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

Nancy Lazar has a fine pedigree coming from Cornerstone, but this is a WT interview from Oct 3, 2014.
WT on PBS this week is a repeat of Hyman & McLennan, part 2, about the global economy and investment; it's spring begathon at PBS.

I can't read the WSJ article on line, but its title is "Individual Investors Wade In as Stocks Soar."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/individuals-tiptoe-further-into-long-running-stock-rally-1489141804

@Old_Joe When I'm done should have 10 fund portfolio @TIAA. Planning to make it reasonable conversative and global. GAIFX I will buy when market corrects.
Other Toe Dippers...
FVALX, INTLX (because Scottrade has them NTF and TD will not)
MDISX, MQIFX (doubt any other broker lets you into these NTF)
FEBAX, FEVAX (Want some Gold in this portfolio, plan to sell FEBAX at Schwab)
Need some reasonably docile SMids to round things out.

3/9 -- nibbled (small) adds to positions in PFN, PCI, PKO (taxable Pimco EFs)
3/10 -- re-opened position in FFC (pfd CEF); small add to FRIFX

@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

The double edge sword of productivity.
From Article:
"Oil prices have plunged to the lowest level this year as US shale producers boost output at an astonishing pace and crude inventories keep rising, triggering a wave of selling by hedge funds with record speculative positions.
The US surge threatens to neutralize cuts agreed by the OPEC cartel and a Russia-led group of producers last November, potentially delaying a full recovery of the market until 2018 or even later."
And,
"It had been assumed that the Saudis would do whatever it takes to push oil back up to a band of $60 to $70 in order to smooth the way for a $100bn part-privatisation of the state oil giant Aramco next year, the biggest public offering ever. This is no longer so certain."
Finally (David Fuller's from Fuller Treacy Money) comments,:
"US shale producers in the Permian Basin, which have never been part of OPEC, are in the strongest position. They can ramp up production very quickly when prices are firm, as we have seen in recent months. Even more importantly, they can reduce output very quickly, when prices are less attractive, while preparing additional wells for the next price rise.
Most oil producers were overly dependent on $100 plus prices which we may never see again. Those (oil producing nations) with large populations face a rough time, burning through reserves and facing huge declines in their standard of living."
Link:
telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/03/09/us-shale-surge-overwhelms-oil-market-opec-splits-deepen/

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.

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

@Ted- Thanks. I can see how that got by you- the "Copyright ©2017 MarketWatch, Inc." certainly didn't help.

"? That would make it much more a balanced fund than I was arguing earlier or elsewhere."
Just don't forget that it's leveraged, so the argument against being balanced is that you have all the equity exposure as if you were 100% stocks. You can argue the detils in a number of different ways depending on what you want to emphasize or how you look at it, but I would tend to think about it the way you do- not a balanced fund but rather one where the bonds are intended to make your results better than the underlying equity exposure.

>> 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: Pacific Investment Management Co (Pimco) is replacing the full slate of managers on its Total Return Active Exchange-Traded Fund and changing its name, a spokeswoman for the fund management company said on Wednesday, the latest transformation for what was once the largest actively managed ETF.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.fa-mag.com/news/pimco-revamps-etf-gross-once-ran-31730.html?print

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