Here's a current article from the Wall Street Journal which pretty well sums up the whole fiasco. The link is free to non-subscribers:
‘It Wasn’t Our Finest Hour’

Perhaps a reference to the savings accounts offered at major banks. For example, AMEX offers 0.50% on its account with up to 9 withdrawals per month.

Fido has the nerve to charge $49.95 TF for Hussman's funds. Meh. At that point, I'd rather just hold cash and put it to work when the market tilts over.

The 5% OTM puts in JHQAX series should not be taken as a protection after 5% slide in SPY, as is evidenced by current SPY and JHQAX slide. It depends on the timing of the fund purchase and what the market has done since when the puts were purchased. If one is interested in the fund, it is best to study it to understand the best time to buy and which one of the three in the series to buy. This und has been discussed previously at MFO and so, a search of MFO could also be useful.

I had experience with OppenheimerFunds in 2008. It was IL 529 manager at that time. It stuffed lot of HY in the core bonds and allocation/balanced funds. This was stupidity if not fraud. That all turned ugly during the financial crisis. There was eventually a settlement with IL 529 but only some funds were restored. OppenheimerFunds was not fired immediately but was reigned in by being forced to include several non-OppenheimerFunds funds. Eventually, its contract wasn't renewed. IL 529 has bounced well under the new manager UBT and is now rated Gold by M*, only 1 of 3 such 529s.

Odd, the third result returned on my search for Champion Oppenheimer turned up this SEC summary of the settlement and what the issues were:
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2012-2012-110htm
Just skimming, it sounds like Oppenheimer made material, misleading statements (aka "lies") about what it was doing. That's not the impression I get about ARKK. Woods is saying she expects annualized yields averaging 40% over the next five years and has explained why. That would seem to be considered "puffing", rather than, um, "misleading".
We have at least one poster here who appears to feel this is reasonably possible even it it doesn't pan out: "I guess we'll know in 5 years." There may be a fine line between good salesmanship and illegal deception, but so long as Woods invests according to her statements and the ETFs' prospectuses, I don't think she's crossed that line.
From the SEC release:

"Mutual fund providers have an obligation to clearly and accurately convey the strategies and risks of the products they sell,” said Robert Khuzami, Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. “Candor, not wishful thinking, should drive communications with investors, particularly during times of market stress.”

Outside the box idea......buy the broken clock. He's gonna be right once in a long while....
HSGFX +8.5% YTD

David has two reviews of BIVRX:
https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/2019/05/balter-invenomic-bivrx-bivix-bivsx/
https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/2019/10/invenomic-fund-bivrx-bivix-bivsx/
I own BIVRX.

Here is the Zweig article: https://google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/cathie-wood-ark-innovation-performance-11642175833
Even if such big gains are possible, many investors may not be able to stomach this kind of volatility and could time their purchases and sales as poorly in the future as they already did in the past.

+1
I bailed from DKNG in November at above $40. So that one has fallen over 50% in 2 months.
(Currently $19.46 (the year of my birth - spooky)!

I guess we'll know in 5 years. Right now her largest position in ARKW (what I own along with ARKG) is coin base just moving past Tesla. Coin is down 23% just like ARKW. I can easily see big gains for Coin if Crypto is a real thing, and I think it is. Josh Brown (who I think is terrific) is all in. I am buying BITQ every dip, so far, no good, but 5 years is a long time.

I agree with @wxman123 to the extent than the early investors in ARKK did very well. Wonder how many piled in a year ago, however?

I believe WSJ’s Zweig did a story on this and as is often the case most people get into speculative funds after the initial surge and then lose money. Surely, this is not the first speculative investment fund to lose a lot so it doesn’t deserve that criticism. However, one difference here is the manager publicly boasting the portfolio is set to deliver 40% annualized over the next five years even as investors were already hurting this December 9. Since that date, I believe the fund is down another 25%. So anyone who listened just lost a quarter of their investment in a few weeks. It is those shareholders I feel for and the reason for the initial link. Performance chasing should be discouraged and encouraging unrealistic future performance expectations—40% a year for five years is unrealistic—deserves some response.

I have fiddled around with L?S funds off and on for years, but never had much success. I usually sell them if they loose 10 to 15%
LSOFX did pretty well last year and is more consistent
David reviewed LSOFX a couple of years ago
https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/2018/07/ls-opportunity-fund-lsofx/#more-11890

What a disaster 2022 has been for this MS 5 star Long-short fund that I own. Down nearly 20% ytd. Another great till it wasn't fund. Probably going to hold and hope for a bounce, but looking at BIVRX as a replacement in the same category. That one is up nearly 20% this year and has done well since inception. They guessed right this year (short U.S./ Long Int'l), it seems, while RLSFX seems to have stuck with its strategy (seemingly long growth short value) which has served it well up until now.

Note that the puts protection ( in SPD) would be minimal until there's a selloff of at least 30 or 40%"
Note that it appears there would have been 6 such triggers since 1956. I don't think that's particularly valuable protection unless somehow the convexity makes it such that after the rare, massive decline you end up in the green, which I doubt, but even if it were so wouldn't it be possible to front run and dilute such a strategy, e.g. dump money into the ETF before the puts are triggered?

I found the below 2 articles useful
- https://seekingalpha.com/article/4443699-spd-s-and-p-500-index-fund-with-extreme-downside-protection
- https://www.optimizedportfolio.com/spd/

noteSimplify could do a much better job of detailing how their various ETFs are designed to work.
The article I quoted above is here
https://www.barrons.com/articles/option-etfs-51630661401?mod=md_funds_news
But weirdly, the current online version differs from the paper copy I have in that the following is not in online version
" Note that the puts protection ( in SPD) would be minimal until there's a selloff of at least 30 or 40%"
Article also discusses Buffered ETFs of which there are dozens, but it gets complicated.

Behind pay wall for me. May be somebody could let me know what it is about. This is not 5he first time we had option expiry date. What is different today? Thanks.

It has to do with $3.3 Billion in options expiring yesterday (3 rd Friday of every month). It mentions the big drop in NETFLIX as coinciding with options expiration. It mentions greatly increased options trading recently and attributes a lot of that increase to increased participation in options trading by retail investors and to professional traders seeking to “hedge” against a turbulent overpriced market.
I’m unable to copy / paste from Bloomberg’s site or would. A lot of times when I’m locked out of Bloomberg I temporary delete their App from my device. Usually the article surfaces elsewhere on the web. Something screwy was taking place Friday for sure. Wild gyrations like I haven’t seen in a while. Sometimes that kind of action foretells a significant change in market direction.

SFHYX looks interesting - but expenses are a whopping 2.9%
The cheaper share class (1.75% expenses) is HFSYX but (at least at Schwab, Fidelity and TDAmeritrade) the minimum investment is $1m., even in an IRA.

1/21/22 Episode: