If one is concerned about the bubble factor in traditional market-cap weighted S&P 500/Total Market Indexes, it is easy today to have a value factor overlay to the index. VVIAX has beaten 74% of its peers in the past 15 years, 86% in the past ten years. Its expense ratio: 0.05%. But if you want to avoid "value momentum" as odd as that sounds, you could just equal weight the index to avoid having too much for instance in the FAANG stocks in the S&P 500 or too much in financials and energy in a market-cap weighted value index. RSP comes to mind, 0.20% expense ratio--still indexed in my view. In other words, active managers have some explaining to do.

@Baseball_Fan I don’t really agree, but a lot depends on how you define the term indexing. If one thinks of tracking the S&P 500 as the only kind of indexing, you could draw a bubble conclusion. To me, an index is a passive rules-based machine that a basic computer program can track or execute as a strategy at a minimal cost. It is not at all like the nation of Japan or even the Nikkei Index in isolation.
And yes one can quibble about the definition of active and passive as the S&P 500 actually has a committee of people selecting which stocks to include in it. But it’s worth noting that most employees in 401ks dollar cost averaging with their weekly paychecks into an indexed target date fund are not buying or just buying the S&P 500 in a bubble. They’re also buying foreign stocks and bonds in indexed form as well as small caps via a total market index. Moreover, because they’re buying at regular intervals every paycheck they are not merely buying a bubble, but buying both when the market rises and falls, at its peaks and troughs. So the end result smooths out their cost basis.
Sure there is a momentum tilt to market cap weighted indexes, but most active managers are afraid of deviating too much from the index and underperforming it dramatically when the market is rising. So they go down with the ship when the market falls. And their still much too high fees continue to kill their performance year after year. A handful of managers truly think differently, have low fees and the skills to be right when they think differently.

@johnN: "Tsp Ira all in 2045 spy Iwm and vo..."
Unclear.
TSP isn't an IRA and it doesn't offer one. If TSP, did you signup for new brokerage window? Heard bad things about it - too expensive, etc. There is indeed TDF L2045; a unique aspect is that fixed-income portion included SV TSP G Fund and TSP TDFs are much more conservative that typical TDFs.

What I find interesting regarding index funds is what Fleckenstein refers to the endless money train into said index funds (my paraphrasing, not his words) from retirement investors into 401Ks etc., just like what folks were thinking in Japan years ago...this is going to go on and on, until one day it doesn't and whammo. Drives stocks/indexes up no matter what the true fundamentals are (note what AAPL did last quarter, earnings I think were flat or so and market cap goes up what $5-6Billion? What's up with that?
I think that his one of the reason's some/many invest with funds that are NOT index funds...thinking is that index fund results are based on group psychology to an extent and "it works until it doesn't"...
Hmm.

Our current list keep adding buy list
BRK.b
Tsla
Vang2040 2050
Iwm
Yinn fxi
Vong
Vo
Vang international etf and eem
Vht
Qqq vgt
Tlt
Boeing
Cost
Little XLE slv gld
Tsp Ira all in 2045 spy Iwm and vo international small caps
Also few hundreds per month into btcusd ethusd dodecoins (100 200)
Prob more heavily load toward fxi China sp500 etf imho ccp new world leader in 3 5 yrs bypass everyone else
Thankyou so much for all the wonderful commentaries and thoughtful suggestions

This thread to me is really fascinating and partly understandable:
https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1647197271304335360

Hold a target date fund for 20, 30, 40 years? Sounds good in theory.
What legal or contractual agreement exists with the sponsor to operate that fund for an indefinite time period or as @Baseball_Fan says to adhere to the same allocations, operating restrictions, fee structures? I’ve had at least two firms I invested through (Strong & Oppenheimer) go completely out of existence in the past 25 years. A third one, Templeton has been essentially merged out of existence since I opened a workplace plan there in the early 70s. Or are these simply extreme aberrations due to my antiquity?

”From 12/31/2021 through 10/12/22, PRWCX lost 16.91%. Since then it has gained 13.54%.”
At the depth of the decline, $100 invested on 12/31/21 would have fallen to just over $83 - perhaps enough to spook some little old “grannies” (but no one here) into selling. Those who continued to hang on would have $94.34 remaining today for every $100 invested at the end of 2021.
Those with the foresight to pour additional money into the fund on 10/12/22 would have reaped significant reward. However, at that point there were more compelling opportunities in “growthier” funds that had fallen farther as well as in individual securities - were one willing to gamble a bit.

Last year, the media declared Allocation 60-40 dead, and this year they have risen from the dead, or risen from the ashes. WSJ, Barron's, M*, almost everybody. Media headlines are for the the current news with some hype.
While basic 60-40 (SP500-like + 10-yr Treasuries) had its ups and downs, there were only 5 years in history when both stocks and bonds were down, 1931 (both DODBX and VWELX existed then), 1941, 1969, 2018, 2022 (last year), and in absolute terms, 2022 was simply the worst year for 60-40 since 1937. It is almost natural that dramatic rebounds follow dramatic collapses (for funds at least).
https://twitter.com/charliebilello/status/1609209009994612739

Although only ~7% now, I've doubled my holdings since the end of 2022,

@MikeM, am I correct to assume that percentage is your portfolio? I have owned risky asset but generally in well under 5%.

In the last 6 months, this topic has been discussed at length. https://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/comment/156944/#Comment_156944
Bought a CD several months ago from Barclays Bank - 12 months at 5.4% with NO $ minimum.

Think you can do better at your brokerages where there offer many choices that pay higher rates (>5% 12 months) and no $ limit. Right now, 3 and 6 months T bills that pay a tad over 5% and the upper limit is $5M.

Are such items the very same animal as a bank or CU cert. of Dep?

Today is the 32nd anniversary of my purchase of DODGX. It was neck and neck with SPY up until the dot com bust. From then on, SPY never caught up. What happened the last 1-3-5-10-15-20 years doesn't make any difference.

Good for you.
I read some reputable article 41y ago about the best funds, and DODGX was right in there, and I invested, but of course bailed at some point. TWEIX and TORYX and the others in the article fell by the wayside over time.
It remains interesting to me that 10y returns of the very best broad-based biggies still show, today, DODGX slightly lagging FXAIX, FCNTX slightly ahead, and the only big big winner FBGRX.
All the others I looked up lag. FLPSX, e.g.
Of course niches (FSELX) excel also.
I did have a good friend in the 1990s, amateur investor, tell me she was in FBGRX big and was going to stay. I wonder if she did. At the time I thought meh. What a fund that was (and very recently is).

It would seem to mean little more than average investors fleeing investments at their low points only to buy back at higher prices. Add this data point to the "even more evidence about not beating the market" thread.
PRWCX bottomed out on Oct 12th (M* graph). Largest outflow quarter was 4Q 2022 after right at the bottom. The largest outflow month (by around a factor of 2) was December 2022. Each month of 2023 has seen (microscopic) inflows. Data are estimated from M*'s cash flow bar chart on the fund's performance page. (Much of the Dec. outflow could have been due to investors keeping divs.)
From 12/31/2021 through 10/12/22, PRWCX lost 16.91%. Since then it has gained 13.54%.

Barron’s notes this week that like other ”balanced” funds (their depiction not mine) PRWCX has experienced outflows over the past year. I don’t know what this says about the fund, if anything. Just reporting.
Excerpt: Memories of last year's poor showing might be causing investors to miss out. The average “moderate” allocation fund tracked by Morningstar lost 13.6% in 2022. And, over the past 12 months, net outflows for the 568 balanced funds that company follows totaled $72.3 billion at the end of March. … Some top-performing funds haven't been spared. Consider the venerable $49 billion T. Rowe Price Capital Appreciation fund (PRWCX). It had net outflows of about $1.6 billion for the 12 months ended on March 31, according to Morningstar.
Article: “Funds are Back” by Lawerence C. Strauss - Barron’s April 17, 2023 (Print Ed)

I think all of us are looking for a smoother, less dramatic ride...whatever that means. With indexing, you ride it up, you ride it down, and please don't tell me that there is a law of nature that says stock always go up over time...proven fact they get riskier over time...especially when you consider that you have more money invested over time...(why else would put options cost more the longer out your strike date is?)
I'm thinking back when my Dad got me started investing in the early 80's with my money working at the local Texaco...*ah the stories...I should write a book....
Kellogg, Raytheon, JNJ, Merck and Coke (KO), $2k in each....
Looking back I'm thinking if I just added $2k each year to each of those and did nothing else I would have a beach house in Hawaii to go along with a Ferrari collection..without all the noodling around, reading WSJ, etc etc.
I'm thinking my 5 stock portfolio would have beat any SPY index fund although, I don't think there were any index funds back then?
I think you could do worse than just roll with a Raytheon/LMT, JNJ, WMT/Costco, BRK-B, American Express, MSFT going forward over the next 20 years....
Best,
Baseball Fan

Think you can do better at your brokerages where there offer many choices that pay higher rates (>5% 12 months) and no $ limit. Right now, 3 and 6 months T bills that pay a tad over 5% and the upper limit is $5M.

Randal Forsyth tosses out some interesting inflation numbers in this week’s Barron’s (Up & Down Wall Street).
”… Consumer prices showed a 5% increase in the latest 12 months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this past week, down from the 9% year-over-year peak rise recorded in 2022. But the core CPI, excluding food and energy costs, was still 5.6% above the level a year earlier, and rose at a 5.1% annual clip in the latest three months. Alternative measures, such as the Atlanta Fed's core ‘sticky prices,’ rose at a 5.9% annual pace in that stretch, not much slower than the 6.5% in the past 12 months.”
Forsyth seems to think the Fed will hike at its next meeting, as does every other Tom, Dick & Harry. A notable exception is the gal from Invesco, Kristina Hooper, who appears frequently on Bloomberg’s Wall Street Week. In Friday’s program she seemed rather adamant they would not hike this time around. First time I’ve heard that view expressed from any sources I follow.

The Week in Charts (04/15/23)
A tour of the markets covering the most important charts & themes, including the global trend of lower inflation, the Fed predicting a recession, the consumer pullback, investors showing love for McDonald's, a bull market in auto parts, and much more.
Blog Post
Video

@hank, D&C funds are cheaper than a lot of ETFs. Helps that it's privately held, group managed, and they eat their own cooking.
I wish it had been 10K instead of 1K. Most of the other investments from that time are gone with the wind except for VWGIX discussed in another thread here.
The biggest chunk were in an IRA I cashed out to make a down payment on a house in Marin County. We're pretty happy about how that worked out. Only took equity out once to buy a new roof.
Looking back, I should have scrounged up 500 bucks to get into NICSX. We'ld be on easy street. :)