@Mark
I recall I'd read last year that, that December was the best time to own stocks; EXCEPT ONLY after Dec. 25.

Yahoo Finance articles have become a joke ...

Yahoo has become a joke. I recently ordered some pricey theater tickets. Rather than going through the trouble of changing my old “ymail” address with Telecharge, I left the old email standing. Guess what? Tickets were emailed, but yahoo mail has been completely off-line since some time late yesterday. Tried about 50 times. Finally phoned Telecharge today and got them sent to a more up-to-date email. :)
Yahoo was a pioneer in internet search in the 90s. How far they’ve fallen.

A few things I would note are:
1. There wouldn't be much click-bait journalism if Google/Facebook/Amazon hadn't killed journalism and basically bankrupted many publications.
2. Publications are now desperate for clicks to sustain their remaining ad revenue.
3. Readers, including--at least in the past--many on this site, assume news should be "free" with the implicit assumption that journalists don't deserve to get paid. They happily cut and paste entire articles and show other readers various means around paywalls.
4. Many pubs are now so broke they pay journalists pennies per word.
5. Shoddy click-bait journalism often exists because pubs are so broke/greedy--both, really--they hire writers who are really professionals in another industry seeking to promote their own businesses and journalism is really an advertisement for their businesses, be it financial planning or money management. Those writers come cheap because journalism really isn't their end goal when they write an article. It is self-promotion.
6. Journalists at mainstream publications generally don't write their own headlines. I know I don't. Headlines are written by a team at the pub seeking "search engine optimization" or SEO to generate clicks.
7. Investigative journalism is expensive, time consuming and often draws negative backlash from powerful interests, be they corporate or government, or both. It rarely leads to additional ad revenue for a publication. Pubs are thus less interested in doing it.
And so good journalism is dying.

Just an ironic aside from the reaction to our December issue.
I used a click-bait style headline for our article denouncing click-bait journalism. Yesterday I pulled the readership stats for the first 36 hours (basically, Saturday and Sunday) after launch.
Most-viewed article (in MFO history): Reduce your 2020 risks by 50% with this one move! 27,000 views
Second-most viewed article in the issue: the issue's homepage, 3,000 views.
I'm guessing that bots, Russian or otherwise, are involved. I'm guessing that there's an algorithm that trawls the internet looking for a certain style of headline, then scrapes it. Where the scrapings go, I know not.
Or, more optimistically, we're sparked a revolution in online media literacy and people by the tens of thousands are holding reprints of the article close to their hearts.
Yup, that's what I'm guessing. Yes indeedy.
David

https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp-500-top-stocks-own-in-years-best-time-december/
Now's The Best Time To Own Stocks (Especially These Eight)
MATT KRANTZ 08:00 AM ET 12/03/2019
December is the best time to own S&P 500 stocks. But some stocks are a bit better to own than the rest.

T. Rowe Price has two series of target date funds: the original series now called Retirement Funds and its newer more conservative series that it calls Target Funds.
Price describes the latter as "offer[ing] lower volatility -- and lower potential long-term growth -- than Retirement Funds by emphasizing bonds near the target date."
M* shows the glide path of the former as having a high, but not the highest, equity allocation as seen in the graph on this page:
https://news.morningstar.com/pdfs/STUSA04OMN.pdf
Fidelity has so many lineups it's difficult to keep track of them. Its Simplicity RMD funds were formerly Income Replacment Funds that were overhauled in 2017. It has Managed Retirement Funds, Freedom Funds, and Freedom Index Funds.
Regarding the latter, M* observed that "Despite the notable cost advantage, each Freedom Index fund lagged its Freedom series counterpart since the Freedom Index series' late-2009 launch through December 2018 .... The absence of active management and certain subasset classes, like high-yield bonds, from Freedom Index contributed to these results."
Then they've got a series I'd never heard of: Freedom Blend Funds. In case you can't decide between active (Freedom) and passive (Freedom Index) management, these "blend" funds use both. Did I mention that Fidelity also has Fidelity Advisor (load) versions of these funds as well?

Just to add to syzygy's mention of MICPX, it is more than just bonds. Per one of David's commentaries:

Our July 2017 profile of Matthews Asia Credit Opportunities (MCRDX/MICPX) described it as investing in high-yield bonds. That’s correct but incomplete. Manager Satya Patel reminded us that the fund’s core investments can include “convertibles, hybrids and derivatives with fixed income characteristics.” Indeed, since inception convertible bonds have represented 20-25% of the portfolio.

Might be a bit more risk in this one.

Hi @hank
The repo market circumstance is still in play.
The link below will have 3 articles from yesterday, Dec. 2. They are just down the page a wee bit from the top.
REPO MARKET
Stay warm and wish that snow away, please !
Catch

Kudos, David, for discussing liquidity risk. It seems like the one risk I don't see discussed enough in the press. It also isn't analyzed particularly well or often enough in funds. It's funny to me no one else has complimented you on that part of your commentary yet. Understanding that risk I believe will become critical at some point.

I enjoyed / appreciated that portion as well. Possibly the most thorough look at market risk @DavidSnowball has ever put together (focused on fixed-income, but I’d expect spill-over to equity funds as well). Hadn’t yet read that part when I initially bumped the commentary over.
If you’re 10 or younger you’ve never lived through a real bear market. I hope there’s no one under 25 managing any fund. He / she would have been in high school when the last bear ended. Not clever enough to understand all the intricacies of the repo market. But it struck me as odd the need for massive infusions of cash in September. Article attempts to explain the implications. https://www.globalresearch.ca/federal-reserve-panic-september-2019-solutions-crisis/5693700

As a time-kill, I chose the "target date 2040" category at random.
37 funds. Five year returns range from 5.0 - 7.9% a year. Maximum drawdown from 9.0 - 14.4%. Standard deviation from 7 - 11%. That strikes me as pretty vast differences for funds with such a similar goal.
That's especially striking in light of the funds correlation. I rank a matrix for all 2040, sorted by Sharpe and then chose every third fund (12 total) to analyze. That gaves me a equal sample to top, middle and bottom performers. The vast majority of funds had correlations to each other of 98 or 99. The biggest outlier was one fund-to-fund correlation of 91. The correlation suggests, to me anyway, that they've all in the same markets with small but cumulative differences in expenses, valuations and so on.
Back to my students,
David

The Matthews fund is pretty much sui generis. In the US market, I can find only two other funds that are vaguely comparable, Harvest Asia Bond and Aberdeen Asia-Pacific Income. One other Asia bond fund liquidated a couple years ago. That makes it hard to construct a meaningful peer comparison. Morningstar had it as "world bond," where it was a four-star fund then moved it to "emerging markets bond," where it is a four-star fund.
That said, it's a poor fit - for purposes of benchmarking - with the group. I checked the correlations between the six Great Owl EM bond funds, looking at both their correlations with one another and their correlation with Matthews. Their inter-group correlation is in the mid-90s, their correlation with Matthews is in the mid-70s.
I own shares and have since launch. I'm impressed with Ms. Kong and am persuaded by her argument about the shift in the world financial capitals from New York and London to Asia. Modest correlation to the US bond market, about .53.
"Strategic" was all the rage in fund naming once. Not so much now. These things come and go.
David

JP Morgan ETFs:
https://am.jpmorgan.com/blob-gim/1383650763805/83456/2019 Exchange-Traded Funds Capital Gains Estimates.pdf

Yes, TRRIX looks good to me, apart from the paltry dividends. I still am enjoying my own mix. In order of size: PRWCX RPSIX PRSNX PTIAX PRIDX VEIRX (wife's 403b soon to be moved to TRP as a rollover IRA.) and lastly, PRDSX. .....In full retirement, and wife will commence work again in 2020. I'm paying monthly rent. Nobody wants to still be doing that in retirement, but it simplifies everything, with water and electric included. And I'm rid of a house the family had owned since 1959--- which I've hated for as long as I can remember. And snow is now a thing of the past for us. ...Though I did get caught in the rain on my walk today. 5 mins. from the house. The little guy here just lights up your heart when he smiles at you. We're sharing with cousins. It really feels like FAMILY. :)

Jeffrey Gundlach: The US stock market ‘will get crushed’ in the next recession
Julia La Roche
Yahoo FinanceDecember 2, 2019, 6:14 PM CST
Influential bond investor Jeffrey Gundlach, the CEO of $150 billion DoubleLine Capital, sees a scenario where U.S. stocks get crushed in the next recession — and likely won't recover for quite some time to come.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gundlach-the-us-will-get-crushed-in-the-next-recession-001139205.html
What else is new?...last time lost 55% dows to 5.5k
This time dows 10k to 15k bottom in 12 or 24 or to 36 months?

“we got the name wrong on our first try” or “we’re not achieving what our fund name suggests”?

I get your point. Not knowledgeable about these guys, so I’ll take a pass.
About 8-10 years ago T Rowe did the same thing with TRRIX. Changed name from “Retirement Income Fund” to “Retirement Balanced Fund.” I was fine with that. I took them at their word that the new name better reflected the fund’s existing framework. Possibly the “income” part of the original name was misleading to some investors and suggested a less risky approach than the fund pursues. Also (I think importantly) prevailing interest rates in the U.S. and globally had fallen steeply during the fund’s relatively brief existence so that less income was being generated from the bond component than earlier envisioned.
Another one that baffled me a bit was TRIGX. Initially it was named T. Rowe Price International Growth and Income Fund. Than (also about 8-10 years ago) they renamed it International Value Equity Fund. They gave the same reason: to more accurately represent the investment approach the fund follows.
Shakespeare might say, “What’s in a name ...?” For mutual fund managers who find themselves in the midst of an investor class action lawsuit, perhaps quite a bit. Case in point - Oppenheimer’s “Core Bond Fund” which lost 36% in 2008. http://shareholdersfoundation.com/case/oppenheimer-core-bond-fund-investors-class-action-lawsuit-05282009 One can surmise that the litigation, ill will and investor exodus occasioned by this episode did much to hasten the demise of Oppenheimer.

Hi @ Ralph
Nope, not too old; but some digging around is needed.
The link below (PREMIUM) should take you to the sign-up page for Premium membership.
I do read in the statement that membership is $100, this is NOW $120.
I will tag @David_Snowball in this, so that he may confirm the link and price are correct.
PREMIUM
Premium page #2, is more descriptive of Premium, but also has clickable links in the text to allow for membership.
PREMIUM PAGE #2
Mailing address: (for check payment)
Mutual Fund Observer, Inc.
5456 Marquette Street
Davenport, IA 52806
Take care of you and yours,
Catch

Wellesley (VWIAX) is better than TRRIX for performance + risk attributes + lower ER. See the results (here)

performance information is being updated, a little behind real time in my experience, and sometimes you have to start over w the single listing, in other words not just punching F5 for a refresh of the five you were comparing ...

David Snowball's Portfolio Pruning Primer ("PPP?) contains a gem of a comedic sentence:
"You have no more prospect of keeping track of 15 funds running around your portfolio than you have of keeping track of 15 toddlers running around your house." Five minutes later, after I was done laughing, I thought to myself, "but wait, a minute, last time he posted his own portfolio it contained more than 10 investments, and that's more than the fingers on the hand recommendation? "
David, have I got that wrong? What am I missing?