https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/709364/000094937719000008/trf-rsm497.htm
497 1 trf-rsm497.htm
The Royce Fund
Supplement to the Investment, Service, and Institutional Class Shares Prospectus Dated May 1, 2018
Royce Special Equity Multi-Cap Fund
The Royce Fund’s Board of Trustees approved a plan of liquidation for Royce Special Equity Multi-Cap Fund, to be effective on February 25, 2019. The Fund is being liquidated primarily because it has not maintained assets at a sufficient level for it to be viable. As of December 17, 2018, the Fund was no longer offering its shares for purchase.
January 23, 2019
RSM-ISI-CLOSE
The Royce Fund
Supplement to the Consultant and R Class Shares Prospectus Dated May 1, 2018
Royce Special Equity Multi-Cap Fund
The Royce Fund’s Board of Trustees approved a plan of liquidation for Royce Special Equity Multi-Cap Fund, to be effective on February 25, 2019. The Fund is being liquidated primarily because it has not maintained assets at a sufficient level for it to be viable. As of December 17, 2018, the Fund was no longer offering its shares for purchase.
January 23, 2019
RSM-CR-CLOSE

Good Morning JohnN:
Regards,
Ted :) :)
https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/47112/m-buy-the-unloved-2019-edition#latest

https://www.morningstar.com/articles/907862/buy-the-unloved-2019-edition.html
This against-the-grain approach can lead you to cheap parts of the market that may be due for a rebound, albeit indirectly, because it looks at flows rather than valuations. We exclude those categories where flows are less-useful indicators, such as the target-date, trading, and leveraged categories. It is long-only and long-term-oriented.

Vanguards balanced fund which is closed to new investors

Vanguard closed the Investor share class of its index funds to most retail investors because it lowered the min of the Admiral class shares for these funds to $3K.
Check out VBIAX. It's open at Fidelity (with a TF, as always there), and you can even get in for less - just $2500.

BALFX (the F1 class available at Fidelity with no load and ntf) is a fine alternative to Vanguards balanced fund which is closed to new investors. New fund for me in 2018 when I decided to dial down the growth bent of porfolio. Fine history, and reasonable fees.

FYI: First, thanks to those readers who responded to my request for feedback on the Jan. Newsletter in which I discussed the phasing out of my forward-looking Model Portfolios, along with their allocation percentages to each recommended fund.
Among those who responded, most seemed happy enough with the changes discussed. However, several readers expressed regrets that Model Portfolios, as formerly defined, will no longer appear. And several stated they would particularly miss the suggested allocations.
In reality, these recommendations typically didn't change much from Quarter to Quarter. Therefore, if I had published new Model Portfolios in January, they would have been quite similar to the one published in Oct. '18. Since Model Portfolios, especially for stocks, were envisioned as remaining valid for up to five years, there is no reason to believe that a new Model Portfolio would be significantly different than one three months earlier.
Regards,
Ted
http://funds-newsletter.com/feb19-newsletter/feb19.htm

Whether @hank intended it this way or not, I'll take his post to convey the message that while Shakespeare penned a marvelous piece of rhetoric in which praise for Caesar was "buried" in language that ostensibly condemned him, the cited article is neither brilliantly wordsmithed nor does it employ a rhetorical device as implied by its headline.
What it buries are inconvenient facts. Such as index funds costing as much as 0.50% around 1980 (the start of one of the time frames used). And the oft repeated fact that one cannot invest directly in an index.
A more important fact, IMHO, that it ignores is that the rise in the use of index funds (and index ETFs) coincides with their use in wrap accounts. Those accounts charge the same 1% that the article is criticizing.

Can anybody think of good reasons to go with actively managed balanced funds (other than Vanguard) instead of their Balanced Index? Over the past 10 years the Balanced Index has been competitive with actively managed funds yadda yadda. But what about the future?

Perhaps, this money movement is driven in good part due to electronic trading systems with their repositioning of "hot" money.

When I think of “fund flows” I envision small investors entering relatively small exchanges on tablet devices or laptops. However, if the Lipper figures include institutional money funds that would paint a different picture. Unfortunately, the phantom article doesn’t say whether these numbers include institutional class funds.
Personally, my allocation hasn’t changed since last June when I moved to a more conservative approach due to age. At year’s end the “balanced” (equity rich) portion had dipped to its minimal 38%. It has since moved up to near 39%. (40% is target weight). “Real assets” adds another 10% of equity-like exposure. That area has done very well this year.
I try hard not to make decisions related to all the noise. Just hew to a simple model and rebalance quarterly - but only if an area comes in well outside the pre-sets. It’s what I know best.

FYI: Jack Bogle’s passing is a timely reason to spend a moment considering the growth of index-based investing, an approach he spent much of his professional life promoting with great success. Like many of you, we have watched indexing go from curiosity (in the 1980s) to limited acceptance (the 1990s) to widespread adoption (now). In terms of his impact on capital markets, Mr. Bogle has few peers in this or any century.
As far as what we can add to a discussion of index-based investing, we have three points to share with you today:
Regards,
Ted
https://ritholtz.com/2019/01/we-come-not-to-praise-indexing-but-to/

Perhaps, this money movement is driven in good part due to electronic trading systems with their repositioning of "hot" money. It will be interesting to see if fourth quarter corporate earnings and forward revenue projections can continue to support (and perhaps lift) current stock prices. It will also be interesting to see where the "hot" money flows during this week and if the electronic trading systems continue to buy stocks or if they begin to sell "booking some profit" thus driving stock prices lower.
By the way ... Old_Skeet's stock market barometer that follows the S&P 500 Index based upon its metrics scores the Index as being in fair value on the barometer's scale as of Friday's market close of 1/18/2019. With this, I'm thinking earnings are going to have to surprise to the upside with strong forward revenue projections for the Index to continue to move higher and move through the technical resistance levels. Otherwise, stock market volatility will be back in vogue.
Have a great day ... and, I wish all "Good Investing."
Old_Skeet

For some investors, such as ones who are interested primarily in stocks or ETFs, this may be a fine brokerage. But Merrill Edge doesn't seem to recognize that mutual funds are something different.
It seems to be stuck in the 80s, before fund supermarkets existed and when brokers processed trades only in whole shares. WIth Merrill Edge, one cannot specify a fractional number of shares of a fund to sell. One cannot transfer fractional shares, even between internal ME accounts (e.g. for a Roth conversion). Monthly statements report positions in whole shares, though the fractional amount does appear as a note in the position description as if it were the result of a DRIP purchase.
Even the way it handles closing out a position feels like the way an ETF or stock position might be handled. From a recent communication with ME:
"If you transfer all whole shares of a position out of your account, the fractional shares should liquidate automatically during the third week of the month. This is contingent upon the aggregate sum of fractional shares in our inventory being sufficient to total at least one whole share."
Once a month!? If you're lucky? Sounds like Sharebuilder's investment plan that trades only on Tuesdays.
It lists many funds having a $0 min for additional investments, but the website does not accept amounts under $1. For stocks that trade in whole shares, that doesn't matter (except for penny stocks, and ME blocked a test trade of the penny stock SHLDQ). But it does matter for mutual funds that trade with a granularity as small as one cent.
In one sense (dollars involved) none of this is a big deal. In another sense it's significant - rather than making mutual fund operations easy, it forces the investor to conform to its way of handling mundane requests. That's not fund-friendly.

■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ THIS POST IS IN VIOLATION OF MFO POSTING STANDARDS ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■
⇒ This post had few views and no comments. It has been artificially "bumped" into the COMMENTS + CATEGORY by the poster himself, without legitimate qualifying comments.
He has deliberately done this with the "b comment" so as to force it to your attention. He is well aware that this is in violation of MFO standard practice, but he believes himself to be exempt from such things, because he is the almighty TED.

RPSIX is not a bond fund - as I understand the term commonly to mean. Never has been. The Prospectus (at last check) allows the fund to commit anywhere from 5-25% of its assets to Price’s Equity and Income fund (PRFDX). If you don’t already know, the latter is a stock fund. Normally that commitment is in the 10-15% range. Additionally, RPSIX invests in HY, EM and international bond funds. Technically, those constitute various classes of bonds - but to lump that type of broadly (and aggressively) diversified bond portfolio under the heading “bond fund” is taking an awful lot of liberty with the term IMHO.
So what is RPSIX? It is a diversified income fund. Always has been. Probably always will be. I get questions re whether it’s a good investment. Hard to answer. Instead of looking at its (somewhat lackluster) chart, I prefer to look at the actual holdings and percentages committed to various underlying funds. If I like most of the holdings and can see how they strengthen my overall portfolio in some way, than I don’t give a hoot how the fund performed in the recent past.
Hope the author of this dubious article has been more accurate in attaching that “bond fund” label to the other funds he’s discussing. To read his headline / opening one would think the fund companies were trying to pull the wool over investors’ eyes. In the case of T. Rowe Price, anyway, that’s not the case.
Qualifier: When I looked at T. Rowe’s “Historical Performance” link, RPSIX did in fact surface under the category “Bond Funds.” I think it would be better placed under “Allocation Funds”. If the author only looked at the category list and didn’t bother to read the fund’s “Prospectus” - than I can see why he believed it to be a bond fund.
Here’s the link to that list: https://www.troweprice.com/personal-investing/mutual-funds/historical-performance.html

@hank: my great uncle (d. 1950's) owned a still-running GE refrigerator that was so old it earned him recognition from the company. I recall it sitting on legs an having a round refrigeration coil on top. It kept on running despite his demise.

Ah, the good old days before appliances were smart enough to retire themselves early.

FYI: Lipper’s fund asset groups (including both mutual funds and ETFs) experienced net outflows of $14.2 billion for the fund-flows trading week ended Wednesday, January 16. Money market funds (-$15.0 billion) were responsible for the majority of the net negative flows as investors put money back to work. Equity funds (-$4.4 billion) also contributed to the overall net outflows, while taxable bond funds and municipal debt funds had net inflows of $4.3 billion and $946 million, respectively.
Regards,
Ted

FYI: Some bond fund investors received an unpleasant surprise in the fourth quarter of 2018, when stock market losses stung their bond portfolios.
For the most part, meaningful equity stakes in bond funds are rare. Most bond fund managers stick to bonds, or hold only tiny positions in common stock that might come from a bankruptcy restructuring, or from the conversion to equity of a convertible bond. Of the 280-plus taxable-bond funds that we rate, about one in 10 held more than a couple of percentage points in stocks as of its most recent portfolio, and only a handful held more than a five-percentage-point stake.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.morningstar.com/articles/908355/are-there-stocks-in-your-bond-portfolio.html

@hank: my great uncle (d. 1950's) owned a still-running GE refrigerator that was so old it earned him recognition from the company. I recall it sitting on legs an having a round refrigeration coil on top. It kept on running despite his demise.

@slick, @Derf and @hank: Have no fear Old_Skeet still plans to maintain his 20% allocation to cash within his portfolio even though thus far this year cash has been a drag on my portfolio's performance as stocks rebounded from being extremely oversold during the recent stock market swoon.
As Derf noted many mutual funds still remain down for the rolling one year period including my current year-to-date leaders noted above. However, I have some funds that are up for the rolling one year period. My three fund leaders for the rolling one year period are Alger Small Cap Focus Fund (AOFAX) +18.42% ... Franklin Convertible Securities Fund (FISCX) +7.05% ... and, Fidelity Advisor Real Estate Income Fund (FRINX) +4.20% plus some others as well including my money market mutual funds.
Because of all the uncertainity that presently exist in the markets (and economy) I plan to continue to roll with my 20/40/40 well diversified "all weather" asset allocation as one can never tell where the electronic trading machines (hot money crowd) will next position as I am sure it might surprise.
Wishing all ... "Good Investing."
Old_Skeet

FYI: Global stocks started the week under pressure after data showed that China’s economy grew at its slowest pace in nearly three decades last year, the latest sign that the world economy is decelerating.
The Stoxx Europe 600 fell 0.4% in early morning trade, dragged down by banks and utility companies. Asian markets finished mostly higher, though they trimmed gains after the Chinese data release.
U.S. markets are closed Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Futures for the S&P 500 were down 0.4%.
The world’s second-largest economy grew 6.6% in 2018, the slowest annual pace China has recorded since 1990, official data showed Monday. The economic downturn, which has been sharper than Beijing expected, deepened in the last months of 2018, with fourth-quarter growth rising 6.4% from a year earlier.
The Chinese figures come amid a bruising trade fight with the U.S. and, coupled with lackluster numbers for the American and European economies, paint a picture of a slowing global economy.
Regards,
Ted
WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/global-stocks-weaken-as-chinas-growth-slows-11548060008
Bloomberg:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-20/asian-stocks-to-advance-as-global-rally-builds-markets-wrap?srnd=premium
IBD:
https://www.investors.com/market-trend/stock-market-today/dow-jones-futures-netflix-stock-microsoft-stock-salesforce-stock-visa-stock-adobe-stock-market-rally/
Reuters:
CNBC:
Europe:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-stocks/european-shares-stumble-after-weak-chinese-gdp-data-idUSKCN1PF0P6
Asia:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/asian-markets-rise-despite-slower-economic-growth-in-china-2019-01-20/print
Bonds:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/18/us-treasurys-bond-investors-monitor-trade-with-china-and-shutdown.html
Currencies:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/21/forex-markets-dollar-china-economic-data-in-focus.html
Oil:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/21/oil-markets-china-economy-opec-in-focus.html
Gold:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/21/gold-markets-the-fed-in-focus.html
Current Futures:
https://finviz.com/futures.ashx