Yeah, I know. Been kicking myself for taking a quick 5K profit and running. That's why I never post financial advice here. Anyone following my advice would likely come looking to kill me.

Anyone see the tonight's closing price of ASML?
Tonight's (1/14/21) closing price: $544.65

Yes, the fund dropped 60%, and yes it held mortgage bond insurance companies other than MBI. Yes, it was painful. But it wasn't that much worse than the typical LCV fund. Here's a chart for peak to trough of the fund 10/11/07 to 3/9/09.
It lost 61.34%. A LCV index fund (VVIAX) lost 58.97%. TAVFX did worse, sure. A lot worse? No. If you want to use the word "implode", it's the value side of the market that imploded. "Value trap" implies active stock selection, but passive management did just about as poorly. Whitman made some mistakes but he must have made a number of good calls as well to have come out average.
Meanwhile, TAVFX's cumulative 10-year returns are less than one-fifth the broad market's.
That's the post-Whitman era, which was my original point. He resigned as CIO over a decade ago, and as manager of TAVFX nine years ago. Without Whitman the fund has indeed turned in an absolutely abysmal performance - bottom 3% (though not quite as small as 1/5, closer to 1/3 as much total gain as that of the entire equity market). A whole lot worse on a relative basis than Whitman did before, during, and after the housing crisis.
Regarding the particular mortgage bond insurers it held between Oct 2007 and March 2009, does it really matter? In Oct 2007 MBI constituted 64% of these holdings. FWIW, Radian (which M* says was primarily in other businesses) constituted 27%. The rest was noise.
I recall that Whitman was involved in public disputes with another investor who was shorting that industry
From the NYTimes (repeating a link from above):

“MBIA is being victimized by an apparently well organized bear raid headed by William Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management,” Mr. Whitman wrote.

Never underestimate the fund industry's ability to capitalize on any situation. From the prospectus:
The Index Provider then matches each company’s country of risk against that country’s “Democracy Score” assigned by The Economist Intelligence Unit Ltd.’s Democracy Index. A country’s Democracy Score can range from 0-10 and is a composite of sixty indicators, which are grouped into the following five categories:
1. Electoral process and pluralism
2. Civil liberties
3. The functioning of government
4. Political participation
5. Political culture

I thought bitcoin was all grown up as an investment and had cleaned up its act:
https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-large-bitcoin-payments-to-rightwing-activists-a-month-before-capitol-riot-linked-to-foreign-account-181954668.html

– Why money supply expansion is not equal to inflation
– Understanding the new rules of bond investing in today’s inflation and interest rate environment
– How to protect your portfolio against inflation
– Whether there is a rational argument for stocks to be trading at 50 times earnings

2021-world-podcast-tour-begins
Understanding Money:
https://orcamgroup.com/understanding-money/
Cullen's Blog Posts:
https://pragcap.com/

There's no question that he was way wrong about mortgage insurance companies. However, despite this moderate sized bet, the fund performed respectably before and during the housing crisis.
Let's put some dates and numbers to paper. MBI would seem to be a good proxy for his investments in the mortgage insurance business (what in the annual statements is counted in "Financial Insurance/Credit Enhancement").
Oct 31, 2008: 3.57% of portfolio in financial ins., all MBI.
Oct 31,2007: 3.95% in financial ins., 64% of that in MBI.
Oct 31, 2006: 3.55% in financial ins., 65% of that in MBI.
I'm not going back further. MBI's stock price peaked just before the end of 2006 (Dec 28 close of 73.31 per Yahoo). "In 2007, home prices started to tumble." NPR.
From Dec 28, 2006 to March 5, 2008 (the low point for MBI), TAVFX outperformed the average large cap value fund by over 2% (not annualized) while underperforming VEIRX by about 1%.
M* chart.
In January 2008 the fund owned about 10% of MBI. That mistake by Whitman of doubling down brought its percentage of the fund's portfolio to around 5% (end of January N-Q). With the stock declining from his purchase price of $12.15 to a low of $2.29 on March 5, 2008 the position contributed around -4% to the fund's performance. Since then, MBI has gently risen in price.
Though his bets on mortgage insurers had a measurable impact on fund performance, bringing down a once superior fund to an average performing one, they did not seem to be the cause of the subsequent "implosion". That came later.
The fund started to underperform in the 2nd half of 2008, well after MBI had stabilized. Even at that, it had its moments and performed in line with large cap value funds until just a few months before Whitman resigned as manager, March 3, 2012.
M* chart 2008-March 3, 2012.

I agree. I try to avoid a lot of overlap. *Some* is inevitable but since all my stock funds are actively managed I know that the holdings will change and today's overlap will be tomorrow's "completely different".

It takes some real effort to avoid overlap in Large Cap/S&P500/Growth and Aggressive Growth funds. Almost all of the best ones have the usual suspects: AAPL, MSFT, FB, AMZN, TSLA, BRK... and many of them have Adobe, Tesla and Salesforce. Even my MGGPX has AMZN and ADBE

Here is the registration filing:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579982/000110465921003837/tm212832d1_485apos.htm

Not that lottery tickets are really investments, but then again, neither are some popular stocks and ETFs:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-a-bigger-mega-millions-and-powerball-jackpot-can-actually-be-the-worse-time-to-buy-a-lottery-ticket-215219163.html

It takes some real effort to avoid overlap in Large Cap/S&P500/Growth and Aggressive Growth funds. Almost all of the best ones have the usual suspects: AAPL, MSFT, FB, AMZN, TSLA, BRK... and many of them have Adobe, Tesla and Salesforce. Even my MGGPX has AMZN and ADBE

I ALWAYS look at the following: PM status/history, sector weightings, G/B/V and L/M/S splatters, top 10 holdings, SD, Sharpe, Sortino & Capture Ratios, 1-3-5-10 Yr TRs.

I use M* Portfolio X-Ray (Stock Intersection) to check holdings across my portfolio.
It provides a decent "quick and dirty" view.
However, it shows only the top 50 stocks overall and a fund's portfolio may be several months old.

We always verify current or possible holdings to discover what is inside. 'Course, the contents are subject to change somewhat over time frames.
And to the proposition of an investment into SPY where many may presume an equal weight of holdings among 11 sectors. NOPE. Tis not a balanced U.S. equity holding. We hold 3 of these equity sectors: tech., healthcare and comm. services for our current choices.

Sectors	Fund %	Cat %
Basic Materials	2.42	2.61
Consumer Cyclical	12.66	11.17
Financial Services	13.90	13.42
Real Estate	2.29	2.47
Communication Services	10.26	10.21
Energy	2.60	1.90
Industrials	8.83	10.11
Technology	23.82	22.81
Consumer Defensive	6.78	7.99
Healthcare	13.77	14.76
Utilities	2.67	2.54

SP-500 sector weighing
Regards,
Catch

@Mark- Yes sir, I gave that a try. From the FAQs I noted that the cap is-
• $150,000 if married and filing a joint return
OK, I know that our income from SS & pensions is somewhat over that number. But then it says-
• Your payment will be reduced by 5% of the amount by which your AGI exceeds the applicable threshold above.
So what the heck does that mean? If our income was-
$1000 over that amount, would the $1200 payment be reduced by $50?
$5000 over that amount, would the $1200 payment be reduced by $250?
$10000 over that amount, would the $1200 payment be reduced by $500?
$20000 over that amount, would the $1200 payment be reduced by $1000?
$25000 over that amount, would the $1200 payment be reduced by $1250?
If that's the way it works, then the $1200 payment is probably close to being reduced to 0. But it would be nice to just get a "yes" or "no" answer. It's not as if they don't know.

I did not use Roth. I went with Trad. IRA. It has worked out nicely--- apart from the $5,000 in non-deductible contributions I made--- since in those years, I owed no tax to deduct the contributions against. (Who would have ever dreamed?) But my tax guy is great. Eventually, we WILL get back that $$$, non-taxable. I'm not in a hurry. Our present living circumstances are rather comfortable.

By now TRP should able fully geared to work from home. Customer support can be done with broadband connection. That how IT support is being done.
I performed asset transfer online at Fidelity last week and it was completed in 5 days. As I recall, TRP requires signed paper forms several years ago. If that is the case, it is likely sitting in their Maryland office.

I'm not saying they aren't fully geared to work from home. That I'm sure is true. However, the employees simply are not as engaged when working from home (some are, but I think it'd be naïve to think all employees are just as productive in a WFH environment). If you ask any employer how the WFH experience has been, of course they are going to say it's been relatively seamless and the team just as efficient, however, that is for optics. It is not what is actually occurring for many organizations.

Agree. Bucket approach works well to ensure living expense for near term, 3-5 years. Shifting the gains from equity funds to the balanced funds make a solid approach in this low yield environment.