mud with YOU. Have a nice life interacting only with like-minded people.
Btw other readers (if there are any at this point), if Biden can actually reverse decades of anti-fission sentiment, then that might give his 15-year goal of 'clean energy production' a chance of being realized. I'm not sure that's the BEST solution, or that it has even a REMOTE chance of occurring, but it probably is the only way it COULD happen. MY preconception is that this is NOT going to be among the solutions being considered, but maybe I'll be proven wrong; we'll see. Whether Biden does or doesn't support that approach, I think it's dead in the water politically; probably on both sides of the aisle.
Geothermal has definite possibilities from a technical standpoint, if only to bleed energy from that supervolcano we have sitting under Yosemite before it eventually erupts and kills all of us. The problem is that it is going to take time and money, and from the perspective of our representatives, it's all downside and no upside FOR THEM. Someone ELSE, many years down the line will get the credit, and they'll only get flack over the cost! So they're going to go for the quick, politically-correct 'fix'; if anything. If it can't be completed during THEIR term, it's off the board... I know, cynical much?

@Mav123,

Thank you for sharing. 25% in equities, wow. I always thought even retirees should have more to make sure funds lasts. I'm in my early 40s. Curious, what is the rate of return for the overall portfolio if only 25% in equities?

Bond and conservative funds have made roughly 8% YTD will little risk because interest rates have fallen, compared to the S&P 500 with 14% YTD, but a maximum drawdown of 20%. Stock valuations are very high now. The 25% is Benjamin Graham's lower limit on stock allocation when the markets are fully priced. This is similar to COTZX's strategy of decreasing allocations as the markets become fully valued. TMSRX's strategy is to make 6% plus inflation regardless of market direction.
My December article shows that following periods of high valuations over long periods of time (decades), conservative portfolios outperform aggressive portfolios.
https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/2020/12/enoughin-the-coming-lost-decade/
When I was your age in the early 1990's I was 100% stocks, but times have changed. The secular bear market of the 1960's and 1970's was followed by the secular bull market of the 1980's and 1990's. You could not go wrong in stocks until the market hit the wall in 1999. Now we are in a period of high debts and deficits, high valuations, aging workforce (deflationary), falling dollar (inflationary), and COVID. I choose to be more conservative now.
Best wishes in your investing.

In checking against the Dec 31, 2019 semi-annual report, one sees that the 19% increase in "credit weighting" came primarily at the expense of government (sovereign) debt that declined 9.4% and securitizied debt that declined 10.9%.

Thanks @bee, the first article in particular was very informative for me. I've wondered about sequence of return risk from a different perspective historically and that is if you bought the idea that small value outperforms in the long-term and started investing for your kids in 2009, you might even be right overall but just not if you started at a point in time where you'd give up more than 250 basis points annually over the first 12 years of your investment life.
Does anyone have any ideas how to manage sequence of return risk for an 18 year-old?

+1 Mark and Lewis

Attempting to sustain a fixed living standard using distributions from a portfolio of volatile assets is an inefficient retirement income strategy. This is a unique source of sequence risk.
There are four general techniques for managing sequence of returns risk in retirement:

the-hidden-peril-in-sequence-of-returns-risk

December 11th Episode:

Welcome to the Discussion Board. The following represent my largest holdings (in no particular order) and account for over half of my portfolio. I am roughly 25% equities.
TMSRX T Rowe Price Multi-Strategy Total Return
SWSBX Schwab Short-Term Bond Index
DODIX Dodge & Cox Income
VWIAX Vanguard Wellesley Income Admiral
VFIJX Vanguard GNMA Admiral
COTZX Columbia Thermostat Inst
FUMBX Fidelity Short-Term Treasury Bond Index
FIKFX Fidelity Freedom Index Income Inv
SNGVX Sit US Government Securities S
HSTRX Hussman Strategic Total Return
VGWAX Vanguard Global Wellington Admiral
TAIL Cambria Tail Risk ETF

Thank you for sharing. 25% in equities, wow. I always thought even retirees should have more to make sure funds lasts. I'm in my early 40s. Curious, what is the rate of return for the overall portfolio if only 25% in equities?

Isn’t it funny how Racqueteer said five posts ago “OK, last try for me,” yet he continues to argue his false position that attempting to eviscerate a Democratic clean energy policy that doesn’t even have all its details in place yet is “not political” as if scientifically there were another better policy put forward by the political opposition. The GOP has no real clean energy policy at all because it continues to argue as part of its libertarian death cult that anthropogenic climate change is a liberal hoax or that there’s nothing little old America can do as the second largest emitter of carbon emissions in the world. If you think you have a better plan, Racqueteer, submit it to the president elect’s team or apply for a job there. I’m sure if you’re as knowledgeable as you claim, they’ll hire you. Yet why do I suspect your “last try” wasn’t your last one and we’ll have another all-cap filled response? This isn’t about the truth or solving the problem for you. It’s about winning and getting the last word. So go ahead, and when you’re done submit your better ideas to the new president.
Oh wait, it seems like part of Biden’s failure of a clean energy plan includes nuclear: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2020/08/17/what-will-a-biden-harris-administration-do-for-nuclear-energy/amp/
I guess just send your geothermal idea with your resume because no one on Biden’s team is smart enough to think of that.

I’ve had this one nearly since its 2013 inception. After two mediocre (but positive) years it managed to lose 6.2% in 2015. So, the relationship got off to a rocky start (which should also inject a note of caution). As you are likely aware, the fund has now become one of the best in its category.
Some quick takes:
- Roughly 50% is typically invested in U.S. denominated credit instruments, with the remainder scattered around the globe.
- D&C Is generally cautious on duration in its bond holdings, so I’d expect DODLX to be at or somewhat below the average duration for similar funds.
- It’s predominantly investment grade - but dabbles in lower rated / EM bonds.
- The managers sounded reasonably optimistic in the (most recent) June 30 report - but they’re generally an optimistic lot.
- Like all DC funds, this one has a very reasonable ER (.45%) for a managed fund. Global bond investing generally carries higher costs.
- DODLX currently represents 9.5% of my portfolio. (My overall allocation to bond funds is 25%.)
- I’ve been slowly reducing exposure to this one for the last 9-10 months because it’s had a very good run in recent years and may be nearing some sort of retrenchment. The “slack” (so to speak) has been taken up by PBDIX and PRIHX, both of which I consider less risky - the former because of its higher credit quality (and lower ER) and the latter because of its shorter duration.