@Maurice: SPY value $239 Billion
Regards,
Ted

Its total assets. SP500 etf 'value' might mislead.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1283381/000139834417012114/fp0028112_497.htm
497 1 fp0028112_497.htm
September 19, 2017
TFS CAPITAL INVESTMENT TRUST
(the “Trust”)
TFS Market Neutral Fund (TFSMX)
TFS Small Cap Fund (TFSSX)
TFS Hedged Futures Fund (TFSHX)
Supplement to the Prospectuses dated March 1, 2017
Effective immediately, TFS Market Neutral Fund, TFS Small Cap Fund, and TFS Hedged Futures Fund (each a “Fund” and collectively the “Funds”) have terminated the public offering of their shares and will discontinue each Fund’s operations on or about October 27, 2017 (the “Liquidation Date”). Shares of the Funds are no longer available for purchase, including for purchases through Automatic Investment Plans. The Funds intend to make a final distribution of capital gains and income on or about September 29, 2017.
At a meeting of the Board of Trustees held on September 19, 2017 (the “Board Meeting”), the Board of Trustees, in consultation with the Trust’s investment adviser, TFS Capital LLC (the “Adviser”), determined, to liquidate the Trust based on, among other factors, the Adviser’s belief that it would be in the best interests of the Funds and their shareholders to discontinue each Fund’s operations. Through the Liquidation Date, the Adviser will continue to waive fees and reimburse expenses of each Fund, as necessary, to maintain each Fund’s fees and expenses at their current level, as specified in the Funds’ Prospectuses dated March 1, 2017.
At the Board Meeting, the Board of Trustees directed that with respect to each Fund: (i) all or substantially all of the Fund’s portfolio securities be liquidated in an orderly manner no later than September 29, 2017; and (ii) all or substantially all outstanding shareholder accounts on the Liquidation Date will be closed and the proceeds of each account would be sent to the shareholder’s address of record or to such other address as directed by the shareholder, including special instructions that may be needed for Individual Retirement Accounts (“IRAs”) and qualified pension and profit sharing fund accounts. Because of the liquidation of each Fund’s portfolio securities described above, each Fund’s normal exposure to its investment strategy will be reduced and eventually eliminated. Accordingly, shareholders should not expect any of the Funds to achieve its stated investment objective.
Shareholders may continue to freely redeem their shares of the Funds on each business day during the Trust’s liquidation process.
This transaction will be considered for tax purposes a sale of Fund shares by shareholders, and shareholders should consult with their own tax advisors to ensure its proper treatment on their income tax returns. In addition, shareholders invested through an IRA or other tax-deferred account should consult the rules regarding the reinvestment of these assets. To avoid a potential tax issue, shareholders may choose to authorize, prior to the Liquidation Date, a direct transfer of their retirement account assets to another tax-deferred retirement account. Typically, shareholders have 60 days from the Liquidation Date to invest the proceeds in another IRA or qualified retirement account; otherwise the liquidation proceeds may be required to be included in the shareholder’s taxable income for the current tax year.
If you have any questions regarding any Fund, please call 1-888-534-2001.
Investors Should Retain this Supplement for Future Reference

Target date funds are designed as set-and-forget investments for those who want to have nothing to do with their investments. (I doubt many people here fall into that category.)
It's rarely pointed out (as this article does in its first paragraph), that they don't work as intended if you throw in other investments: "Investors who mix target-date funds with other long-term equity or fixed income products could be inadvertently sabotaging their investment goals....This could lead to skewed asset allocations, over-diversification and potentially poor risk-adjusted returns."
For such investors, if they don't like the glide path, they can pick another fund family or a different target date. They don't have to mix and match - that defeats the autopilot objective. For most people, target date funds are best used as all-or-nothing.
I do see a couple of reasons why one might want to invest in more than a single target date fund. One is because a person might have different objectives. The standard objective is retirement. But one might also have a 529 plan. These plans often offer target date funds (also called age-date, as in these Calif. 529 funds). Obviously two different glide paths are appropriate for college and retirement.
Another reason is to do the complete opposite of what target date funds are designed for. Deconstruct them, use their components as part of your personally managed portfolio. Though I'd be more inclined to crack open funds of funds that don't have glide paths.
For example, if you want access to Vanguard Alternative Strategies Fund (VASFX), you can get by investing in Vanguard Managed Payout Fund (VPGDX). 1/8 of that fund is VASFX. You do have to like the other funds in the package as well, and build your portfolio around them to make this work.

"This must be true, unless you believe that $1 is not worth $1."
Something I agree with. In the 90s, I walked into a Dreyfus office, and commented that I didn't see a difference between growth funds and growth & income funds (the latter placing some emphasis on dividends). The response was "someday you will". It's some day, and I still don't. A buck of total return is still a buck.
It's a matter of cause and effect. A company paying or not paying a dividend doesn't make it different, but because a company is different (e.g. cash cow business vs. high tech) it may be more likely to pay a dividend.
I tried posting a similar comment on ETF.com more than a day ago. It's a moderated site that apparently doesn't appreciate comments on this column (there are none as of now). FWIW, here's what I tried to post:
"Less diversified portfolios are less efficient because they have a higher potential dispersion of returns without any compensation in the form of higher forward-looking return expectations (__assuming the exposure to investment factors are the same__)."
But they're not the same in the case of dividend growth ("lower volatility and [higher] quality") and high dividend ("value and lower volatility") strategies. In fact, with coefficients of correlation at 89% and 95%, these strategies function pretty well as proxies for those different investment factors.
Whether one wants to emphasize those particular factors is a different question. Personally, I've always looked for total return, regardless of whether a fund was growth oriented, equity income focused, whatever. But if you want to say that high dividend funds don't reward investors, it seems you also have to say that there hasn't been a value premium in the market (and houses like DFA have simply been lucky).

(middle of the screen)(similar to Ted's post)
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1031661/000162612917000530/tat-497_091917.htm
...Reorganization of the Third Avenue International Value Fund into the Third Avenue Value Fund
On September 19, 2017, Third Avenue Management LLC announced that it intends to seek approval from the Boards of Trustees of the Third Avenue Value Fund (the "Value Fund") and the Third Avenue International Value Fund (the "International Value Fund"), and the shareholders of the International Value Fund, of an Agreement and Plan of Reorganization providing for the transfer of the International Value Fund's assets to the Value Fund in a tax-free exchange for shares of the Value Fund and the assumption by the Value Fund of the International Value Fund's stated liabilities, the distribution of such shares of the Acquiring Fund to Fund shareholders and the subsequent termination of the International Value Fund (the "Reorganization").
In anticipation of the Reorganization, effective on or about September 28, 2017 (the "Sales Discontinuance Date"), the International Value Fund will be closed to any investments for new accounts. Shareholders of the International Value Fund as of the Sales Discontinuance Date may continue to make additional purchases and to reinvest dividends and capital gains into their existing International Value Fund accounts up until the time of the Reorganization.
If the Boards approve the Agreement, a Prospectus/Proxy Statement with respect to the proposed Reorganization will be mailed prior to the meeting to International Value Fund shareholders. The Prospectus/Proxy Statement will describe the Value Fund and other matters. Investors may obtain a free copy of the Prospectus of the Value Fund by calling 1-800-443-1021...

When I asked Siri for a market report driving today she answered: "Not much happening. Dow's up just a tad by 66 points". Siri's neither real nor a reliable indicator. But does point to how little a 50 or 100 point change represents today. I haven't the foggiest idea where we're going (pretty normal).
Old saying about "Bulls make money. Bears make money ... " ?

Hmmm ... Generally not superstitious. But have a thing about the number 13. Might date back to the ill-fated Apollo 13 which launched @13:13 CST on April 11, 1970 and experienced a catestrophic explosion on April 13. http://www.apollo-13.com/no13.html
When given a choice, I avoid 13 in all manners. I'd never open a new mutual fund account for $13,000. Whereas $12,500 or $14,000 would be fine. Same would apply to booking the 13th floor at a hotel or the number of tomatos I might purchase.
I won't let that phobia interfere with higher priorities. On a flight to London this fall I booked seat 13A in both directions (and not sweating it). Put simply, it was the best available seat at the price I wanted to pay. Have to wonder if other passengers with a stronger aversion to 13 than I might have earlier "passed" on this choice seat.
---
Thomas Paine: "I have as little superstition in me as any man living ..."

FYI: For all the talk about how bad a month September has historically been for US equities, this September surely isn’t fitting the mold. Through Monday afternoon, the S&P 500 has gained 1.4%, which is a good return for the first half of any month, let alone the month that has historically been weaker than any other month. Looking a little bit deeper, though, it should be noted that the first half of September has historically been considerably stronger than the second half of the month. The chart below shows a distribution of the median returns for every stock in the S&P 500 during the first half of September over the last ten years. As you can plainly see, well over half of the stocks in the index have seen gains during the first half of the month; 359 to be exact. Overall, the median return for each stock in the S&P 500 is 1.02% with Ulta Beauty (ULTA) leading the way higher with a median gain of 18.43%, while Advanced Auto Parts (AAP) brings up the rear falling 3.07%.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.bespokepremium.com/think-big-blog/wasnt-september-supposed-to-be-a-bad-month-for-stocks/

FYI: A few good screens can whittle the whole fund universe to fewer than 50 funds.
Regards,
Ted
http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=825546

FYI: Canny stock investors are like judges in a quirky beauty contest. They aren’t looking for real beauty but for qualities that other people believe still other people will find beautiful.
That was the observation of John Maynard Keynes, who suggested that investors do not actually make money by picking the best companies, but by picking stocks that waves of other traders will want to buy.
Investing, in other words, is an exercise in mass psychology.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/business/stock-market-mass-psychology.html?mcubz=3

" Also promised—repealing the Affordable Care Act, which subsidizes muni-bond-financed health-care facilities via Medicaid reimbursements."
This seems to be conflating two different factors - changes in Medicaid coverage (which pays for hospital services just as "regular" insurance pays for services), and changes to hospital subsidies that are made via Medicaid.
The ACA reduced the number of uninsured. The number of individuals getting insurance from private insurers (not through the government or employer) increased by several million. The number of individuals covered by Medicaid increased even more significantly.
Because many more individuals were covered, hospitals had to absorb the costs for many fewer people. If you were to remove the Medicaid expansion and eliminate the individual mandate, the number of people covered would drop, and hospital costs would regress.
Such changes in coverage would have constituted the largest impact that the AHCA would have on hospitals. But this is just changing the number of people covered, not the subsidies to hospitals (except in an indirect sense, like saying that hospitals are subsidized because people receive tax subsidies for buying insurance).
The writers of the ACA recognized that because of better coverage, hospitals would be spending less providing for the uninsured. So they put a provision into the ACA to cut actual hospital subsidies. These subsidies are called disproportionate share hospital (DSH) funding. While these cuts have been repeatedly deferred, they are currently scheduled to kick in on Oct. 1.
Modern Healthcare, Billions in federal uncompensated-care funds to be cut starting in October
The AHCA (by undoing the ACA) would have restored these subsidies - the opposite of what the article seems to be saying.
On balance, the AHCA would indeed have cost the hospitals about $2B/year over the next decade, but that's more because people would have lost coverage (and thus cost hospitals more to take in as patients), than it is because of changes to subsidies (which would have been restored).
See Exhibit 3 in:
The Commonwealth Fund, The Financial Impact of the American Health Care Act’s Medicaid Provisions on Safety-Net Hospitals
Both Medicaid and Medicare have DSH programs.
Here's a short column on Medicaid's DSH. It talks about how the SC ruling that Medicaid expansion was optional hurt the hospitals and motivated the government to delay Medicaid's DSH cuts.

Medicare's use of DSH to subsidize care of the poor is a bit more convoluted (since it gradually evolved from a payment to care for higher-maintenance poor seniors to a more general payment to support hospitals serving the poor of all ages). AFAIK, these subsidies are not affected by any proposals floating around Congress now.
There are many moving parts here. A lot of effort went into ensuring that facilities were able to serve everyone regardless of economic status. It's really not fair for me to pick on a sentence or two that Lewis wrote in a space-limited column. I'm not doing the issue much justice here, either. If you care, and have the time, look through some of the links above.

@Crash
You noted: "Small-caps have been lagging, this year."
>>>One would have to define "which" small caps. The fund category returns at the below link indicates the happy areas of all cap sizes in U.S. equity. The current trend favors growth; with perhaps value being value for good reasons. One might expect that value will become so inexpensive that the algo machines will signal a buy. I recall a year or two backwards that growth in this area was not so happy.
M* All category returns
http://news.morningstar.com/fund-category-returns/
M* Small Blend...........click onto the YTD column header to sort list for best performance YTD.
http://news.morningstar.com/fund-category-returns/small-blend/$FOCA$SB.aspx
Just for the heck of it, a chart of sm. cap value, growth and a Vanguard sm. cap blend; with the selections chosen at random.
http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?SLYV,SLYG,NAESX&n=1009&O=011000
>>>Mr. Snowball described the background of the managers of this fund, per your link.
However, with management's E.R. of 1.51%; one would expect great things, eh? The fund is ahead of the crowd average for small cap blend (7.6% vs 4.1%, more or less); but there are currently other funds much ahead of both, at this time.
I don't find any particular attraction to this fund, if I were investigating this sector area.
What draws you to this fund?
My Sunday morning two cents worth.
Now back to chores while Michigan weather remains pleasant.
Respectfully,
Catch

Ted seemed to have had an off day yesterday. NLIP (no link in post) here, either.
http://www.morningstar.com/articles/825339/theres-likely-more-risk-and-less-reward-in-foreign-small-caps.html
A confusing title/column. More risk and less reward than what? The column shows that foreign small caps have had the same risk (as measured by volatility) as foreign large caps and greater rewards. Though it argues that this may have been a statistical anomaly.

Plus one link that doesn't exist but should:
http://www.morningstar.com/articles/825625/5-funds-that-dont-exist-but-should.html

Nice. Impressed you did not get into covariance.
About cash, all I was pointing out is that no one invests in cash. Actual investing practice. Some like to quip that cash is what you do not in vest in, by definition. Whatever. Not that everyone and his mother does not write 'cash investments' and 'cash waiting to be invested', true. I sometimes write this stuff for a living, and have typed the phrase 'cash investments' many times. I do try not to write 'riskless investment', and have successfully argued for writing around the wording to emphasize the risklessness and get rid of 'investment'. Just to try and adhere to the lawyers' vetting spirit of investor warning, blah blah. It has worked a few times.
About negative correlation vs noncorrelation, I was commenting in the context of Maurice's 'losing money' phrase. That is, necessarily losing money in comparison. Not a good way to phrase it. though. nor, as you explain, even of thinking about it. Like ads for gold. 'Behavior unlike equities', even in a bull market (they never qualify it that way), as it can go ever so much higher. Etc.
Can you think of assets (not cash) that do not move together at all? Interesting about stocks' / bonds' being phase-shifted.
Finally, did I mention to you long ago the first few months of CD player shipments from Japan (35y ago) which had a function button saying 'random' / 'random play', and the customers returned them to the store after they played the CD tracks 1,3,6,3,3 ?

No way this is going to be a short post, because people have a mistaken fixation on zero, such as: "I'll wait until my returns get back to zero before selling, that way I won't have lost anything."
Similar fixation with zero with respect to volatility and correlation. Volatility is variation about the mean return, not around zero. So two assets could have perfectly inverse (negative) correlation - as differentiated from being uncorrelated - and still both could always be rising.
Even if one chooses to be lax with wording and use "uncorrelated" to mean negatively correlated, this shows that when everything else is going up, an "uncorrelated" (negatively correlated) asset does not need to be going down. It could just be rising less than its mean (average) Thus, it is not mathematically true that "When everything (stocks, bonds, REITs, and more) rises in synch in a bull market, then [an "uncorrelated" asset] must necessarily [go down]".
Say you have two investments, one which rises 1% a month, give or take volatility, and another which rises 1% a month, give or take its volatility. They could have perfect negative correlation. One might rise (in percent) 1 + sin(month #), while the other might rise 1 - sin(month #). These assets move in perfect (inverse) unison. They both rise every month (since sin(x) ≤1), but when one zigs (rises faster than its mean), the other zags (rises slow than its mean).
Why am I going through all this detail? Because aside from revisiting what I tried to explain before, you asked about stocks and bonds. Bonds, on average, rise in every part of the business cycle. So if one looks only at whether an asset class is simply rising or falling (and not looking at how it's performing relative to its mean performance), one would conclude say that bonds must be closely correlated with cash - they both rise together. But that would be wrong. Cash doesn't correlate well with anything, including bonds.

The graph above is from a good Fidelity page on "How to invest using the business cycle". Stocks and bonds tend to be phase shifted, much like sin and cos, but not as cleanly. So while the correlation coefficient between stocks and bonds tends to be a low (positive) number, it doesn't mean that the performance of stocks and bonds is unrelated. (Nor does it mean that when stocks zig up, bonds will zag down, just that they may gain less than their average.)
Which gets us to Vanguard's precise statement that uncorrelated means that one would expect no systematic linear relationship.
First, linear. As I've been stating, a simple phase shift can produce two curves (say, stocks and bonds) with little linear relationship (like sin and cos). But they're hardly unrelated. Checking for phase shifts, autocorrelation, etc. is one of the first things one does in looking for patterns in time sequence data.
The word you're more concerned about is "expected". A thing with random variables is that the unexpected happens. It must, else the variables are not random. Toss a fair coin enough times and you will come up with ten heads in a row. Toss two coins (to represent stocks and bonds), and sooner or later they'll match 10 times, 20 times, however many times you choose, in a row.
In short, zero correlation does not imply independence, and independence does not mean variables must not show correlation over any arbitrary stretch of time (just that they're expected not to).
"zero correlation and uncorrelated synonymous, sure. Not worth using the term about in the first place. "
I think you missed the point of the bolded sentence, viz. that zero correlated (i.e. uncorrelated) assets don't move together at all. That directly contradicts the claim that an "uncorrelated asset is one that does the opposite".
I agree with you that, unlike the other terms above which have clear mathematical meanings, "reliably" (and hence "unreliably") are weak (vague) words. Outside of this thread, I don't think there's any question that these are extremely fuzzy terms.
"Unreliably" didn't come from a citation. I used the negation ("unreliably") of the word you introduced ("reliably"). Here, I took it on faith that you had some meaning in mind when writing "reliably". I tried to make sense of it, and used it accordingly.
Cash in the "actual investing world". Again, I tried to follow your lead. You suggested looking at how terms are used in journalistic idiom.
We can start with the term "riskless investment". As already discussed, "riskless" entails essentially zero volatility, and cash is the only asset that has that attribute (90 day treasuries, the usual benchmark, would meet the requirements for a MMF). If cash is not an investment, then "riskless investment" must be an oxymoron, albeit one in widespread use.
Moving on to Vanguard, that writes: "Cash investments can lower the overall risk of your portfolio and give you a place to hold money while you wait to invest it." Vanguard seems to be of two minds - cash is an investment awaiting investment. This is pretty typical. While one may not personally think of cash as an investment, and some in the "actual investing world" agree, it seems others don't (hence the ambiguity).
Much has been made of the fact that Schwab Intelligent Portfolios® (robo investments) have a high allocation to cash. Schwab calls this portion of the portfolio a "cash investment".
It defends its use of cash on its FAQ page (see the question "How do you approach cash ..."). There, Schwab says that cash provides stability and liquidity, but also diversification and possible inflation protection. The latter two attributes are usually ascribed to investments.
Finally, TD1 wrote of SRRIX as a "100% non-correlated asset". The meaning in that post was pretty clear and precise, regardless of how sloppily "journalists" might use the term. That's what Maurice was writing about, and what you were responding to when you stated that when everything else was moving up, such a non-correlated asset must necessarily move down (move in the opposite direction).
Likewise, when I wrote "unreliably", I was using it to mean the opposite ("un") of whatever "realiably" meant in the post to which I was responding. Context matters.

FYI: (Click On Article Title At Top Of Google Search)
Unfulfilled promises of tax cuts, health-care repeal, and infrastructure spending have spurred municipal bonds higher this year.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&q=Political+Misfires+Mean+Good+News+for+Munis&oq=Political+Misfires+Mean+Good+News+for+Munis&gs_l=psy-ab.3..33i160k1.5933.5933.0.8066.3.2.0.0.0.0.77.77.1.2.0....0...1..64.psy-ab..1.2.153.6..35i39k1.76.6TwLV-zh-xE

FYI: They would be investment successes, although perhaps not commercial hits.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/

cat bonds are also included in a Pioneer offering HNW. the bonds plunged 16% on Friday, before Irma, as some predictions estimated damages of over $200bln and a wipe out of Fla insurers. on Monday those estimates were paired back to about $50bln, with about $20 bln of insured losses so cat bonds are back into recovery. one needs to note that in the Katrina aftermath they, too, have recovered and rallied.
so yes.. these are uncorrelated risks and returns. but, by its nature, people are happy with the perfect correlation in a bull market, with 'know-it-all comments' all around. efficient portfolio construction is not something everyone does as a hobby in their spare time.

Not sure how this has lost money over the past 3 years as it was up 25% over the past 3 years before IRMA and is still up 12.69% with essentially zero volatility (with the exception of the past 2 weeks). It also goes back to portfolio construction and that is why advisers use it. Take a look at the chart of AIG and Berkshire over that time period and then take a look at SRRIX. Volatility in those stocks is HUGE while SRRIX has next to none. It's about building a diversified portfolio where this is just one component. People pull from their portfolios over time and risk adjusted returns is most important. No client closes their eyes for 10 years and then opens them on the ten year anniversary to see how they did. How you get there day by day is most important. Modern portfolio theory.