Say you owned GSPKX and SPY on Oct 9, 2007. That's one of just a few covered call funds that existed and used covered calls back then.
Between then and March 9, 2009, you would have lost 55.17% with SPY. GSPKX would have provided you around 3% of protection with its covered call income. You still would have lost 52.22%.
Yogi has pointed out that the downside protection provided by covered calls is limited. That limitation is no more apparent than when losses are large. The two funds track all the way down. That's not diversification; the call writing just gives a little daylight between the lines. (Data from M* chart.)
In case one wonders (as I did) whether GSPKX was really a covered call fund during the GFC, here are excerpts from its prospectus, then and now:
From its prospectus, April 29, 2008:

The Fund invests primarily in a diversified portfolio of common stocks of large-cap U.S. issuers represented in the S&P 500 Index and maintains industry weightings similar to those of the Index. The Fund seeks to generate additional cash flow by the sale of call options on the S&P 500 Index or related ETFs. The volatility of the Fund’s portfolio is expected to be reduced by the Fund’s sale of call options. .

From its current summary prospectus:

The Fund invests, under normal circumstances, at least 80% of its net assets plus any borrowings for investment purposes (measured at the time of purchase) (“Net Assets”) in dividend-paying equity investments in large-cap U.S. issuers. ... The Fund seeks to generate additional cash flow and may reduce volatility by the sale of call options on the S&P 500® Index or other national or regional stock market indices (or related exchange-traded funds (“ETFs”)). The Fund expects that, under normal circumstances, it will sell call options in an amount that is between 20% and 75% of the value of the Fund’s portfolio. As the seller of the call options, the Fund will receive cash (the “premium”) from the purchaser

Not quite identical (the lawyers have had two decades to tweak the wording :-)) but close enough.

Do all markets recover in one month? If they do, then theses funds are for suckers. Those who lost 50% in 2000-02 and 2007-08 may want these funds as a diversifier.

The SP500 might be up YTD. How much further UP might it be, if not for all the Orange falderal?

Just follow the OP
"Please limit comments to how tariffs may impact the economy or investing.
This thread is not intended for political diatribes - please use Off Topic for that."
The SP500 was up over 2% today and is positive in 2025 regardless of all the tariffs=noise.
The facts are simple.

Funny you should mention GABXX @msf. I was looking at another of their funds, GABCX, last evening and when I ran it on Fidelity’s site I learned they don’t offer it, nor do they offer GABXX. Not a huge fan of Gabelli, but have owned / do own 1 or 2 of their CEFs.
You make excellent points. Complicating things is that I’ve stashed about a year’s anticipated IRA distributions in SPAXX. A slug of that is anticipated for infrastructure. Absolutely want that $$ in a money market fund. Just don’t want to actually “distribute” it until needed. So my question hinged more on cash as a longer term portfolio position, equal in weight to several other holdings (with occasional rebalancing back to neutral).
Re trading - I lost a bit when I sold JAAA in late April in order to buy equities and other risk assets.. JAAA dropped then (but much less than equities). So no! Don’t rely on it for trading needs. (I no longer own it.) I also lost on PRIHX which I loaded up on in my taxable account roughly 5-6 years ago. It had appeared so “safe” based on past performance. Yet when I finally sold out 3 or 4 years later it was worth less then at purchase.
Oh. Excuse me. I realize you’re not supposed to confess past mistakes here! :)

The approach depends on one's objectives. For day-to-day, checking account type usage (or hank's trading), IMHO only a MMF, like GABXX (7 day yield 4.30%) or VUSXX (7 day yield 4.23%), are a good match. I'm assuming a "checking usage" occurs in a taxable account where pure treasury holdings (state exempt) add value. And like bank accounts, these will not lose money (unless the underlying treasuries default).
What to use beyond that depends on one's objective(s). If one is looking at making periodic payments within the next few months (e.g. property taxes, mortgage payments, insurance premiums, income tax estimates, etc.) then buying individual treasuries maturing at the right time look good. The treasury yield curve is flat out to six months (around 4.35%)
If one is looking at opportunistically replenishing one's "checking" account, then looking at funds with durations up to two years (NEAR being at the outer fringe) makes sense. I'd focus more on drawdown recovery times than volatility risk. Alternatively, one might want to optimize risk/reward.
I asked Portfolio Visualizer to do that with eight funds. Four of those were mentioned here: USFR, PULS, TBUX, NEAR. Since PV doesn't optimize cash, I substituted ICSH for a MMF. For the other three I added two floating rate non-treasury funds, FFRHX (bank loan, junk) and FLRN (IG). Finally I added CBUDX which has gotten some mention on MFO.
PV reports that one optimizes reward/risk generally with a mix of CBUDX and FFRHX - the more risk one is willing to take, the more one adds FFRHX. It's only at the low end of risk (very low portfolio volatility) that one emphasizes USFR. And there's a narrow range of risks (volatility) of risk where ~10% in PULS helps. If it makes you feel more comfortable, an equal allocation of all eight of these funds is not far off the efficient frontier, so that works too.
If anyone is wondering why I didn't include RPHIX, it's because the results aren't that much different from using CBUDX. Substituting RPHIX for CBUDX, the mixture graph (which funds for what volatility) is fairly unchanged. Though the max Sharpe ratio is a higher as are the returns with RPHIX.

Raised portfolio cash from 10% to 15% with withdrawals from more aggressive holdings across the board. That somewhat understates actual short-term fixed income exposure because some of my ”investments” hold or attempt to replicate fixed income as well.
Another Marvell line: “But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot … “

@Mona, will done.
More tariffs consequences : Pigs can't fly: US high-end livestock breeders lose millions in China tariff fallout

Dr. Mike Lemmon's pigs, each valued between $2,500 and $5,000, were supposed to be on a plane bound for Hangzhou, China, from St. Louis in April, where’d they spend the flight snoring, play fighting and snacking on oats and husked corn before taking up residence at Chinese hog farms.
Instead, many went to a local Indiana slaughterhouse for less than $200 each after the Chinese buyer canceled the order within a week of China implementing retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. in April.
China is one of the biggest importers of American breeding pigs and other livestock genetic material such as cattle semen. These lucrative niche export markets had been growing, but dried up since U.S. President Donald Trump started a trade war with Beijing.
U.S. farmers and exporters said the dispute has already cost them millions of dollars and jeopardized prized trade relationships that took years to develop.

https://msn.com/en-ca/money/topstories/pigs-cant-fly-us-high-end-livestock-breeders-lose-millions-in-china-tariff-fallout/ar-AA1FgFK9
China plays the long games since they learned from the first tariffs war. Other agricultural products are not purchased from others countries while US farmers are having hard time swelling their products at an even slim margins. Brazil replaced the bulk of soybeans imported to China today, and no tariffs treat will change that.

Several comments, some I said before:
1) My system signaled a buy on April 12th (link).
2) The tariffs are a bargaining tool; get used to it.
3) The SP500 is down less than 1% in 2025 regardless of the politics. The SP500 made 50% in 2023-4, are you expecting another high % year in 2025?
BTW, Europe=VGK made over 20% in 2025 and since Feb is was clear, did you use it?
4) I'm sure Trump was shaking after he talked with Ursula von der Leyen...really?
5) David Rosenberg is one of the "best" predictors. See examples below.
In 10/2016 (link) "It’s ‘late in the game’ for market"
Reality: The SP500 made 27+% to the end of 2017 (link)
In 01/2019 (link) "A recession is virtually unavoidable this year"
Reality: There wasn't any recession in 2019 and the SP500 was up over 31%.

@Hank. For reasons of preservation of capital I live in the world between TRBUXX and common old Money Market Funds. For the last several years my Schwab MM has been more than satisfactory. I became overly enthusiastic about CD’s yielding above 5%. Those days are over but going forward it will depend on the direction of interest rates. I don’t need the income but I value preservation. And as the Bogleheads say,,, take your risk with equity stuff.

PRWCX 2025 Percentile Rank is at 27% = far from the bottom.
3-5-10-15 years Percentile Rank at 8-4-1-1
My portfolio is different = my system

DIVO has a different covered-call strategy. It has a concentrated equity portfolio and writes calls only on a handful of holdings. JEPI on the other hand uses SP500 index for call-writing.
DIVO has a slightly higher volatility (Relative SD 0.6861) but also does little better.

@msf offered this perspective in another thread:
“PRWCX is having one of its poorest performances relative to peers, all the way "down" to the 22nd percentile. Typically growth leaning, it has moved solidly into blend (37% of portfolio is LCBl) suggesting that Giroux also sees the markets moving toward value. (It is also open to investors who have at least $250K total invested at TRP.)”
As one who owned PRWCX almost from inception (1986) until I sold 2 or 3 years ago I’ve witnessed several different managers at the helm, a staggering growth of AUM and changes in how the fund positions itself (away from mid-cap and niche holdings). It’s a heavyweight now. Giroux speaks in terms of a 3-year time horizon and isn’t afraid to hold cash when he thinks equities are pricy. If past is prologue, the fund will again head to the front of the pack sometime during the 2 or 3 years. As always, I’m skeptical.
If you go back to the January Barron’s “Roundtable” 2 or 3 years ago (either 2022 or 2023) you will find Giroux was quite far off on his interest rate outlook - insisting rather stridently at the time that the 10-year Treasury would not finish the year above 3%. It finished quite a bit higher that year. Today it’s at 4.518%

Peeking at PRWCX's bond holdings - the top 4 are three UST Notes (5 yr) and a UST Bond (10 yr), followed by bank debt, corporates and other HY. But it appears that the fund has stayed away from Longer term debt.
Didn't realize how many call options this fund holds.

From this weekend’s WSJ
Investors continue to pile into ETFs at record pace
(If you’re not into sports betting at DraftKings, these products are the next best thing.)

FD said, ”I never believed in B&H for decades, the markets keep changing, and sometimes it's for years.”
Somewhat agree. Every 3-5 years I’ve found it prudent to alter the overall mix - even though it is intended as long-term B&H. An example was after real assets funds outperformed heavily around 2020-21. I dumped them. But during the past 6-12 months I reallocated to one, as these products have cooled off in recent years.
My “Strategery” doesn’t always work. Last year I sold a big position in PRPFX after it had surged 28% at one point during the year. Darned if it hasn’t continued on its winning ways this year, thanks to gold’s unparalleled rise plus its holdings in the Swiss Franc which is up around 10% YTD.
However, at this stage of life, ”A bird in the bag is worth two in the bush”.

From the article
"The so-called 60/40 portfolio – long recommended for investors who want to balance exposure to risk with a cushion of safer, steady income – calls for allocating 60 per cent of holdings to stocks and 40 per cent to bonds. While a bedrock for retirement savers over decades, the approach lost some of its lustre in recent years as its underlying mechanism fell out of whack, with US stocks and bonds moving more in lockstep rather than offsetting each other."
VBIAX is your typical 60/40.
I would not call 2.2% a great income.
BND, the US Tot Index made 1.46% annually in the last 10 years, a pretty low performance. Even 15 years at 2.2% is pretty low. BND lost more than 13% in 2022, where was the cusion?
I never believed in B&H for decades, the markets keep changing, and sometimes it's for years. I preferred to hold funds like PRWCX.

@WABAC. Sometime will have to post all the bullish momentum indicators that triggered beginning on April 9. A plethora of them. More than in August 1982 and March 2009. So far so good.

I would be interested in seeing them. I'm interested in the human desire to find patterns and meanings in patterns.
As an amateur historian I would also be interested in looking at the historical circumstances around the other eleven events that are similar to market action since April 9.
Starting tomorrow, the S&P 500 will have to find its way out of another tariff-induced pothole. The recent comments about Apple and the EU are the main reason my small holding in BUBIX has out-performed SPY since I bought it on March 4, and my money market has outperformed it YTD. They also put a sizeable dent in my taxable holdings that have remained largely untouched for quite a while.

These are many tempting ideas to read for one who has 95% of his egg in FIGXX earning 4.17%
Normally chasing a few basis points isn't worth the effort, but ...
Or you could roll short maturity Treasuries. ... About the same as VUSXX and you don't have to go to another institution to buy.

Thanks v v much. Appreciated and most considerate.
76% of that 95% is in Roths. Our tax situation therefore is meager, chiefly on (meaning AGI chiefly comprises) RMDs plus some CG and divs from a brokerage account.
Plus we have some senior prop tax circuitbreaker thing which I no longer understand fully.