After the dot com bubble burst and my largest holding was down 10% more than the market (i.e. around the figures Lewis is using), I got a cold call from someone pitching professional portfolio management. I still remember my response: I already have professional managers, and I started naming the managers of that fund.
Some of us were not entranced by the ability to trade Fidelity Select funds seven times a day (hourly pricing) back then, and don't feel the need to trade ETFs tick by tick today. I make a change when I can no longer answer the questions: what do I expect from this fund and why is it part of my portfolio?
If I own a volatile fund, I expect it to go down more than the market. But I also look for it to more than make up that underperformance on the upswing. And I'll wait that out, unless there are specific reasons for me to doubt the fund or the management going forward.
Regarding VFORX, I generally agree that for many employees "one and done" is a great option. I would have loved to have had any sort of asset allocation option available when I started working and had no clue what I was doing.
If one is willing to pay double the expenses (0.11% ER vs VFORX's 0.06%), there's a fixed asset allocation fund that has done a little better. FFNOX correlates 100% with VFORX according to Portfolio Visualizer. I didn't believe that either, but that's what it says.
PV's performance analysis reports FFNOX having higher annualized returns, lower volatility, smaller max drawdown (based on monthly figures), better Sharpe ratio (to be expected given higher returns and lower volatility), even closer stock market correlation. Though its best year was inferior to VFORX's.
Of course all of these differences are rather small. This is simply an alternative for those who eschew Vanguard or don't like the idea of glidepaths.

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.

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

I concur in the take about distant-date Vang and Fidelity target funds.
As for TWEIX, yes and no. See
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/xnas/tweix/chart
Compare it since 1994 w/ DODGX, FXAIX, FCNTX, and FBGRX. Okay.
But who among us would hold patiently through the recent runups and big drops of D&C, Blue Chip, and esp Contra, which of course is the one you want to have been in all along, unwaveringly, up 2132% the last 29y?

”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

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.

+1.

I too watched Kristina Hooper on Wall Street Week and not convinced of her argument. FED minutes indicated they are expecting the possibility of recession but that is not their priority as opposed to containing inflation.
Things to watch now is the earnings reporting in order to gauge the economy. Earning expectation has already been lowered from previous quarters. Large banks reported ok but weakness of the financial sector as a whole will be reveal among the regional banks in the following weeks. If the financial sector goes down, things can get ugly.
https://reuters.com/business/finance/bigger-banks-rise-while-regionals-slump-q1-earnings-season-kicks-off-2023-04-14/
Personally, I think we are already in a rolling recession. We will have to see how the earning pressure will unfold.

Down-years are to be expected from time to time
Lean years, sure. Down years, not so much. Aside from last year, the last calendar year in which PRWCX lost money was in 2008, when it lost 27.17%. The only other calendar year in which it lost money was 1990 when it lost 1.3%. (Inception was in 1986.)

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?

As PRWCX has risen lately, I redistributed some of my shares to where I wanted them in other TRP funds, but still within the T-IRA. PRWCX is up (per Morningstar) YTD by +7.13%. I've been in since 2013. Quite very satisfied. Down-years are to be expected from time to time. The amount I'm holding in terms of proportion within my portfolio is getting uncomfortably high, which is why I moved some $$$ around. PRWCX is still almost 38% of my total. My other balanced fund is BRUFX: almost at break-even today, YTD.
(*Edited.)

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)

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.

I disagree with the notion that articles on how active funds on average continue to get slapped around by index funds year in and year out don’t have a place on this board because we’re so sophisticated we know how to avoid the pitfalls of poorly run active funds. If you search the history of posts in MFO and even the older FundAlarm you can see posts recommending hot funds that subsequently proved disastrous—ARKK being a recent example from posts in 2021 and early 2022. I imagine everyone here has a story about terrible fund purchases or even decent fund purchases at the worst possible time. The index story bears repeating again and again because when surveyed almost every investor believes their skills at picking stocks or funds are above average—a statistical impossibility. Hope for the big score springs eternal.