Here's the full thread ...
https://twitter.com/svrnco/status/1010309418905407490

FYI: Most investors have way too much cash. Wealthy investors really have too much.
This is a phenomenon Citi Private Bank’s David Bailin has observed whether the markets are soaring, stumbling, or stagnant.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.barrons.com/articles/what-to-do-with-excess-cash-1531249298

@LewisBraham
One aspect that continues since the global equity mini-melt at the end of January; is that there remains a lot of down and up range, with buys and sells, in many sectors.
Without data available for an inside view, I can only speculate that machines are trading within ranges of overbought and oversold based upon, say; 6 months of backward data points. If 50% of this activity is machine programmed trading another substantial percentage will be the follow along human traders using their own tools of judgement for buy and sell points. Those who are very good at this type of trading will actually be able to sit atop their money in place of a chair.
My 2 cents worth.
Catch

Thanks, Charles, for finding this comment. I don't quite understand what Mr Lee is trying to say but I do share in his pain.

It's painful to see $QMNIX, $QSPIX and $QLEIX get crushed over the past couple of months. Seems like they got caught up in the massive short squeeze.

— Samuel Lee (@svrnco)

June 22, 2018

It's painful to see $QMNIX, $QSPIX and $QLEIX get crushed over the past couple of months. Seems like they got caught up in the massive short squeeze.

— Samuel Lee (@svrnco)

June 22, 2018

Grandeur Peak, recommended strongly by David (and Sam), continues to be an MFO Top Fund Family. All seven of its funds have beaten their peers handsomely since launch. Its two open funds, Global Stalwarts (GGSOX) and International Stalwarts (GISYX), have done particularly well this past year. That said, all seven are experiencing five months of drawdown.

Sorting through old basement boxes I came across my IRS returns as an adolescent, prepared by my father, from the early 1960s.
Along with W2s from the Balsams Resort ($450 for the summer) and International Harvester ($1k. other summers) were schedule lists of modest stock and fund holdings, Transcontinental Gas Pipeline, Draper (not Labs), Ryder (not trucks), and Ford, ... and also Mass. Investment Growth and Fidelity Trend funds, both extant.
So I went and plotted those two mutual funds from ~1959 to present, and observed how the $50 then would (reinvested, which we did not do so much) be ~$11k-$40k today.

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1.85%, is that really the best one can do on a Savings/MM account? Missing from the list is Salem Five Direct, which yields 2.05%. The site also omits a couple of well known banks, Ally and Syncrony, that offer the same 1.75% as the second best yielding bank of those that are listed.
Nor does it show the superior savings account rate of 1.90% of a bank that even advertises on the site: PurePoint Financial. Maybe PurePoint only paid to be listed with CD rates. Or maybe the banks shown on the savings account page paid to keep the higher rate off.
(It's not PurePoint's $10K min that's the problem, because the savings account page lists Capital One, that also has a $10K min. Nor it is that PurePoint is not included in BankRate.com's site, which is the source of the data.)
It doesn't even get the comparisons with TBTF banks correct. It shows them all yielding 0.01%. BankRate reports Citibank at 0.04% and BofA 0.03%.

You have a good memory. Earlier prospectuses (e.g. this one from 2013) didn't imply there were fixed stock/bond ratios, but the current prospectus does:

[For AOM] As of July 31, 2017, the Underlying Index included a fixed allocation of 60% of its assets in Underlying Funds that invest primarily in equity securities and 40% of its assets in Underlying Funds that invest primarily in bonds. As of July 31,2017, the Fund invested approximately 63.57% of its assets in Underlying Funds that invest primarily in equity securities, 36.24% of its assets in Underlying Funds that invest primarily in bonds and the remainder of its assets in Underlying Funds that invest primarily in money market instruments.

The 60/40 seems to be a target, since the next sentence gives the actual allocations.
Looking at the funds' allocations for April 30, 2014, AOA had 3.77% in Cohen & Steers REIT ETF (ICF) (see page here), while AOK had none (see page here). So the funds used to include different underlying funds, including RE.
Though as you suggested, not really enough to make much of a difference.

Hi Sir- Mark. Have very small portion play money on O.. Was looking at O for very long time past few yrs but never buy it.. I was very under weigh in real-estate eft and stocks so finally pulled trigger when went down recentlys. May put short stop lost on it tomorrow
For cash - I used safe individual aaa muni or safe Aa+ bonds as cash portions. Currently don't have a true cash portions at all,probably 5%. I am not very good w playing market timing so probably best leave it indexes and some in TRP funds at 401k

Still about 80-20 w 401k distributions and bought more stocks real-estate reits previously w private equities portfolio... I Still have least 20 yrs until retirement so taking the lazy portfolio approaches... We are overdue for a large15s%correction so nothing surprises me anymore . Did place trade on O and another oil preferred stocks last week

FYI: ( In my opinion, this column is a direct result of the conversation that Chuck had with David Snowball on his recent show regarding the Mathers Fund)
Yes that sounds confusing, but while Mathers is a unique fund, its situation — with investors never knowing quite what to make of it — is not that uncommon in the fund world.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/longtime-fund-closes-as-both-a-winner-and-loser/
David Snowball On Money Life Show:
https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/moneylife-with-chuck-jaffe/e/55125809?autoplay=true

Give or take rounding error, Barclays is doing the same thing as Vanguard. All the sibling funds hold the same underlying funds (though unlike Vanguard, these may vary from time to time).
If one looks only at the underlying equity funds, these are held in the same proportions across all sibling funds. For example, 80% of AOA is in equity funds. Of those equity holdings, 48% are in an S&P 500 fund, 38% are in a developed market fund, etc.
60% of AOR is in equity. Of those equity holdings, the breakdown is the same: 48% in the S&P 500 fund, 38% in the developed market fund, and so on.
The only difference among all these funds is the stock/bond ratio. They are 80/20, 60/40, 40/60, and 30/70.
So your family member was getting a 52.5/47.5 stock/bond portfolio by allocating evenly across all the funds. (Just average the percentages.) Rebalancing simply maintained this stock/bond ratio. Had Barclays offered a variant with that particular ratio, all your family member would have needed would have been that single fund. Or if a 60/40 split rather than a 52.5/47.5 had been acceptable, then buying a single fund - AOM - would have sufficed.
Regardless, since there is only one degree of freedom (the stock/bond ratio), the same portfolio could be achieved with a mix of just two funds. This is a simple linear algebra problem, or could even be viewed as an 8th grade math mixture problem:
You have $100 to spend. You want to buy $52.5 of stock (and the rest in bonds).
For every $1 you spend on AOR, you'll get $0.60 in stock (and $0.40 in bonds).
For every $1 you spend on AOM, you'll get $0.40 in stock (and $0.60 in bonds).
How much should you spend out of $100 on each fund to wind up with $52.5 in stock?
Let x = amount spent on AOR, so ($100 - x) is the amount spent on AOM.
So 0.60 * x + 0.40 * ($100 - x) = $52.5
0.20 * x + $40 = $52.5
0.20 * x = $12.5
x = $62.5
We can check this: $62.5 in AOR buys 60% x $62.5 = $37.5 of equity (and $25 of bonds)
$37.5 in AOM buys 40% x $37.5 = $15 of equity (and $22.5 of bonds).
Together, that's $52.5 of equity, and $47.5 of bonds.
A common complaint against 401k plans offering too many funds is that because participants don't know what to do with all the choices, they tend to simply buy the same amount of each fund. With these iShares, the result was reasonable - something close to a 50/50 allocation. But with 401k plans, where you might have 17 equity funds and 3 bond funds, a participant could wind up with a portfolio that was 85% in equity (looks like we're back to FFNOX), whether that was suitable or not.

I had one family member, whom I advised for free (talk about getting what you pay for), who ultimately decided upon $5k each into AOA, AOR, AOM, and AOK, rebalancing every few months (free, at ML). Now each account worth more, of course; this was a while ago.
They felt (rightly or wrongly ) they had good control over allocations. It sounded a little sketchy to me, but turned out to be pretty simple and straightforward, or was on paper, since it was not ever fully clear to me exactly how they decided to adjust and shift funds. Timing, iow.
I guess they were being their own dynamic index fund manager, like so many in other etfs. Worked fine, but better than other approaches?

The mutual fund firm Vanguard, in its column “IRA Insights,” said that approximately 20 percent of its investors who take RMDs move the money to a taxable account because they do not need to spend it. (from article provided by @msf)
That’s a curious statement for Vanguard to make. How do they know that? I guess they must have conducted some sort sort of study in which they queried their investors. Reason I’m curious is because at Price I routinely have RMDs (and all other IRA distributions) transfered first into a cash equivalancy non-sheltered account on which I can write checks or otherwise transfer from at a later time. (I use their ultra-short fund for this purpose.) There’s a lot of reasons for doing this. Most importantly, I feel that should the distribution process somehow get “muffed” (perhaps by incorrectly withholding Michigan’s pension tax against my instructions), it would be a lot easier to resolve the issue with Price while the money is still under their umbrella.
Now to the crux of the issue here. Sometimes the RMD or other funds I take from a sheltered account are actually “needed” right away. But much more often they’re simply “rolled” into an annual household budget and may not actually be spent for up to a year. At still other times the purpose of the money is simply to “replenish” depleted cash reserves after an unusually large / unexpected household expenditure. So tracking the actual purpose to which withdrawals from an IRA are ultimately applied would seem to be a difficult (near impossible) undertaking.
Just my H/O on this one ... But I’ve long felt that way too much is made of being “forced” (author’s word) to withdraw a small percentage of sheltered funds annually upon reaching RMD age. There are some great tax efficient stock funds which have been discussed here over the years. Munis are a possibility as well. Recently while I was using Price’s high yield muni fund (PRFHX), it seemed to be consistently outperforming their Spectrum Income fund (RPSIX) which I hold inside an IRA. Risk level appeared about the same too. My thinking on this, however, might be warped, as have about 65% of retirement monies inside a Roth.

The idea behind cap weighted indexing is that you duck the risk (and benefit) of issue selection by buying everything.
I've never seen anyone advocate choosing a stock/bond ratio to match the ratio of worldwide equity to worldwide debt. So implicitly at least, people tend to regard asset allocation differently from issue selection.
Hence the suggestion that asset allocation be left to the investor. But to what degree? For example, there's VT, that covers all the stock in the world. That can certainly take the place of two funds, VTSAX and VTIAX. It also takes away a degree of flexibility, but is that flexibility needed?
Maybe so; people may want finer granularity of their asset classes. So the first question is how does one define one's asset classes (finely or coarsely)? After that comes the question of picking the preferred mix.
The most obvious way to construct a portfolio having answered these questions is to pick broad based funds, one for each asset class, and then mix them in the desired proportions.
The difficulty in using all in one funds is that they must roughly match your preferred allocations. FFNOX, with its 85% share in equity just isn't going to do it for you if you want a 40/60 stock/bond mix.
Fund families address this by offering a suite of funds, each with a different allocation. Vanguard has its LifeStrategy funds. If one of those works for you, great.
But there's still the matter of what classes of assets they're allocating. The Vanguard funds appear to be offering various admixtures of US stock, US bond, foreign stock, and foreign bond. But in reality, all their LifStrategy funds have the same ratio of US stock to foreign stock, so it's as if they simply used a single global stock fund. Likewise, all the funds have the same US/foreign bond ratio, so it's as if they used a single global bond fund.
Rather than offering a four-dimensional choice of allocations, you've just got a two dimensional offering - the only thing that varies is the ratio of global stocks to global bonds. 20/80, 40/60, 60/40, 80/20.
It's just impractical to offer more. Thinking about US stock/Int'l stock/US bond/foreign bond combinations, there could be:
10/10/10/70, 10/10/30/50, 10/10/50/30, 10/10/70/10, 10/30/10/50, 10/30/30/30, 10/30/50/10, 10/50/10/30, 10/50/30/10, 10/70/10/10, 30/10/10/50, 30/10/30/30, 30/10/50/10, 30/30/10/30, 30/30/30/10, 30/50/10/10, 50/30/10/10
That's 17 funds right there. This is why you're not likely to find an all in one fund with your desired asset allocation. Thus all in one funds don't work unless you give up a large chunk of control over your asset allocations.

FYI: Puritz and a business partner are putting their financial IQs to work advising middle-income savers how not to blow their nest eggs. They are doing it through a firm called Rebalance-IRA that is disrupting the staid world of boutique investing and stock picking by putting (almost) everything in the cloud.
Its conceit is long-term, low-cost indexing, mostly through Vanguard Group’s exchange traded funds (ETF). (I have been a client of Vanguard for decades but do not own an ETF. I have index and managed funds.)
Regards,
Ted
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/what-to-do-with-your-nest-egg-heres-advice-from-two-rich-guys/2018/07/06/734cd87e-7e26-11e8-bb6b-c1cb691f1402_story.html?utm_term=.b12a495e8ed6
Rebalance IRA Websitde:
https://www.rebalance-ira.com/

"Both came to prominence in the 1970s".
A nice sound bite, but a bit simplistic. Vanguard didn't even exist until 1975, and at that time it was a load family.
From Forbes (Ferri): "The Vanguard Index Trust was launched in early 1976 and received a tepid response. In the early days, the fund was a 'load fund,' sold exclusively through brokers. ... To add insult to injury, John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard and the brainchild behind the fund, was ridiculed by the fund industry."
From Vanguard: "As the 1970s turned into the 1980s, the news about Vanguard started to get around."
Regarding Fidelity, start with the sentiment in the Barron's piece attributed to Wiener and Lowell: “'Buy the manager, not the fund,' the astute, straight-talking duo likes to say."
Going back to the 60s, who was the manager, the original gunslinger? Gerald Tsai, with the Fidelity Capital Fund, until he left in 1965 to form his own fund (Manhattan Fund). So famous was he over his career that

He was also idolised by younger tycoons, including Donald Trump.
When Tsai was named CEO of Primerica, "I went out the same day and bought stock", Trump told Fortune magazine. "I made a big bet on Gerry. Life is people and Gerry's a champ."

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1503697/gerald-tsai-playboy-financier-who-seduced-america
Certainly Fidelity became even more well known in the 1970s, but it first came to prominence before Lynch.
What Wiener and Lowell (as opposed to Barron's) have to say in the article is much more sensible. No great surprises. A lot of the usual suspects, though well reasoned, and sensible:

What’s your view on the stock market?
Wiener: It will go up and down.

A quick search turned up this Financial Adviser Mag article from 2014. It cites a Vanguard figure saying that 20% of RMDs were reinvested there.
Of course that's only Vanguard investors, and may only count the RMD money that they reinvested at Vanguard, as opposed to moving it to an outside taxable account. Still, good for a ballpark sense.
https://www.fa-mag.com/news/what-if-your-client-doesn-t-need-the-rmd-19538.html