@Bobpa: In my opinion, for the foreseeable future, a rising tide lifts all boats. I agree with Old-Skeet, and would add SCG.
Regards,
Ted
LCG Funds:
YTD 13.78%
3.yrs 15.02%
5.yrs. 15.05%
MCG Funds:
YTD 13.30%
3yrs. 12.98%
5yrs. 12.49%
SCG Funds:
YTD 19.43%
3yrs. 15.26%
5yrs. 12.60%
SPY:
YTD 8.66%
3yrs. 17.23%
5yrs. 13.76%
Source Lipper

FYI: It might seem odd to open a retirement account for a high school student.
But teenagers can get a big head start on long-term savings, financial advisers say, by stashing some of their earnings in a Roth individual retirement account.
Now is a good time to talk with teenagers about long-term savings using a Roth I.R.A. because they may have earned money from summer jobs, said Patricia A. Seaman, a spokeswoman for the National Endowment for Financial Education, a nonprofit organization that promotes financial literacy.
Teenagers can benefit from tax-free growth of investments in a Roth account years before they have the opportunity to contribute to a workplace retirement plan, Ms. Seaman said. And five decades of growth allows plenty of time to ride out market swings.
“The earlier you start,” Ms. Seaman said, “the more the time value of money works for you.”
A Roth I.R.A. for someone under 18 must be opened and managed by an adult custodian, like a parent or grandparent. The teenager must have earned income, whether from a formal job or from gigs like babysitting and lawn mowing. Children can contribute their total annual earnings up to $5,500.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/your-money/roth-ira-retirement-teenagers.html

CBLDX is now on several platforms - such as Schwab, Fidelity, TD, etc.

At Fido it's shown as a TF fund, $250k minimum (same for taxable and retirement).

@MSF The sentence in the story is:

We included only fund share classes with over $500 million in assets, as the money flows in tiny funds are too volatile.

I am not saying that flows affect the fund's performance, but that in a smaller shareclass of a fund, flows can seem far more erratic because one or two large shareholders of that particular shareclass can have a disproportionate effect on flows. That means flows and thus investor returns may not reflect the experience of the average shareholder but that of just a handful of shareholders driving this small shareclass. These flows do not affect the overall performance of the fund--at least not in an easily measurable way--but have an impact on investor returns in that particular shareclass. It is possible that a small group of shareholders could dramatically affect flows in larger shareclasses of funds, but it is less likely the bigger the shareclass is.

FYI: (The Linkster says, buying GAMR gets you banned from MFO for life. Just thinking about it, suspended for six months.)
With a few squiggles of her electronic pen and nine seconds of computer processing, a data scientist at the Electronic Arts campus here created a life-like mountain range for video gaming. Typically, modeling that terrain by hand would take two weeks.
At another booth at the game maker’s in-house innovation fair, a team used artificial intelligence to simulate boisterous sports announcers, including one that sounded just like the company’s CEO, Andrew Wilson, Australian accent and all.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-videogame-industry-reaches-for-the-cloud-1535155282
M* Snapshot GAMR:
https://www.morningstar.com/etfs/ARCX/GAMR/quote.html
A Videogame ETF? Save Your Cash:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-videogame-etf-save-your-cash-2016-03-30/print

Hi @bee, My portfolio is comprised through many years of investing and there are guidelines in place but no hard rules. For instance, the two largest fund holdings are also my oldest at about six percent each (FKINX & AMECX). I decided ... enough is enough ... and, I don't want to keep expanding these two funds so I split some off and open other funds with these being my seed funds for the others. With new money, some gift and inheritance transfers, and taking what the existing funds generated I built what you see. With this I'm thinking new positions to complement the core. Also, a good amount of what you see is also held in taxable accounts. So, I have to consider the tax angle as well.
An exapmle. Currently, NEWFX is the largest position in it's sleeve so I'm thinking of splitting some of it into another fund (DWGAX) through a nav exchange process. This will rebalace NEWFX's sleeve while adding some diverfication to the sleeve that will hold DWGAX. As you can see I have another fund under review for a nav exchange buy (INUTX). So, this is an on going process and done when I felt warranted. Again, gudelines but no hard rules. Generally, no fund starts at less than 5% of its sleeve and becomes no more than 60%. For instance AOFAX is currently 15% of its sleeve, NDVAX 15% and PMDAX 70%. When AOFAX gets built AOFAX is tatgeted to become 20%, NDVAX 20% & PMDAX 60%. PMDAX is held in a taxable account and has been a long term position and through the years of growth become an outsized position within its sleeve. The strategy is not to sell any of PMDAX but to grow the other positions to balance the sleeve with some more buys and natural growth as they should grow faster than PMDAX.
That is why it is important to Xray what you have before starting to tweak.
The below outlines the process and was not posted with the portfolio. Again, no hard rules just guidelines about my sleeve management system.
Old_Skeet's Sleeve Management System
Now being in retirement here is a brief description of my sleeve management system which I organized to better help manage the investments held within mine and my wife's portfolios. The master portfolio is comprised of two taxable investment accounts, two self directed retirement accounts, a health savings account plus two bank accounts. With this, I came up with four investment areas. They are a cash area which consist of two sleeves ... an investment cash sleeve and a demand cash sleeve. The next area is the income area which consist of two sleeves ... a fixed income sleeve and a hybrid income sleeve. Then there is the growth & income area which has more risk associated with it than the income area and it consist of four sleeves ... a global equity sleeve, a global hybrid sleeve, a domestic equity sleeve and a domestic hybrid sleeve. And, there is the growth area where the most risk in the portfolio is found and it consist of five slleves ... a global sleeve, a large/mid cap sleeve, a small/mid cap sleeve, a specialty/theme sleeve plus a special investment (spiff) sleeve. Each sleeve (in most cases) consist of three to nine funds with the size and weight of each sleeve can easily be adjusted, from time-to-time, by adjusting the number of funds held along with their amounts. By using the sleeve system I can get a better picutre of my overall investment landscape. I have found it beneficial to Xray each fund, each sleeve, each investment area, and the portfolio as a whole quarterly. My positions and sleeves can be adjusted from time-to-time as to how I might be reading the markets through using my market barometer and equity weighting matrix. The matrix is driven by the barometer. All my funds with the exception of those in my health savings account pay their distributions to the cash area of the portfolio. This automatically builds cash in the cash area to meet the portfolio's disbursements (when necessary) with the residual being left for new investment opportunity. Generally, in any one year I take no more than a sum equal to one half of my portfolio's five year average return. In this way principal builds over time. In addition, most buy/sell transactions settle from, or to, the cash area with some net asset exchanges between funds taking place.
See the portfolio for asset allocation ranges for each area. Sleeve and fund weightings are known but not listed.

(Curiously, I was able to read it directly; no tricks, no special software. Though I am on a new machine, and Barron's might be counting articles.)
A nit to pick: FBTCX and FBIOX are not different share classes of the same fund, but shares of two different, albeit it similar funds. (For example, they have a different #3 holding as of 6/30/18.)
I agree that which share class you look at likely does affect investor return data. As I commented in this thread, the selling point for C shares is that they are supposedly better for people who only want to own the shares for a year or two. (Or even less.)
So it might be interesting to look M (formerly T) shares or A shares of Fidelity Advisor Biotech. Since M* doesn't have 10 year investor data for A shares ($787million), I pulled up the investor data for M shares ($127million). Despite the small share class size.
Small funds (under $500K) were excluded in the article because they are more likely to have erratic cash flows making their performance too volatile. All well and good.But that's not a reason to exclude share classes of large funds. The small size of a share class doesn't affect the fund performance. If anything, because a share class is small, its investors will have a smaller impact on the fund performance.
Over the ten year period ending 6/30/18, M* reports:
FBIOX: 12.73% (investor return), 17.15% (fund return) - matches Barron's reported M* data
FBTTX: 11.88% (investor return), 15.86% (fund return)
FBTCX: 5.97% (investor return), 15.35% (fund return) - matches Barron's reported M* data
Similar gaps between investor returns and fund returns for FBIOX and FBTTX. So at least here, it doesn't look like the existence of a load or the popularity of a fund matter. What might matter more is whether the shares are designed/marketed for shorter term trading (such as C shares).
More generally there are various confounding factors that aren't sorted out. Do investors do well in cheaper funds because they have more patience when the fund costs less (as speculated)? Or perhaps it is because "high expense funds have much more volatile risk-adjusted returns", and it's just the volatility that affects investor behavior?
Livingston, Zhou, 2016, The Volatility of Mutual Fund Performance, http://www.fmaconferences.org/Vegas/Papers/QUANTILE-12-31-2015.pdf

@MFO Members: Six funds with these percentages.
Regards,
Ted
IVV=36.5%
PONCX=20.9%
QQQ=20.6%
MSOPX=10.9%
TRBCX=8.0%
MVRXX=2.8%
YTD Returns:
QQQ-17.60%
TRBCX= 16.70%
MSOPX= 10.94%
IVV= 8.69%
PONCX= -(.78%)
MVRXX=$1.00= Yield 1.83%

@Old_Skeet, Thanks for sharing your most recent portfolio. I am always struck by your organization of sleeves. Again, an allocation question for you.
Within your individual sleeves do you adjust allocation within the sleeve...say AOFAX has out performed your other two holdings in the sleeve...is there ever a reason to reallocate gains from one fund within the sleeve to the other funds?
Also, I am personally trying to achieve a portfolio that holds funds that have at least a five percent (5%) overall weighting in my portfolio, but no more than a 20% weighting. So, this could mean as many as 20 funds (at 5% each) or no less than 5 funds (at 20% each). Your individual fund weightings must be part of you design as well. With so many funds how do you weight their importance in the overall portfolio?
I mention this because some investors have a well diversified equity portfolio with one fund (VTI) and others have a very concentrated equity portfolio with 50 funds.
Finally, have you explored correlation of your sleeves? Is one sleeve more correlated say to the equity market, the bond market, or alternatives? Do you have a recipe for the percentage of these non-correlated assets in your portfolio?

Hi @bee, I open my position in AOFAX in the spring of this year by doing a nav exchange from some of my SPECX into it as SPECX had grown to a sizeable position within its sleeve and portfolio. This was done commission free. Currently, AOFAX is still under construction and will be capped at about a 25% weighting within it's sleeve. Since, I take all fund distributions to cash this in of itself helps keep funds like this with explosive growth in check thus limiting the need to often manually rebalance. Generally, no fund within the growth area is greater than two percent of the overall portfolio with the exception that SPECX is the largest fund in the growth area at about 3% of the overall portfolio while AOFAX currently less than 1%. So, there is room to do some more nav exchanges from SPECX into AOFAX and let AOFAX run. By the way the two largest sleeves in the growth area are my large/mid cap sleeve and my specialty & theme sleeve. Combined they account for about 60% of the growth area while the other two sleeves account for the remaining 40%. Currently, there is no spiff investment position.
Below is my portfolio holdings of late.
Last revised: 08/24/2018 Master Portfolio
Here is how I have my asset allocation broken out in percent ranges, by area. My neutral allocation weighting are cash area 20%, income area 30%, growth & income area 35% and growth area & other assets 15%. I do an Instant Xray analysis of the portfolio quarterly and make asset weighting adjustments as I feel warranted based upon my assesment of the market, my risk tolerance, cash needs, etc. In addition, I have the portfolio set up in Morningstar's portfolio manager by sleeve and as a whole for easy monitoring plus I use brokerage account statements along with other Morningstar reports and the fund fact sheets to follow my investments.
CASH AREA (Portfolio Weighting Range 15% to 25% with neutral being 20%)
Demand Cash Sleeve ... (Cash Distribution Accrual & Future Investment Accrual)
Investment Cash Sleeve ... (Savings & Time Deposits)
INCOME AREA (Portfolio Weighting Range 25% to 35% with neutral being 30%)
Fixed Income Sleeve: BAICX, CTFAX, GIFAX, LBNDX, NEFZX & TSIAX (CTFAX under review partial nav exch sell)
Hybrid Income Sleeve: APIUX, AZNAX, DIFAX, FISCX, FKINX, ISFAX, JNBAX, PCGAX & PGBAX
GROWTH & INCOME AREA (Portfolio Weighting Range 30% to 40% with neutral being 35%)
Global Equity Sleeve: CWGIX, DEQAX & EADIX (DWGAX under review for nav exch buy)
Global Hybrid Sleeve: CAIBX, PMAIX & TIBAX
Domestic Equity Sleeve: ANCFX, FDSAX, SVAAX (INUTX under review for nav exch buy)
Domestic Hybrid Sleeve: ABALX, AMECX, FBLAX, FRINX, HWIAX & LABFX
GROWTH AREA (Portfolio Weighting Range 10% to 20% with neutral being 15%)
Global Sleeve: ANWPX, FWAFX & SMCWX
Large/Mid Cap Sleeve: AGTHX, AMCPX & SPECX
Small/Mid Cap Sleeve: AOFAX, NDVAX & PMDAX
Specialty & Theme Sleeve: LPEFX, NEWFX, PCLAX & PGUAX (NEWFX under review partial nav exch sell)
Spiff Sleeve: No position engaged at this time.

Hi @ DavidV, I also own AOFAX and according to Morningstar has it's ytd at 40.51% and rolling 1 year at 55.21%. I'm thinking there are probally some other funds that got missed as well.

It didn't get missed. "Here are 10 funds that have turned $100 into $150 or more in the last 12 months ending Aug. 17, 2018."
According to this Morningstar chart, $10,000 in AOFAX on Aug. 17, 2017 grew to $14,640.26 as of Aug. 17, 2018. So $100 turned into $146.03, not quite the requisite $150. It didn't make the cut.
While that's sufficient explanation, it's possible that the returns analyzed included the effect of loads. AOFAX carries a 5.25% load (though you can purchase it with the load waived). None of the ten tickers listed are load shares.
For example LOGWX is class F-3, the cleanest, lowest cost share class you can get. The appropriate share class to check for Alger Small Cap Focus would be AGOZX, though that doesn't make the grade, either.

FYI: Asset managers are hawking free products and services as if they were carnival barkers. JPMorganoffers free stock trades; Fidelity boasts about its zero-cost index funds; Vanguard is waiving trading costs for exchange-traded funds. The appeal is simple: Costs—whether incurred by buying and selling a fund, or imposed through an annual expense ratio—eat into returns. But there’s another, surprising benefit: Cheap funds may save you from your worst impulses.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.barrons.com/articles/best-mutual-funds-for-investors-cheap-and-boring-1535145075

@DavidV and @Old_Skeet actually impressive 3 year returns. Do you have a strategy to reallocate your out sized gains? This fund (I charted AOFIX) has out performed both mid-cap and small-cap growth indexes since it's most recent bottom starting around 2/12/2016. Do you see this continuing in the Small/Mid cap growth space?

FYI: Daniel Sundheim built a reputation as savvy stockpicker at Viking Global Investors, a hedge fund where he helped oversee $32 billion in assets. That helped him raise more than $4 billion in seed money when he launched his own fund in July.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.barrons.com/articles/even-wall-street-pros-have-a-tough-time-getting-into-this-club-1535143468

Howdy doc,
Not surprising. Strong dollar has had the greatest impact, but also some lessening of demand due to bitcoin. feh.
I will stay with my decades old call that everyone needs to have some precious metals in their wealth portfolio: 3-7 % as a safety net for WTF.
As for secure storage, please realize that a tube of American Gold Eagles is worth about 25K and is 2" tall and the size of a quarter. It will fit easily inside the oatmeal container [just make sure it's Red Mill and not full of Roundup).
And so it goes,
peace,
rono

Hi @ DavidV, I also own AOFAX and according to Morningstar has it's ytd at 40.51% and rolling 1 year at 55.21%. I'm thinking there are probally some other funds that got missed as well.

I own ETIHX which I purchased at a bad time in 2015, right before the bio's dipped. I was going to sell, but didn't. Now I'm up 50%. With a relatively concentrated position of 70 or so stocks, they look to be good analysts in this space.
No leverage, but it does go into small bio's and is definitely a "risk-on" trade. Paring this with a combination of VGHCX could make a reasonable barbell position in healthcare as relates to risk. When the overall market takes a dive in the next 2 years or so, I'll be adding to this fund to make it a full position. Not for the squeamish though.
FWIW, I agree with the comments above on leverage. I make enough bad decisions without magnifying them.

@Hank, what alternative funds are you invested in? Were they around in 2008-early 9 for the great recession so that they have a performance tract record during the worst of economic times? Just curious how they performed over that stretch compared to a conservative balanced fund. Again, just my opinion, but alternative funds offer nothing that a good equity/bond balanced fund can offer, including safe-guarding your down side risk in retirement. Compare your alternatives for risk-return to a couple pretty conservative balanced funds like GLRBX or BERIX. These 2 funds lost only 5.5 and 10.2% in 2008 respectively, while averaging returns over the last 10 years of close to 6 and 7%.
Not trying to change your mind or comfort zone, just saying, in my opinion alternative is more a marketing gimmick than a useful portfolio add at any stage of life. Bear market funds being the worst choice of the group.

Close behind at 46.84% - FSRPX. No 2x strategy, low minimum, reasonable ER, steady long term results...

@hank
According to data from various sources, I'm considered a senior citizen, too. But, I was also offered a membership to AARP when I was age 35. :)
As to the "cash" as a place to run to in the event of an equity melt. Well, if one is able to pull the evacuate equity soon enough, and choose not to go to U.S. bonds or notes, our current default core cash at Fidelity yields, 1.6%.
Not too bad when seeking protection of assets from the "nasties", eh?