Overheard in Washington: "Hrmm, that's not supposed to happen."
Buckle up. folks....Asia opens soon. And we're already limit-down on the US futures.

Dollar, Equity Futures Drop as Fed Slashes Rates (Bloomberg via Yahoo)
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/yen-extends-gains-fed-slashes-210909833.html

Futures on the S&P 500 fell 3.9%. The gauge advanced 9.3% on Friday.

Also because, as @PRESSmUP put it, "Smells like fear."

Dollar, Equity Futures Drop as Fed Slashes Rates (Bloomberg via Yahoo)
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/yen-extends-gains-fed-slashes-210909833.html

Futures on the S&P 500 fell 3.9%. The gauge advanced 9.3% on Friday.

Also because, as @PRESSmUP put it, "Smells like fear."

While PTIAX may have disappointed you, it has outperformed many other popular multisector funds the past week, month, and YTD.
Fund 1Wk 1Mo YTD
PTIAX -3.24 -0.56 1.45
PIMIX -4.64 -5.69 -4.54
VCFAX -2.72 -2.42 -1.07
PUCZX -7.59 -8.20 -6.61
JMUTX -4.52 -4.42 -2.99

MFO has long operated with one "master" discussion board, rather than Morningstar-like sub-forums. That reflected the desire of our community members to avoid fragmentation, and to avoid encouraging a drift away from the site's mission.
With time, we created "off-topic" as our version of the office water cooler (or hand sanitizer station).
Now, following thoughtful requests from several people and reservations from few, we've added "other investing" as a hub for speculations about whether Covid-19 will trigger a recession, central bankers will flee in luxury yachts, interest rates will go negative ... or whatever topics you think bear meaningfully on the future of markets and the economy.
The underlying rule for posting is the same: say something sensible, and say it will due respect for likelihood that other, bright, thoughtful people might well have reached a conclusion that differs from yours. Paging through The Plague, you hear Albert Camus say thoughtful things ("stupidity has a knack of getting its way") about life under enormous stress. One struck me:

The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything ...

I don't. You don't. We don't. But, as the Make Me Smart folks weekly aver, "None of us is as smart as all of us."
Take great care.

@Crash FWIW. These are just a few random thoughts....
It doesn't surprise me that many bond funds took a hit this week. Maybe the bond market is in an "early stage" and rather dysfunctional way saying the bottom is approaching on interest rates (zero percent is a pretty low rate!). Doesn't the NAV for most multisector bond funds tend to decrease as rates start to bump off a rate bottom? (I suspect the current bump was partly related to technical issues and is just a bump for the time being.)
I am not convinced the world as we know it is coming to an end. Its my sense the Fed will move heaven and earth to keep credit flowing and prevent a total meltdown in the bond markets...zero percent discount rate, quantitative easing, and new tricks yet to be unveiled. Here is a look at the state of the bond market. It can profitably be read just for the generalist highlights.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4332039-when-black-swans-collide
A recession is likely in the offing. So, I suspect the fiscal floodgates will open to prop up the economy over the next year or so.
https://washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/14/recession-economy-coronavirus-jobs/
My thought is the markets and the economy will move past this. The PTIAX dividends will keep arriving and management is skilled enough to make lemon aide out of the lemons. (I own some too.)
Maybe I acted too early, but on Friday I bought some more ZEOIX (down 2.94% year to date) and initiated a postion in RCTIX (down 0.56% year to date).

last 11 days down ~12%, SP500 down ~10%, bond sauce aggravating things rather than the opposite

But oh, those monthly dividends just keep adding more shares.

last 11 days down ~12%, SP500 down ~10%, bond sauce aggravating things rather than the opposite

https://www.kiplinger.com/article/investing/T041-C007-S001-vanguard-dividend-growth-reopens-enter-vdigx.html
/Vanguard Dividend Growth Reopens. Enter at Will.
Why you should consider investing in this terrific fund now./
We had van div etf love that fund 2019, now not doing too well. Now maybe good time considering to add more

@Crash: Thanks for making comment.
The two equity dividend paying funds that I have been buying (during the market swoon) are IDIVX with a yield of 4.0% and INUTX with a yield of 3.2%. And, yes they have been hit hard during this stock market sell-off. On Friday's stock market rebound, I have the S&P 500 Index being up for the day 9.27% while IDIVX was up 7.45% and INUTX was up 8.80%. And, in comparison, VEIRX with a 3% yield was up for the day 9.18%. And, so it goes. With this, they will recover as the market recovers and I will collect coupons and dividends while I wait.
In the stock market, investors have the trade day plus two days to settle their trades. This gives those shorting the trade day plu two days to cover and secure borrowed shares that cover their short positions. Otherwise, they would become a naked short position and a buy-in takes place thus keeping it form becoming illegal. The stock market is the only place that I know of where you can sell something that you don't own and not go to jail. Below is how shorting is supose to work.
When a trader or speculator engages in a practice known as short selling—or shorting a stock—they are essentially borrowing the shares. The short trader borrows shares from an existing owner through their brokerage account. They will then sell those borrowed shares at the current market price. Here, the objective is that they believe the share's market price will decrease before they are forced to pay back the borrowed shares allowing the trader to pocket the difference in the two share prices.
With this, I removed the word naked from my above script. But, there again, investors have trade plus two days to settle their accounts (Trade plus 2 days, aka T+2).
Now here is another take on how shorting is actually working in the markets. The below script comes from the Naked Short Site.
What is Naked Short Selling?
Before we get into Naked Short Selling let’s understand the basic premises around short selling.
Short selling is the sale of a security that is not owned by the seller.
The motivation for short selling is an investor's belief that a stock's price will decline, enabling the short seller to buy the stock back in the future at a lower price and make a profit.
Normally, when one short sells a stock, their broker will lend them the shares to sell. The loaned stock will come from the broker's own inventory, from another one of the firm's customers, or from another brokerage firm. The shares are sold and the proceeds are credited to the short seller's account. As payment for borrowing the shares, the short seller is charged a fee, quoted as an annualized percentage of the value of the loaned securities - i.e. a borrower of a stock with a 5% stock borrow rate will be charged $5 per year for every $100 of stock borrowed. Stock borrow rates change daily based in large part on the supply and demand to borrow that particular stock.
If the number of shares available to borrow is in short supply and/or great demand (which is often the case in highly shorted stocks), finding shares to borrow can be difficult and expensive.
A frequently asked question and outlined in our FAQ’s but let’s look at naked short selling from various perspectives.
How does naked short selling effect the stock market?
When a seller "naked short sells a stock" they do not own the shares they are selling and therefore are selling artificial shares. This is like counterfeiting a stock. This process creates an obvious unfair advantage to the seller and an imbalance in the market as the sell side is now increased with more shares – many of which are counterfeit. There is a time limit on how long the seller can sell these shares and be naked on the trade and the time limit is 3 days. This is where the RegSho rules come in and the data we track. If the sellers broker-dealer has not located a borrow to cover this short trade within 3 days they will need to purchase back the shares they have sold on the open market. This process is referred to as a "Buy In".
"When it comes to illicit short selling, the shorts win over 90% of the time"Naked Short – A license to steal?
Naked short selling is yet another creation of the securities industry and is in essence nothing more than a license to create counterfeit shares. When you are inflating the amount of stock that is outstanding in a company, this is considered counterfeiting. The rules justify the practice by saying it helps create smooth, efficient and orderly markets. Same stuff we have heard countless times around high-frequency trading, but in reality we believe this practice leads to shady characters creating unlimited supplies of counterfeit stocks which in turn results in your investment continuing to decline and you wondering why?
I am sure you here because you are a shareholder in a company that just continues to go down, and you have no idea why. Nothing material has happened but the trading doesn’t make any sense. We hear it all the times. Most CEO’s don’t even understand, and are baffled. The worst part is, good luck getting anyone to listen! There is a major epidemic going on right now with naked short selling right now.
It's funny when we hear CEO's say , I will just buy all the shares up and own the whole O/S and they wont be able to short me anymore. Really?
Read about: Global Links Corporation and see what happened when Robert Simpson purchased 100% of Global Link’s 1,158,064 shares. Then you will truly understand how the system is rigged. Back to counterfeiting…
I'm now thinking that one can come to a better understanding of how shorting is working in this high frequency trading market and why the short volume was elevated for the past couple of weeks.

@Old_Skeet: Noted SPY volume took off between 2/20 - 2/21. Any chance that was the start of Mr. Market drop ?

Related story

@_Old_Joe
Hi sir one large roll toilet paper or one large purell hand sanitizer =1 ounce gold by week_end

The Fed is expecting to cut 75 to 100 basis points. The race to the bottom is on! Next is to buy assets at even more higher level than 2008.

(I’m agnostic on the issue of duplicate links.)
More importantly - on the bond issue Catch raises, I’ve been searching for a word to characterize the present situation. A seldom used noun, “Confuscation” seems to best fit. The word is so rarely used that your spell-checker will likely try to override it.
Confuscation - Collins Dictionary: (1) n. “designed to confuse, e.g. a maze or puzzle” (link)
Just when everyone was expecting rates to decline forever in the lee of Fed rate cuts, bond rates have begun to rise. As Gomer Pyle would say, “Surprise, Surprise!”. The 10-year spiked from somewhere around 0.40% early in the week to near 0.90% at week’s end. That’s a doubling in less than a week’s time.
The Fed can try to set market rates with its peg on the overnight lending rate (and often succeeds), but there is no absolute guarantee longer rates will follow suit. Apparently, the “real world” bankers and bond vigilantes fear price inflation / depreciation of paper currencies more than the Federal Reserve does. I suspect this is all related to the repo and liquidity issues David and others have commented on in the past - but it’s a bit beyond my pay grade.
Bonds got hammered late in the week. If your bond fund has some credit risk (ie BBB / high yield) it probably held up better at week’s end as equity markets stormed ahead (good for lower rated bonds). The bloodbath Friday was more related, I think, to the high quality (rate sensitive) areas. By way of example, here’s one way it affected me: Over the past 7-10 days the nav on T. Rowe’s ultra-short bond fund TRBUX has tumbled from around $5.05 / $5.06 all the way down to $5.01 on Friday. That’s a huge decline for a sedate cash-equivalency fund like this one.
As Catch mentions, many other synergies investors had come to depend on over recent years decoupled last week as well. Miners suffered double-digit losses on several days (-13% on Friday alone). Absolute carnage. That move defied the prevailing wisdom among many gold “experts” that the miners were undervalued relative to gold. A lot of $$ was lost last week by those employing leverage to bet on miners outpacing the metals. Likely we haven’t yet seen all the fallout from that bust.

"Should I put all my 401k in bonds"
Yes, by all means. Be sure to let us know how that turns out.

+1.

Equity income-payers. Wife has been in VEIRX for quite a while. 3.16% yield right now. We've been happy with it, but it dropped like a lead-weight through the recent tumble. I suppose that's because those good dividend payers are the pillars or anchors of the markets: big, established names. So, when they fall, they fall hard.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3551661-gold-suffers-worst-week-in-eight-years
Gold bug not going well at least recently
Nothing works well now