Geez that fund hasn't made the rounds since forever. Anyway I see nothing compelling in a garden variety LC Value fund that (according to M*) trails its category by 14% and the index by 26%. It holds nothing special and is heavily weighted toward the financials and healthcare sectors. What raises your interest?

Geez that fund hasn't made the rounds since forever. Anyway I see nothing compelling in a garden variety LC Value fund that (according to M*) trails its category by 14% and the index by 26%. It holds nothing special and is heavily weighted toward the financials and healthcare sectors. What raises your interest?

Here is the related filing:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/709364/000094937722000004/rpr-497.htm
7 1 rpr-497.htm
The Royce Fund
Supplement to the Investment, Service, and Institutional Class Shares Prospectus Dated May 1, 2021
Royce Premier Fund
I. Effective as of April 1, 2022, the paragraph appearing under the heading “Investment Adviser and Portfolio Management” for Royce Premier Fund is deleted in its entirety and replaced with the relevant information below.
Royce Premier Fund
Royce & Associates, LP is the Fund’s investment adviser and a limited partnership organized under the laws of Delaware. Royce & Associates primarily conducts its business under the name Royce Investment Partners. Lauren A. Romeo and Steven G. McBoyle are the Fund’s co-lead portfolio managers. Portfolio manager Charles M. Royce manages the Fund with them. They are assisted by portfolio manager Andrew S. Palen. Ms. Romeo and Mr. McBoyle became co-lead portfolio managers of the Fund on April 1, 2022. Ms. Romeo and Mr. McBoyle became portfolio managers of the Fund in 2016 and were previously assistant portfolio managers from 2006 and 2014, respectively, through 2015. Mr. Royce has been portfolio manager since the Fund’s inception. Mr. Palen became assistant portfolio manager on February 7, 2022.
II. Effective as of April 1, 2022, the information appearing under the heading “Management of the Funds” that is inconsistent with the disclosure immediately above is hereby revised accordingly.
February 7, 2022
RPR-ISI-0222
The Royce Fund
Supplement to the Consultant and R Class Shares Prospectus Dated May 1, 2021
Royce Premier Fund
I. Effective as of April 1, 2022, the paragraph appearing under the heading “Investment Adviser and Portfolio Management” for Royce Premier Fund is deleted in its entirety and replaced with the relevant information below.
Royce Premier Fund
Royce & Associates, LP is the Fund’s investment adviser and a limited partnership organized under the laws of Delaware. Royce & Associates primarily conducts its business under the name Royce Investment Partners. Lauren A. Romeo and Steven G. McBoyle are the Fund’s co-lead portfolio managers. Portfolio manager Charles M. Royce manages the Fund with them. They are assisted by portfolio manager Andrew S. Palen. Ms. Romeo and Mr. McBoyle became co-lead portfolio managers of the Fund on April 1, 2022. Ms. Romeo and Mr. McBoyle became portfolio managers of the Fund in 2016 and were previously assistant portfolio managers from 2006 and 2014, respectively, through 2015. Mr. Royce has been portfolio manager since the Fund’s inception. Mr. Palen became assistant portfolio manager on February 7, 2022.
II. Effective as of April 1, 2022, the information appearing under the heading “Management of the Funds” that is inconsistent with the disclosure immediately above is hereby revised accordingly.
February 7, 2022
RPR-CR-0222

At some point in the future, all the sovereigns will de-leverage very easily, likely in a coordinated timeframe. The deleveraging event will go something like this:
The then POTUS will direct the DOT to issue several $1 trillion coins. The DOT will use each coin to purchase from the Fed $1 trillion of USTs, Those repurchased USTs will then simply be retired. Presto. De-delevered.
We are all Zimbabwei now.

+1 Lewis

I've transferred numerous funds from E-Trade, Ally, and JP Morgan Direct Invest to Fidelity via ACAT and haven't provided a screenshot of an account statement in the last 5 years. Vanguard still requires account statements from the other brokerage, which is 1 reason I no longer transfer mutual funds to them ! If I have to, I transfer cash to Vanguard and buy the fund there.

Uh-huh. That's a lead (or lede) sentence in a CityWire story announcing Chuck Royce's decision, at 82, to hand over management responsibilities for Royce Premier.
He'll still be a portfolio manager, of course, he will just "rotate" so that he's no longer a "lead" portfolio manager. Following the move, he'll remain a manager of some sort on eight funds.
I'm struck by the delicacy of the Royce press release wording and by the ability of the CityWire writer to declare that Mr. Royce has ten years of experience: he's been with this fund since '92 (30 years), founded the firm in '72 (50 years) and earned his MBA in '63 (nearly - checking fingers and toes here - 60 years).
For what interest it holds.

If you can do it online it’s pretty simple (knock-on-wood). TRP may be one of the few that makes the process difficult. I ended up having to submit paper copies. But in moving PRPFX it was done on line. Took 2-3 days to complete. Fido let’s you attach a screenshot of an account statement. And, there are apps that allow you to string 2 or more screen shots together. I think you’ll be happy with Fido. My early problems have already been disuussed. In the end they served me well - teaching a valuable lesson about the hazard of “Free-Riding” which is an SEC violation and easy to do if not forewarned.
Good luck.

+1.

There are two ways to eliminate the deficit. One is to cut government spending and the other is to raise taxes to pay down the debt. Amidst all the constant hand-wringing from deficit hawks, rarely is the latter solution evoked. It should be:

It is also known that adding bonds will increase both ratios, and optimization on either of those ratios will produce strange results for a mix of stock, bond, blend funds. But their utility remains in assessing similar funds.

Again context matters. Since about 1980 or 82, interest rates have been in a long-term downward trend, with a few blips upward at various times. Bond prices have gone up long-term as a result, moving inversely with rates. It would be interesting to see--perhaps "interesting" is not the right word--what would happen if we had a long-term upward trend in rates. I don't think that will happen, but if it did, it would be "interesting." Also interesting would be a sudden rate shock where rates went up a lot in a very short time.
There are indeed managers who earn in excess of their expense ratio drag. The problem is--and perhaps the raison d'être for this site--is knowing in advance which managers those will be. I don't necessarily think past performance stats or even past risk stats, which one could argue are fruit of the poisonous tree being derived from performance stats, are necessarily the best indicators of that future outperformance. And as you've observed, the bare fact of the matter is the higher the expense ratio, the greater that hurdle is for the manager to overcome to beat the market and his/her peers. It's possible, but one must have a lot of confidence in the manager to begin with and increasing confidence the greater that hurdle is. That's where I think just looking at these numbers doesn't really help. They are a starting point perhaps, but not an end point.

@Yogi
I use the sub-type field in MFO screener to group and compare. I think there are less than 10 values in that field so makes it a lot easier vs. like you stated M* and Lipper fund categories which can become mind bogglingly complex.

Similarities without cause-effect relationship may be just coincidental. For MPT, this means that one can have confidence in similar MPT stats when sufficiently high correlations exist. So, comparing beta, Sharpe Ratio, Sortino Ratio are meaningful only when correlations are sufficiently high. It is easy to produce examples with similar MPT stats with low correlations that don't mean anything.
Unfortunately, M* has overdone this by creating 127 categories in the US alone (more elsewhere) and most M* data is applicable within its categories. As users, we don't have control over aggregating M* categories - e.g. we cannot aggregate LC-growth, LC-blend, LC-value into a simple LC, or other combos. Lipper fund categories, at least as reported in Barron's, are poor for bond funds.
As for Sharpe Ratio vs Sortino Ratio, I have found that in most cases, fund rankings by Sharpe Ratio and Sortino Ratio are similar, i.e. funds with high Sharpe Ratios also have high Sortino Ratios, etc. It is also known that adding bonds will increase both ratios, and optimization on either of those ratios will produce strange results for a mix of stock, bond, blend funds. But their utility remains in assessing similar funds.

@Lewis
I know you're using the toll road fees as an analogy but this analogy is applicable to passively managed like funds only, not actively managed funds.
The other metric of a 1.50% ER fund being 50 times better than a 0.03% ER fund isn't applicable either imo.
What matters I believe is after fee performance (after accounting for risk, category etc..)
If one has access to a crystal ball that can see 10 years and the following were the choices what would most people pick?
Fund A 10Y performance 5%, fees 0.03%
Fund B 10Y performance 10%, fees 1.50%
For a starting balance of $10K, after 10Y Fund A balance will be $16,242 and Fund B balance will be $22,609
Note that I'm not arguing for or against passive investing, just the math of expenses and compounding
As a personal aside, for more than 15 years I had hard cutoffs for ER, I would look at any fund that exceeded my thresholds but I now believe that is an error and that some fund managers do indeed earn and overcome expense drag.

I think standard deviation matters a great deal, in particular recent standard deviation, as recent volatility levels may persist. But looking at the numbers without further analysis is a mistake. Why did the volatility or lack-of-volatility occur, and do the same conditions that caused that exist now or are things different? The Sharpe ratio is interesting to look at in the past, but is as the article points not an indicator of the future in the aggregate. But it can provide clues to do further research. Oh, this manager has a high Sharpe/Sortino ratio and handled bad market conditions well before. What did he do to handle those bad conditions? Are the same conditions in existence today? Consider, in March of 2020 we had a pandemic crash in which the world had to switch to virtual distance employment. No surprise, tech stocks and growth funds held up well in that environment and funds with growth tilts had high Sharpe ratios coming out of that crash.. Do the same conditions for market volatility exist today? Not exactly. Inflation and interest rate worries seem to be driving volatility more. Growth stocks with high valuations don't fare well historically as rates go up.

*what else do we have to go on besides looking at past performance.

As I already stated, fees, fees, fees. That expense ratio is like a toll road and the manager is generally going to collect it no matter what. Say you have an index fund with a 0.03% expense ratio and it metaphorically is a $3 toll road you could drive on or there is another road run by a fund manager with a 1.50% expense ratio charging $150 to drive through. That other $150 toll road better be 50 times smoother, safer or faster than the $3 one or you're losing out.

Enjoying the thread, good comments!
Additional thoughts:
* Isn't risk/reward the same as "sell down until you sleep comfortably at night? You could jam all the numbers, ratios you want but isn't that what it comes down to?
*Does it matter if your investment in a mutual fund goes down 5% one day and you lose the equivalant of your annual grocery spend that day but overall it is very small % of your wealth? Hold on, sell, what to do? I've been reading a new book, Money Magic, Kotlikoff, great book, suggests the more money you have the less risk you should take in the stonk market??
* is there a difference between having 85% cash/15% aggressive, ARKK? vs a balanced fund...is the black swan approach better?
*Is there a difference between looking at what fund mgr has/doesn't have invested in a fund and a "wealth advisor" who has a fraction of your wealth advising what you should do with your wealth? Are you better off with the person with some grey in his hair and has seen things or the younger person who isn't jaded from past experience?
*what else do we have to go on besides looking at past performance...reading tea leaves as to what might happen going forward, trend following...where the puck will be ala The Great Gretzsky? (I was just in a building yesterday where the late Mr Rumsfeld used to work...the "Unknown, unknowns"...I guess you could apply that to investing...no one really knows what will happen or are there some who can make better guesses than others?
Best,
Baseball Fan

So is NOW the time to start nibbling ?

Nibble at own risk. Re ARKK - It’s a gamble. I still own some DKNG which is one of Wood’s babies. I’d probably sell on a 15-20% gain as it (along with ARKK) are outside my general tolerance level. I’ve done somewhat better with their stock than wagering on their app. :)

LB thank you for the link.
"There’s nothing more profitable than a market inefficiency you know about and most other people don’t!"
The cat is out of the bag !
I guess my comment was a bit late as article was from Aug. , 2019.

Folks had plenty of opportunity last week to buy ARKK. I provided a buy price ($64.5) and reasoning and followed up on several days last week and also posted when I bought on Friday. From the silence, I figured folks have no interest in a ARKK trade / investment.
I think @yogibearbull also started a thread on Friday about market forming a base.
Those interested in getting off the sidelines have already gotten off.
Good luck.

See page 1 - https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/59085/gambling-in-2022
At last look ARKK is down 27% YTD. At the time the thread was posted (January 15) it was down 15% YTD. Just a lucky guess. No expertise claimed. Most anything that falls 50% from peak eventually rebounds - if only temporarily.

@staycalm https://google.com/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/widely-followed-risk-return-measure-for-stock-portfolios-is-debunked-after-55-years-2019-08-07

Another use for VIX to aid with deciding about "getting off the sidelines"...

The buy signal is triggered when the Cboe Volatility Index (VIX) rises by more than 50% of its 1-month moving average, which it last did Jan. 25, according to the strategists led by Mislav Matejka. The indicator has proven 100% accurate outside of recessions over the last three decades....Data show the VIX signal has been triggered 21 times since 1990, with the S&P 500 Index gaining an average 9% in the six months afterwards.

JPMorgan Strategists See Sure-Fire Sign It’s Time to Buy Stocks