Wrigley’s company now has 42 dispensaries across three states, with 39 in Florida and the rest in Massachusetts and Nevada, with new ones slated to open in Pennsylvania and Texas. To date, it has raised a total of $400 million largely from Wrigley and other high-net-worth individuals. The latest funding round, which closed in 2020, valued the $250 million company (2020 sales) at an estimated $2 billion.

billionaire-beau-wrigley-says-his-cannabis-company-will-be-bigger-than-the-family-candy-business

If you are open to the idea of Basic Material VMIAX has performed very well. It's top 10 positions make up 50% of the fund, but it covers 115 companies that are in the Small, MID, and Large Cap space. ER is .10%
VAW has no minimum.

If you are a trader like me and watch momentum you switch. I held PIMIX for about 7 years. I also watch very high risk and why I sold prior to the meltdown last March(link) and bought after it.
It's also pretty obvious from my table above that PIMIX is way behind the leaders for 1-3 months and what I use for my investments as a trader.

According to the most recent findings of AAII the best 3, 5, and 10 year annual return's lies with IYG - iShares US Financial Services and IYF - iShares US Financials.

Elsewhere I read that catalytic converters are disappearing from parked cars because of their rare metals content. Signs of a bubble or social commentary re: the new normal?

Prices for the precious metals used in catalytic converters have increased significantly.
"From about $500 an ounce five years ago, the price of palladium quintupled to hit a record of $2,875 an ounce last year, and is now hovering between $2,000 and $2,500 an ounce, above the price of gold. Rhodium prices have skyrocketed more than 3,000% from about $640 an ounce five years ago to a record $21,900 an ounce this year, roughly 12 times the price of gold." Link

@MikeW: when I was teaching I had a friend in Finance and we used to yack it up about equity CEFs. He actually knew something about international finance, while I was an amateur. After I retired I ran into him and I asked if he still was using CEFs; he said no because ETFs gave him all the exposure he wanted to given markets. I found it very hard work to take advantage of spikes or drops in discounts as it entailed frequent trading.
I did maintain a position in HQL, and then in BME, but I now believe that active management in those two healthcare funds added no alpha. I would not discourage an investor from exploring equity CEFs, especially if the goal is equity-income-like returns, especially as many CEFs have had to adopt minimum distribution plans, often in the range of 8% yearly. There is income to be had in those circumstances, but the learning curve could be steep for some. One drawback of equity CEFs is volatility, particularly on the downside. I have gotten more satisfaction and better returns from ETFs like MOAT and CAPE. Recently I added DSTL, DSTX, XBUY, CSB, NUEM, and of course ARKK. Best wishes to you from behind my KN 95.

Good grief! SPCAX has a turnover ratio of 4,249% according to M*. Maybe @msf’s legion of fact checkers/researchers could compute the average holding period for a typical position given that number. IIRC, a 20% TOR results from holding a position for 5 years.
One newsletter I read has DBA and DBC in its portfolio for exposure to ag and “stuff”. I’ve never owned either one. Elsewhere I read that catalytic converters are disappearing from parked cars because of their rare metals content. Signs of a bubble or social commentary re: the new normal?

I spent a lot of time a couple years ago looking at this issue. the funds that track various indices are pretty heavily in energy, especially oil. I decided that if I wanted to invest this heavily in oil, I could buy individual stocks or an energy fund. I looked in some detail at actively managed funds and tried to avoid ones that had large fees ( although they all are expensive)
I finally picked Silverpepper Commodity Fund SPCAX and have been satisfied. It has handily beaten the category and most commodity indices.
Their web page is rather sparse but will show you that they are invested mainly in agricultural commodities now. M* has very little update information unfortunately.
An alternative is to pick large ETFs focused on various commodities and buy a basket of them that meets your objectives
Barrons had a article on Commodities recently.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/commodities-are-starting-to-rally-here-are-the-stocks-and-funds-to-play-it-51611958101

I said several times in the past, PIMIX was a great fund until 01/2018 when I sold it after holding for several years. Since 01/2018 it's still a good fund but performance ranks only at the top 44% according to M*.
Past performance is important but I'm looking to make a lot more since my portfolio is mainly in bond OEFs. See below performance as of 2-9-2021 sorted by YTD.
Can you guess where is my money now?

@sfnative Elaborate. State the manifold reasons in your view. They're worthy of discussion. If it's falling interest rates, that's done. If it's attractive valuations, gone too. If it's America's economic dominance, that is up for grabs. Maybe, maybe not. There is one reason, though, I can think of that is very important and still valid--the constant need to make the rich and powerful grow even more rich and powerful, provide them whatever they need to keep the stock market rising--tax breaks, Fed bailouts, interest rate cuts, anti-competitive monopolies that would never have existed in the trust buster era, union busting, gutting environmental regulations and pretending climate change doesn't exist, minimum wage supressed, 17-year patents on me-too drugs that have one molecule of difference with the last me too drug.
Our government has tilted in that direction since the 1980s and I don't see any real difference in the current administration. In fact, I think the phrase "income inequality" is baked into the "in the long run stocks go up" thesis. So you may be right. In fact, in the other discussion on Grantham's bearish predictions being wrong one thing not discussed is a rather famous mea culpa he made a few years ago about not realizing how corporate power has grown in recent years so that monopolistic dominance that wouldn't have been tolerated in earlier eras is now permitted. That dominance is baked into the returns of bellwether tech stocks and the benchmarks themselves. In other words, there aren't too many search engines people use besides Google's. The fact that market-cap weighted index funds keep buying those bellwether tech stocks creates a kind of feedback loop, making them more powerful and driving their stocks even higher.

Also, @FD1000 might better explain SVARX (ER around 3%).

This is mainly a fund of funds. In their top 5 holdings they have IOFIX+BDKNX both expense ratio about 1.5%. Then they use leverage, and they still want to make money.
The only explanation that I care about is performance which is after expenses + risk attributes(SD, Max Draw, Sharpe, Sortino, others).
I never invested in SVARX because I do my own trading + going to cash and my performance + SD in the last 3 years is better. My portfolio max loss from any last top was lower than 1%.

Few fund managers have been more successful than Cathie Wood, the chief executive of ARK Invest and fund manager of the ARK Innovation ETF ARKK, 2.32% and ARK Genomic Revolution ETF ARKG, 1.51%, which according to FactSet have drawn in more inflows than any other actively managed stock exchange-traded fund over the last 12 months. In a monthly webinar, Wood made the argument against stocks being in a bubble.
“If there is a bubble anywhere, it is not in the equity market, it is in the fixed-income market,” she said.

stocks-arent-in-a-bubble-but-heres-what-is-according-to-fund-manager-ark-invests-cathie-wood

Yes, and this is generally true for most CEF's but with caveats...most significantly some CEFs can trade at premiums or discounts for a very long time. I look at the history on MS, and you have to really get a feel for a fund before making significant purchases. One recent example is MPV, a CEF that historically has traded at a premium but since the pandemic at a discount. Its price over the past year is down 25% but its NAV is down under 1% (based on the most recent valuation, this one is not valued daily). I've been buyer here. Another caveat, some CEFs can be thinly traded so if you're patient you can place "stink bids" (limit orders well below the current price) that will randomly execute.

PIMIX still has the highest Sharpe ratio, lowest drawdown and no down years
The following performance graph is from PIMIX's 2009 statutory prospectus. You can take it on faith that this is for the institutional class shares for calendar year 2008 or you can find it yourself on p. 58 of the 21MB prospectus.

MSF, I think you may have misread my comment. I said "Go ahead and compare PIMIX to many of the funds mentioned here back to January 2016. PIMIX still has the highest Sharpe ratio, lowest drawdown and no down years."
After that I said "The same holds mostly true back to 2009 (except PIMIX was down a modest 5.47% in 2008)." I should have said back to 2008 but the point is the same.

Here is what David Giroux, the wunderkind manager of one of the best asset allocation funds, PRWCX, said in a recent M* interview about rising interest rates and duration:
"So, now, everybody's convinced the yields are going to go up 1% to 2%, but not above 2%. We'll see. What I would tell you about rates today is that the risk/reward on Treasuries or IG [investment grade] is so poor, it gets a situation where if rates stay static, you make very, very low returns. If rates revert back to more normalized levels, you lose a lot of money. And if rates go down, you don't have a lot of room for rates to go down. So, it's really hard to get a really great return. [...] even if rates rose 100 bps over two years, you made zero return. [...] So, as a result of that, we have a very short duration in our fixed-income portfolio, probably the shortest duration we've had since I've been running this strategy.
Our duration today is 1.5 years, just because that skew is so negative on a lot of traditional fixed income. [...] So, this is a time to be short duration in your fixed-income portfolio. [...]"

Since I basically agree with Giroux's current outlook, I will not invest in "reliable" intermediate core/core plus bond OEFs at this time. Rather, I am using multi-sector OEFs like RCTIX, TSIIX, or even PIMIX, which have excellent risk/reward profiles but durations of less than 3.0.
This may be off-topic, but I have also been investing in alternative funds like ARBIX, a "market neutral" fund according to M*, that has exhibited a bond-like low risk profile with a SD of 2.97% and a Sortino Ratio of 2.38. Its YTD total return is 1.43% and its 3-year return is a pleasing 6.23%. During the recent market crash, the fund lost 3.1% during the month of March, and over its 3.5 year history its largest monthly loss was 0.38% in November 2018. So far, so good.
These are very uncertain times and, as another poster said, "with rising interest rates in 2021, it seems that [...] Investment Grade Intermediate bond oefs are struggling". Hence, I have decided to look at other low risk opportunities outside the conventional bond OEF box.
Good luck,
Fred

@MrRuffles Yes agreed on PFSLX... I will read up on it over next few days. Also, you should take a look at Davenport Small cap focus fund. Just had a write-up in Barrons over the weekend by our own @LewisBraham. If we're lucky, Lewis might comment on this. Definitely beats to its own drummer with strong performance. https://www.barrons.com/articles/small-cap-mutual-fund-tech-stocks-51612307908

PIMIX still has the highest Sharpe ratio, lowest drawdown and no down years
The following performance graph is from PIMIX's 2009 statutory prospectus. You can take it on faith that this is for the institutional class shares for calendar year 2008 or you can find it yourself on p. 58 of the 21MB prospectus.

It's interesting but not news. People have known for decades now how difficult it is for active funds to beat the benchmark with any consistency--and the consistency part is perhaps not dicussed enough. My problem is with the basic assumption, i.e., forecast, that stocks themselves will always be a good investment and this assumption is implicit in the decision to index the benchmark, and in investing in many active funds that rigidly adhere to a particular stock-driven investment style. The indexing decision assumes that the benchmark itself isn't really dynamic, that the S&P 500 today or better yet the Russell 3000 is really the same as it was yesterday, last year, ten or fifty years ago and plunking one's money into it at any point in time in the future will always be a good choice. What we know is historically it has been a good choice in the past most of the time. But there are a periods of time--periods of extreme over- and under-valuation--where it's been a terrible or terrific choice. One could argue that now is one of those times. Moreover, no one knows what the future will bring and the data-set for stocks overall is extremely limited versus human history, and a grain of sand in biological, or worse, geologic history. There is nothing particularly scientific in other words in assuming that in the long run stocks go up. All we know is in the past stocks have gone up.

@gk3105gklm. Thanks much for sharing this. Will take a look. Paradigm Select comes up also on my screen

Coincidentally, I was just coming on to see what people’s thoughts were on PFSLX. It’s a long-term Great Owl, good Martin/Sortino ratios, MFO rating of 5, and tax efficient with two female advisors with a decent amount of skin in the game. I’m surprised it’s never been discussed here.

@observant1 thanks for sharing the spiva pdf. Page 4 is interesting - the table shows that over a 15 year period, 92.35% of all Large Cap Growth equity funds failed to beat their benchmarks. I guess that is what you and others are trying to say. I understand that data and agree it’s not easy and there’s a strong compelling case to just index.
If you choose some active LC growth funds and set and forget them for 15 years, 92.35% of the time you will be disappointed as they won’t beat their benchmarks. Since you and I own active funds, aren’t we saying that by using our tools, we think that we can maneuver in and out of these funds before we are disappointed and thereby beat the benchmarks? Not often - just when performance “consistently” underperforms.
I don’t mean to be simplistic, it’s just that I was an index only investor for a number of years and I’m constantly second guessing myself since owning active-despite positive results. This discussion and the feedback is helpful to me.