http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=739025
PRHSX ( 19% of my portfolio) and TRLGX, PRWAX

@MFO Members: I'll repeat the same advice as a PRHSX shareholder regarding Taymour R. Tamaddon that I gave when Kris Jenner left, wait and watch !
Regards,
Ted
M* Slant:
http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=739025

We had an earlier discussion on PTIAX, where I said I'd contact the fund and get back on some of the details about the portfolio. I was finally able to speak at some length with one of the analysts, so here's the Cliff Notes version.
* Credit quality: The munis are basically A, with only a few BBBs and nothing below investment grade. For the mostly non-agency mortgages, it's the same thing Gundlach always says: credit ratings alone aren't very helpful for evaluating older, higher-yielding mortgages, since there haven't been any revisions since the typical downgrades of the financial crisis era. PTIAX invests only in prime and Alt-A, no subprime, so the credit quality of their holdings is comparatively good for the asset class.
* Duration: The munis fall in ~ the 7-8y range, and the mortgages (on paper, by the usual calculation) are ~ 4-5. (But see the 'graf below on their take on using duration as a metric.)
* Strategy: As is pretty obvious by the holdings, it's a strategy that attempts to balance risks. On the rate-sensitive side of the scale, as tax-exempt munis have moved into historical fair value range (based on the spread to Treasuries), they've moved some of that part of the portfolio to taxable munis, which they regard as still a decent value. They've also added a single-digit stake in IG corporates, but are going slow in that department and still regard IG corps as peripheral to the strategy.
* Duration and their process: they regard duration as interesting but not definitive, not in their top tier of evaluation metrics. For example, the mortgages they use in the portfolio, on paper ~ a duration of 4-5, typically don't move much if any when there's a rate bump. Their process, "Shape Management," starts with rate and credit-based analysis, but the critical piece is "a forward projection of a fixed-income security’s total return characteristics over a variety of interest rate scenarios, yield curve shifts, and time horizons." (The "shape" is the shape of returns under different scenarios.)
Thus endeth the dissertation. These guys are still very helpful; the delay in responding was apparently due to the ramping-up of the operation that's going on now.
Best, AJ
Edit to add: To clarify on the non-agency mortgages, they're what show on, say, the M* portfolio page as the below-IG part of the portfolio, based on the ratings of years ago, which the PTIAX folks think aren't very accurate today.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/918294/000100262416000017/hsfhsphsvstatutorystic-20163.htm
497 1 hsfhsphsvstatutorystic-20163.htm
T. Rowe Price Health Sciences Fund
T. Rowe Price Health Sciences Portfolio
T. Rowe Price Health Sciences Portfolio—II
Supplement to Prospectuses Dated May 1, 2015
In section 1, the portfolio manager table under “Management” is supplemented as follows:
Effective April 1, 2016, Ziad Bakri will join Taymour R. Tamaddon as the fund’s co-portfolio manager and co-chairman of the fund’s Investment Advisory Committee. Mr. Bakri joined T. Rowe Price in 2011. Effective July 1, 2016, Mr. Tamaddon will step down as portfolio manager and Mr. Bakri will become the fund’s sole portfolio manager and Chairman of the fund’s Investment Advisory Committee.
In section 3, the disclosure under “Portfolio Management” is supplemented as follows:
Effective April 1, 2016, Ziad Bakri will join Taymour R. Tamaddon as co-chairman of the fund’s Investment Advisory Committee. Mr. Bakri joined the Firm in 2011 and his investment experience dates from 2005. Since joining the Firm, he has served as an investment analyst covering the healthcare sector. Prior to joining the Firm, he was an equity research analyst with Cowen and Company and an investment banking analyst with Merrill Lynch. Effective July 1, 2016, Mr. Tamaddon will step down as co-chairman of the committee and Mr. Bakri will serve as sole chairman of the committee.
The date of this supplement is February 1, 2016.
F114-041 2/1/16
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Staying with T Rowe Price
T. Rowe Price Institutional Large-Cap Growth Fund
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1012968/000101296816000014/lcvstatutorysticker211-20161.htm
497 1 lcvstatutorysticker211-20161.htm
T. Rowe Price Institutional Large-Cap Growth Fund
Supplement to Prospectus Dated May 1, 2015
On page 5, the portfolio manager table under “Management” is supplemented as follows:
Effective January 1, 2017, Taymour R. Tamaddon will replace Robert W. Sharps as the fund’s portfolio manager and Chairman of the fund’s Investment Advisory Committee. Mr. Tamaddon joined T. Rowe Price in 2004.
On page 21, the disclosure under “Portfolio Management” is supplemented as follows:
Effective June 30, 2016, Taymour R. Tamaddon will become a member of the fund’s Investment Advisory Committee and, effective January 1, 2017, Mr. Tamaddon will replace Robert W. Sharps as Chairman of the committee. Mr. Tamaddon joined the Firm in 2004 and his investment experience dates from 2003. Since joining the Firm, he has served as an equity research analyst and a portfolio manager (beginning in 2013).
The date of this supplement is February 1, 2016.
E139-041 2/1/16
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FYI: Innovative emerging-markets funds may catch the eye, but the traditional type has the edge for most investors.
Regards,
Ted
http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=738495

@vkt, if you don't already know about it you might be interested in the following site:
https://portfoliovisualizer.com/
This site has been mentioned here at least the handful of times that I've taken notice and it will do some of what you were talking about with a bit more flexibility than I've found elsewhere (admitting that I'm generally comfortable with the arbitrary nature of calendar returns even recognizing that your comments are valid). For instance, you could back test a portfolio made up only of Smead's fund with monthly additions to the portfolio and compare the monthly balances to those you would have earned if you could invest directly in the S&P 500, or a handful of other indices, with no expense ratio. You could also choose any starting month you wanted along the way, recognizing that it would be a manual process, and do the same for a variety of different starting points. It's not going to give you category comparisons or total flexibility but hopefully something closer to what you would like to see.

@lljb, you are right. My first reading of those slides was wrong. He was badmouthing the critics not Bill Miller by quoting the badmouthing of Bill Miller by the critics. So, I take that part back and apologies to Mr. Smead for that mischaracterization.
The critics weren't doing anything other than echoing the sentiments of the passive indexing over active indexing crowd that saw the fall of Bill Miller as validation of their long-held views. I don't see this is necessarily foolish because there are good reasons for criticizing the performance of active managers as a whole.
Ironically, his argument against the criticism relies on the same calendar year metric that I show above can hide the performance real investors may see in the funds relative to the index.
Just to note, I am not doing an indexing vs active argument here. My point is that bad metrics make it difficult to select good active funds that may exist from bad/lucky ones.
Here is an idea for the site owners since they seem to have the data and the computing capability.
What if you computed a metric that calculated the 1yr, 3yr, 5yr returns as an average and variance to the index over multiple runs of the fund each with a single purchase at the beginning of each month since inception and held for that period of time? Right now, the metrics say what happens if investors purchase only at the beginning of the year which is very artificial and subject to gaming by fund managers.
Wouldn't this be a more valid indicator of what an investor coming across a fund and purchasing without paying attention to the calendar can expect from the fund? This would make explicit any destructive effect of the fund's volatility if they tend to be volatile and can burn investors. Would the great owls be still be great owls using this metric? If a fund had a long and distributed poor performance periods with some lucky short spikes then this would expose the destructive power of such underperformance even if the fund managed a tiny gain in enough years from such spikes to look great in current metrics.
The second metric would be adding a fixed investment every month for each run above as might happen in a retirement fund or a disciplined investing plan. This is for investors in the accumulation phase. The complement would be withdrawing a fixed amount each month during that run.
Isn't it worth doing this experiment if the current metrics have the potential of misleading investors setting false expectations of what a fund is likely to do even when future performance mimics past performance? Is it feasible or such metrics already available?

First, I would be turned off by the lead manager. He seems to have a habit of badmouthing. Foolish this and that. But the showstopper would have been the way he tore into Bill Miller in this presentation.

Maybe I missed the point during the call so I'm sorry if that's the case, but I didn't hear him tear into Bill Miller at all. My take on what he was saying was that Miller was an incredible guy, outperforming for 15 straight years and as soon as he didn't all the critics came out of the woodwork. But he showed Miller's performance after the criticism and he was back at the top, hence I took his comments to suggest those who criticized were "Foolish Critics", the title of the presentation. He was making the same argument about Buffett- that people are criticizing him for recent performance but Smead thinks they have it wrong.
Just for the sake of transparency I don't own Smead's fund but I do pay attention to him and his fund because I think he has some reasonably good ideas about the future, mostly related to the impact millennials will have.

FYI: (This is a follow-up article)
His argument might have been a smokescreen to cover up his own bad performance, but index investors ought to hear him out
Regards,
Ted
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bill-ackman-actually-had-a-point-with-his-index-fund-bubble-theory-2016-01-30/print
Earlier Link:
http://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/25690/bill-ackman-are-index-funds-a-trap-for-the-passive-minded#latest

FYI: It wasn’t that long ago that many were calling an end to the out-performance that has persisted for years in the Vanguard Wellesley Income Fund (VWIAX[1]) in light of rising interest rate concerns. After all, how could a fund shackled by a prospectus rule to hold an abundance of fixed-income ever outperform high yield strategies near the low end of an interest rate cycle?
It just goes to show that there is no replacement for common sense asset management during a difficult year in the market. As a result of their expertise, the $40 billion juggernaut VWIAX was recently named Morningstar’s Top Allocation fund for 2015[2].
Regards,
Ted
http://investorplace.com/2016/01/vanguard-wellesley-income-fund-shines-on/print
M* Snapshot VWINX: (Investor Shares)
http://www.morningstar.com/funds/XNAS/VWINX/quote.html
Lipper Snapshot VWINX:
http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/Fund/VWINX?countrycode=US
VWINX Is Rank #5 In The (CA) Fund Category By U.S. News & World Report:
http://money.usnews.com/funds/mutual-funds/conservative-allocation/vanguard-wellesley®-income-fund/vwinx

@rjb112, the quick-glance metric you have pointed out is a good example of why the performance metrics as published can be misleading (and why managers try to game the numbers each calendar year). Investors don't always invest by calendar years. And barely beating the index one year isn't much of a comfort to an investor if you have lost much more the previous period.
For example,
The 11 month performance in 2008 is missing in that table and was a bad one for the fund losing about 42%+ of its value compared to the approx 36%+ loss for S&P 500 in the same period. It is the bounce back from this deep loss that it managed to recover some in 2009 so 2009 by itself looks as if it beat the market but investors who invested with the fund in 2008 were still under water relative to S&P 500. Trailed index again in 2010 and didn't even make back all of that trailing deficit in 2011 although it looks like it beat the index that calendar year in your table. In fact, the people who started with the fund or soon after didn't see anything over the S&P 500 up until that one good run in 2012-2013 more than 4 years later.
The one continuous period I mentioned from mid 2012 to mid 2013 is what makes the 2012 and 2013 calendar years look good. 2014 and 2015 are index hugging years for all practical purposes. If you look closer at 2014 unless you were invested in the first three months of 2014, your portfolio would have trailed the index even in that year.
If you had invested in 2013 after its one good run ended (still in a rising bull market) you would be trailing the S&P 500 again todate.
All this shows is that except for that one good run, the fund is just more volatile than the index and when you have such a fund, real investor returns suffer unless you were lucky to time the few entry and exit points correctly. It seems to give back all the advantage in down markets. I do not want to confuse this with the IRR values computed by M* and blaming it on bad trading by investors. The point I am trying to make applies to all investors that just invest and hold but aren't lucky in when they enter/exit this fund to make the fund worth it. Even holding for a long period may not help in such a fund if you weren't in it for its one good relatively short run.
My point is that this is why many investors think they have chosen a good fund because all published metrics look good and yet may see that their returns are nothing to justify the high fees such funds charge. This has certainly been my experience in selecting funds based only on such easy to digest tables and metrics ratings even when it has a boatload of numbers as available on this site.
Better metrics can perhaps be designed that try to make the performance metrics as insensitive as possible to when the investment began or ended perhaps by aggregating over a large number of random periods or some model of typical disciplined investor behavior such as monthly deposits/withdrawals each month. Also perhaps metrics that try to detect such continuous good runs and compare relative to other periods to see whether the fund is a one hit wonder or is regularly outperforming even if it has down years. I would chose a fund to buy and hold that did well in the latter even if it didn't beat the index in every calendar year which is a very artificial construct that fund managers try to game to look good to gather assets.

Hi @DavidV.
Thanks for posting the Seeking Alpha article. Below are some of my own recent observations and thinking.
I, myself, have been wondering what triggered the January sell off in the markets ... and, came to the conclusion that it had a lot to do with electronic program trading. It seems, there were some big money accounts that sold assets, as I have read, perhaps even some sovereign wealth funds to raise money to support domestic programs. No doubt, selling pressure in the capital markets was generated; and, I believe, program trading keyed on this selling pressure resulting in a good sizeable downdraft. Perhaps some might even say a selling stampede resulted.
From my own research, year-over-year earnings in the S&P 500 Index have been in decline for most of 2015 and had been trending downward until about September in which I noticed that they began to improve. From the reference source I use to follow earnings, earnings are currently projected to rise and to continue upward through much or 2016. With this, it seems to me, technical market trading patterns took over fundamental based market research and trading.
Within my own portfolio I have a good number of hybrid mutual funds (sixteen of forty seven funds) that invest in a combination of cash, bonds, stocks and other assets. In my recent month end study (January Ending Instant Xray Report), I detected that there was some good movement from stocks to bonds in these hybrid funds, as a whole, enough to the point that it raised my portfolio's overall allocation to bonds by 2%. Due to the delay in reporting mutual fund trading activity some of my hybrid mutual fund managers must of have had a feeling there was going to be a possible stock market sell off coming and began to move to bonds sometime back in late 2015 or because they felt stocks were overbought.
It will be interesting, to continue to follow this asset movement in my hybrid funds and see if this movement to bonds continues or if the hybrid fund managers change course and begin to now load equities perhaps following a fundamental path since earnings seem to be now improving and stock market prices have recently declined perhaps now to the point of becoming oversold.
I am wondering if anyone else, that closely follows their portfolio’s asset makeup, might have also noticed this?
I wish all ... "Good Investing."
Old_Skeet

"Then I took a look at the fund performance. It is a classic index hugger.....and a poor one at that and would have done poorly if it wasn't for one period between June 2012 and August 2013. That time frame with a reasonably well defined start and end suggests the fund had one or two positions that over performed. Typical stock momentum for high flying stocks last about that much time. If the fund didn't have that, it would look bad relative to S&P 500. In fact, almost all of the good metrics for the fund can be traced to that period.

If you had bought into that fund after that period, for most such buys you might have experienced index hugging or worse performance. For the 4.5 years before that period, the fund had lagged the S&P. Now you can see why such blind metrics can be really misleading
"fund that didn't have such a one-hit wonder quality to it"
take a look at the calendar year performance since inception.
It beat the market and its category in 6 out of the 7 years.
A pretty consistent outperformance rather than just a single period of 14 months

Cheers

I find no compelling reason to invest in this fund even if it was open.
I hope this post is not a faux pas as it might be construed as a criticism of the fund profiling and metrics done on this site. But that is not the intent. I have been frustrated quite often by selecting funds based on the usual Lipper, MorningStar, etc as they looked great on paper and came highly recommended but never delivered for my investment.. So this applies to all of such fund evaluation techniques.
I am thinking that by looking at the metrics above and the fund profiling linked above, that this is a fund that would be seen favorably here. I realize that "past performance is no predictor of future performance" is the explanation when that does not work as expected but I think that is just CYA. One could say the same thing about any metric including those that had zero correlation with anything that happened in the future. So one has to look at the performance/validity of the metric itself.
I have never considered this fund before but would never have chosen this fund looking at the performance a little more carefully than what is blindly captured by metrics and the accompanying presentation.
It looks great on paper with a positive 5yr alpha over S&P 500. But I am sure everyone has had experience with funds that looked great and yet their returns when invested were very disappointing. People chalk it up to that "past performance ..." thing but I would believe that a fund like this one could be positively predicted to disappoint more investors than not in the future compared to say just a S&P 500 fund/etf by underperforming relative to that benchmark.
First, I would be turned off by the lead manager. He seems to have a habit of badmouthing. Foolish this and that. But the showstopper would have been the way he tore into Bill Miller in this presentation. I don't know Bill Miller personally nor have I invested in his fund. In my career where I have to evaluate the future performance of people very often and with not a lot of information, people who use a lot of time to badmouth others very seldom deliver. It shows a lack of class here which some people might not care about but to me it also shows a lack of judgment because that whole section looks personal. A manager that gets that personal or emotional will make judgment mistakes. It was highly unnecessary to do so against a peer/competitor and moreover does not imply he can do better himself in his own style. I expect the culture he will set in his company with that attitude will also be toxic. Even in the brief profile done on this site, he cannot help himself criticizing to toot his own horn.
The presentation goes on and on about Brk.B. Why would that make the fund look good? There are any number of funds you can buy to get Brk.B exposure. Or is it to make the fund look good by association?
Then I took a look at the fund performance. It is a classic index hugger with high 1.25% ER and a poor one at that and would have done poorly if it wasn't for one period between June 2012 and August 2013. That time frame with a reasonably well defined start and end suggests the fund had one or two positions that overperformed. Typical stock momentum for high flying stocks last about that much time. If the fund didn't have that, it would look bad relative to S&P 500. In fact, almost all of the good metrics for the fund can be traced to that period.
If you had bought into that fund after that period, for most such buys you might have experienced index hugging or worse performance. For the 4.5 years before that period, the fund had lagged the S&P. Now you can see why such blind metrics can be really misleading. Not because of "past performance..." caveat but the actual past performance characteristics of the fund that might hint at a high probability of underperformance gets hidden in the statistical measures and ratings.
What exactly is fhe reason to invest in a fund like this rather than the index itself or some other large blend style fund that didn't have such a one-hit wonder quality to it and didn't risk underperformance with a huge ER?

Hmmm. I'm not seeing that. Perhaps you don't gave access to this share class? Unfortunately, Smead Value comes in several share classes ...

•The Fed speaks, and in my view, market participants got the message WRONG.
•The crude oil trade continues to determine the direction of the equity market. Perhaps a “signal” and change of sentiment has arrived.
•Earnings are not as bad as expected, but they continue to go unnoticed amidst the obsession over crude oil and the Fed.
•Investors need to mesh the good headlines with the bad and lose the confirmation bias which leads to bad decisions.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3849836-s-and-p-500-update-bulls-bears-focus-crude-oil-fed-taken-eye-really-matters-earnings
with many investors' comments.

Thanks for the post Ted...this is my longest held Matthews fund.
This interview is informative, particularly after reading the post of davfor suggesting the shift of the BRIC banner to one of TICKs (Taiwan, India, China and Korea). MAPTX appears nicely positioned if this plays out. The earlier thread is noted below.
press
http://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/25683/the-brics-are-dead-long-live-the-ticks-ft/p1

I've been very distracted dealing with a health insurer, and (after a year of errors) am now filing a complaint w/state regulators - about a dozen pages, spreadsheets, email transcripts and summaries, etc. So I'm just now getting back to other stuff.
Regarding @vkt's question - Congress does not create regulations, it creates laws. Regulatory agencies then create regulations to implement those laws. So I don't see any distinction between Congress "getting rid of regulations" and sending them back to the drawing board. So long as there's a law to be implemented, there will be regulations from the executive branch to implement it.
If Congress doesn't like a regulation, it can change a law (or create a new law) to do as little or as much as it wants. For instance, the ACA created risk corridors to stabilize rates. If an insurer had particularly healthy customers, it would make a bigger profit, and some of that would go into a pool. That pool would be used to cover some (not all) of the unexpected expenses of an insurer that had bad luck. This was also intended to help stabilize rates until insurers got more experience with ACA.
Congress was silent on whether that pool was to be self-sufficient (i.e. not needing extra cash from the government), and the regulators (HHS) did not require it so as to help ACA get launched. Congress didn't like that, and in the 2015 "Cromnibus" bill, required risk corridors to be revenue neutral. Congress did not change the risk corridor law (that it had created in the ACA) in any other way, and did not tell HHS how to write the regulations. It was up to HHS to implement this new requirement (which it did by prorating payouts).
As to Dodd Frank, @BobC has called attention to what I wrote before - that it is up to the regulatory agency to say what the law is (until Congress passes a law that says otherwise). Dodd Frank is a law, not a set of regulations. The SEC creates regulations. As an "independent" agency the SEC is both more and less political than the DOL or other cabinet agencies. It is less political in the sense that it must represent both major parties. It is more political in that this makes it more susceptible to lobbying, since it isn't as beholden to one party's vision as are cabinet agencies.
Depending on an agency's structure, it may be more or less susceptible to lobbying - which is not to say that stops anyone from trying. How much sway have the banks had on Fed rates?

Hi expatsp:
I manage, or mismanage, retirement accounts for 2 kids and their spouses. Bought FAIRX maybe 10 years ago, sold maybe 5 years ago. Why? The 'star' manager phenom. Some of those 'kids' are more attuned than others, but none of them have the level of cynicism I do. I like the team managed stuff, thinking that there might be some continuity over the coming years. I use two you mentioned: Primecap and Dodge & Cox. Tweedy Browne Global has been in their ports for years as well, although I think their ER stinks: they don't trade an awful lot and won't buy anywhere they can't drink the water - so whats the deal with 1.40 ER?
Am taking antacids over Sequoia: thought I had a good one there. We'll see if they can right the ship.
Matthews MACSX requires monitoring now - I have been neglectful of their management changes. Artisan ARTGX can stay for a while and we'll see. Bridgeway B
ridgeway is another concern of

It looks like per M* data, procrastination is hurting you. FAIRX is down about -11% for the month (FAAFX slightly worst), compared to the S&P 500 down about -5%.
In hind sight, it appears that Berkowitz does not fit the definition of a great active manager. Over the last 10 years he has under performed the S&P by almost 3% a year on average. In the last 5 years he has under performed by an astonishing 12% a year.
So, are the chances Berkowitz some how turns things around better than switching to an index or a more stable manager?