I see all sorts of signs of a market top or at least a 5% to 10% pullback. The problem is too many others do too. And won't we get that infamous 3 steps and a stumble rule come Wednesday (or is that outdated)

@dryflower: Here are some Large Company Stock Fund returns over 1,3,5,10,20 years. Returns as of 2/28/17.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/investing/T041-S001-top-performing-mutual-funds/index.php

What is the highest annualized rate of return of which you are aware for a mutual fund over an extended time period, say 15, 20, or 30 years? I know that before the weaker performance this century, Templeton Growth Fund (TEPLX) had compounded at something north of 13% annualized for about 50 years. As of late 2016, the fund company says its inception to date return was 11.86%.
What do y'all think is the highest annualized return one could hope for from a diversified equity mutual fund over the coming couple of decades?

VintageFreak,
I like your mutual series funds very much.....smart choices. But, Forester funds.....what do you see there? FVALX has negative average annual returns for the last 5 years with a 1.26 ER. INTLX is not much better with a 1.36 ER. I would put more money in the mutual series funds and skip these.....just saying. The info I cited is from Fidelity.
God bless
the Pudd

You'll find my comments on the Investment News page. In short, M* has been selling advisers "managed portfolios" for years. They had been picking funds and allocations on paper, leaving it to the advisers to buy.
All this seems to be doing is taking that process in-house, where a M* fund hires the same managers, allocates the same sleeves, and then presents the prepackaged "managed portfolio" in a single fund to advisers.
https://corporate.morningstar.com/us/documents/Brochures/Bifold-MIS-MF-TAMP200-0516.pdf

@VintageFreak- Reopened a small position in The Income Fund of America (been some years since we had that) but you should be OK because I went with the AMECX version. FYI, about the only difference that I can see is a slightly lower ER, IFAFX 0.65% vs AMECX 0.56% . I'm guessing the difference covers the NTF arrangement with brokers, as compared to buying directly from AF.

@MFO Members On 3/9/09 PXD was 12.00 per share, on 3/9/17 it closed at 187, a 1451% increase.
Regards,
Ted

I think E.R. should be evaluated based on the way the funds invests. If you are a closet indexer and charging 1.25% then that's robbery.
You can't expect to buy a Long/short or alternative fund for 0.25%.
Returns are always quoted after expenses. E.R. is a hurdle to higher performance. To the extent that hurdle is overcome, it is not news E.R. doesn't matter.

I will also note that fees always have a negative impact on investor returns. ... Mutual fund managers never have a losing year when their funds have negative years, the investor does. ER is paid regardless as to whether the investor subtract the fee from gains or adds the fee to losses.

Morningstar: "Zero or negative expense ratios are rare but not unprecedented." The article contains examples and links. The ones I had in mind were the Bridgeway funds the article leads with. They are especially relevant as they have performance adjustments that can make fund expenses go negative. The fund managers most definitely had a losing year.
Since the article is old, and some of those links are dead, I'll help out a little. The Elon Musk backed funds referenced are also described in this Bloomberg article.

right, and that's how it's sold as well
my comment based off your 50% figure was uninformed and misleading

Hi Guys,
A study based on 1 year of performance results that was completed with a poorly documented procedure is a recipe for a faulty study. Here is a Link to a Morningstar study that has a lot more meat to it.
https://corporate1.morningstar.com/DownloadRPSpdf.aspx?url=http://rps.morningstar.com/api/v2/654566632/documents/752589/file
Not a shock that costs matter (perhaps matter most) across all asset categories.
Best Wishes

>> Each of the etfs should get 12.5% and the bond fund should get 50%
? That would make it much more a balanced fund than I was arguing earlier or elsewhere. But the only balanced fund whose bonds goosed results rather than chiefly modulating them. (Still not fully persuaded given the tracking of CAPE with persistent slight but real outperformance.)

And yet the article complains about12b-1 fees (which are already accounted for in the ERs). If expenses don't matter, then why complain about a fee?
The article is short and doesn't describe how the study was done. (The non-print version doesn't contain any links to more detail or the study cited.) For all we know (and from the brief description given), the study didn't control for obvious factors like number of funds in a category, or performance by category.
For example, the top performing category in 2015 appears to be Japan funds. Those funds aren't cheap. A fund's category is likely to have a much more significant impact on performance than expenses, especially over a short period of time. (On the other hand, lots of category winners appear to be muni funds, which should have lower costs than other categories - that shows the problem in taking superficial looks at data.)
Similarly, the size of a category will tend to skew results. Those muni funds? I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure there are a lot less of them than vanilla large cap funds, which are typically more expensive. So even if muni funds did better, there may not be enough of them to significantly affect a linear regression (2015 performance vs. ER).
GIGO on so many levels, at least until some more details are provided.
(My guesstimate about Japan funds being top performers came from doing a M* search on funds between 48% and 52% category ranking in 2015 - to approximate the category average - then sorting by 2015 absolute performance. Top "average" fund was CNJFX, a dismal 1* fund that apparently had a decent 2015. Again illustrating how one year is meaningless.)

Fees are never about the short-term but the long. It is the cumulative drag over time that really impacts funds as year after year they must cross that fee hurdle. So looking at just one year performance in 2015 is rather dim.

FYI: Birinyi Associates did something amazing. They took all funds with at least a billion dollars in assets under management and a five-year track record and plotted them on a graph showing the association between 2015 performance and expenses.
What did they find? “Expense-wise there was no difference between winners and losers. Period,” writes Jeffrey Yale Rubin. In fact, the funds that charged the most actually outperformed.
Regards,
Ted
http://blogs.barrons.com/focusonfunds/2017/03/08/its-not-the-fees/tab/print/

Hi @VintageFreak and others,
I think VF is on to something here ... as Jeffrey Saut of Raymond James wrote in one of his recent weekly commetaries sometimes it's best to just sit.
How many of us have been expecting a dip in the markets? I have for one have so these technicals are a signal this could develop into the dip (possibly pullback) many of us have been looking for. From the S&P 500 Index's recent high of March 1st (2396) to it's close on March 8th (2363), a time period of 1week, the Index is down 1.37%. So, if you were looking for a 3% dip (2325) to 5% pullback (2275) as I am we still have a ways to go.
With the earnings outlook ... I just do not see a big correction in the stock market taking place unless forward earnings fail to materialize.
Old_Skeet

MikeM said "But all this talk about this "could" happen to the fund or the fund "could" be susceptible to that... I don't see where that should scare people away."
I agree. The goal wasn't to scare anyone away but rather to learn something about a fund I didn't understand very well previously and, because it's performance has been so good since inception, to figure out whether that's durable and/or what could derail it.
I don't think there's anything crazy about what either MikeM or davidrmoran are doing. As an approximation you can put the four sector etfs and a bond proxy into M*'s instant X-ray. You can use another Doubleline bond fund if you think one is reasonable or you can just use a Total Bond Market fund, which won't do a great job but I don't think its the most important part. Each of the etfs should get 12.5% and the bond fund should get 50% because that's effectively what he's doing, he's using the assets twice. Obviously the equity side is focused on the 4 sectors but everything else, from a statistical point of view, doesn't seem bad to me. The stock stats are a little high compared to the total S&P but I'd think that's what you'd expect. CAPE compares earnings to what you'd expect over the business cycle while M* just looks at the present.

@VintageFreak- With the market up 5.5% YTD, if DSENX was shorting consistently how could they be beating the market at 7.4%? That doesn't seem to compute.

I just meant it must have positions by design that are supposed to go up when market is down. However @DavidV had a better answer, so I'm wrong.

Pimco has always been a fan of derivatives also. For example PSPDX has been at it since 1993:
"PIMCO helped pioneer the innovative StocksPLUS strategy in 1986 – the same award-winning approach used across our “PLUS” portfolios, which capitalizes on the depth and breadth of PIMCO’s global resources. Today, we manage “PLUS” portfolios across a range of objectives and market exposures."
"The investment seeks total return which exceeds that of the S&P 500 Index. The fund seeks to exceed the total return of the S&P 500 Index by investing under normal circumstances in S&P 500 Index derivatives, backed by a portfolio of Fixed Income Instruments. "Fixed Income Instruments" include bonds, debt securities and other similar instruments issued by various U.S. and non-U.S. public- or private-sector entities. It may invest up to 30% of its total assets in securities denominated in foreign currencies and may invest beyond this limit in U.S. dollar-denominated securities of foreign issuers. "

FWIW, here's what Schwab is showing: