@yogibearbull, that is how they got me to subscribe originally. $1 a month for I think 3 months(?) Can't remember exactly. I'm not sorry I subscribed. I enjoy both the newspaper with my coffee on weekends and the web articles any time.

Check out these deals advertised on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/barrons/posts/10158561337427741

What you said about your Kindle subscription is interesting to me @hank. When I noticed the weekly paper was $5 I sent Barron's an email asking why I pay $30/month. The $30 does include paper delivered each Saturday morning and a site web account. Maybe my web-link is what you call the Kindle edition(?) I threatened to cancel my subscription if they couldn't reduce my cost. Well, they pretty much just said "we hope you reconsider and they believe they supply good value".
That was an empty threat on my part, I didn't intend to cancel, but now the cost makes sense to me. I'm paying for the hard copy paper and an extra $10 for the internet access. Not sure why they just didn't tell me that in response to my email.

The ICI has a somewhat provincial perspective when it comes to fund history. Though its fund timeline does start with Adriaan van Ketwich's 1774 pooled investment vehicle the Eendragt Maakt Magt ("unity creates strength") trust, the ICI can't seem to acknowledge that this was a CEF. Rather, it gives the 1868 creation of the Foreign and Colonial Government Trust as the precursor to the US fund model.
https://www.icifactbook.org/21_fb_app_b.html
While this was the first fund in an Anglo-Saxon country, the Dutch fund came nearly a century earlier.
K. Geert Rouwenhorst (Yale School of Management), The Origin of Mutual Funds
In footnote 6, that paper adds that there was an even earlier (1773) plan for a similar vehicle, but it's not known whether it was ever actually launched.
The ICI timeline goes on to give 1924 as the date of the first mutual funds in Boston. The Massachusetts Investors Trust was started in 1924. It seems that whatever other 1924 funds the ICI has in mind didn't survive, as the Putnam Investors Fund (1925) is often given as the second oldest surviving "modern" fund.
Whether CEFs ever "caught on" is somewhat subjective, but consider:

A "veritable epidemic of investment trusts afflicted the Nation" before the Stock Market Crash of 1929. By 1924, over $27 million had been invested in investment companies, up from less than $15 million in the prior year. In 1925, investment trusts holdings double to $150 million. Some 140 investment companies were formed between 1921 and 1926. A new investment company was being created every other day in 1928. "[B]y 1929 they were being created at the rate of almost one a day." The assets of investment companies rose to over $1 billion in 1928. Another $2.1 billion was added in 1929. Between those two years, the number of investment company shareholders increased from 55,000 to over 500,000.
Almost all of these enterprises were "closed-end" investment companies that invested in securities rather than producing a product or service.

Copious footnotes omitted. Jerry W. Markham, Mutual Fund Scandals - Comparative Analysis of the Role of Corporate Governance in the Regulation of Collective Investments, Hastings Business Law Journal, Volume 3, Number 1 (Fall 2006).
Similarly, the late Harold Bierman Jr, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Management and Finance at Cornell, wrote that "By 1929, investment trusts were very popular with investors. These trusts were the 1929 version of closed-end mutual funds."
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-1929-stock-market-crash/

@Mav123.
+1.
oops, Looks like PRIDX is closed, still, too. And BRUFX is still a father/son operation. Because of its very thin batting order, there are many who don't like it, including some here at MFO. But I have tracked DODBX --- same flavor of fund --- and it's too streaky, even if 2021 is quite a good year for it, so far. YTD, it's virtually tied with PRWCX in terms of performance. (19 Nov, '21.)

Hello, @Mav123.
My only single stock holding amounts to a tiny sliver of one percent of my total: ENIC. Chilean electric utility. I'm looking at a loss these days which in percentage terms is big. But there's been lots of political junk happening, and on Sunday, 21st Nov. there is to be an election....
Fund-wise: PRWCX. PRIDX PRDSX and wife's IRA is in BRUFX. Both PRWCX (closed, still?) and BRUFX are allocation funds, holding both stocks and bonds. :)
Thank you @Crash. I was able to get in to PRWCX through my work, yes, it is closed.
I'll look at the funds you mentioned. Thank you

+1

Jack Hough writing in this week’s Barron’s (November 22 issue):
“Gold is an inflation hedge, but only reputationally, not statistically. It lost money during bouts of elevated inflation from 1980 to 1984, and again from 1988 to 1991.”
(Above does not necessarily reflect my opinion and is not intended as investment advice.)

This chapter on CEFs of the ICI Factbook shows that CEFs are a rather tiny segment of funds - there were 494 CEFs with total AUM of $279 billion only as of 12/2020. They are the oldest form of funds that have existed since late 1800s but are rather complex in structure and never caught on with the masses. About 38% are equity CEFs and 62% bond CEFs. Mutual funds (OEFs) came along in late 1920s and ETFs in early 1990s. https://www.icifactbook.org/21_fb_ch5.html
Ireland IRL is quite concentrated, not leveraged, has a high ER of 1.96% (0.65% for management is OK but 1.31% "other" is high considering that there is no leverage), has high distribution due to managed-distribution policy (many CEFs do) but its large discount has persisted. One has to know more about Ireland, N Ireland, UK and EU to be exposed to IRL. Strong dollar also cuts into the return for the US investors.

Yogi,
Your $5 news stand price seemed way too low. So I checked. You are correct. Just $5 an issue for the paper edition. What bargain! For me it has paid for itself many times over during the past year. (To be perfectly accurate here, I subscribe to the Kindle edition of Barron’s at around $12.50 monthly. As far as I can tell - it is pretty much the same as the print edition.)
And - nice to hear @Sven subscribes …

The link @msf posted did not work for me. But, this one did:
Biden's Pick

Here's a different take. The op ed writers agree that the decision is political. But they feel that the political calculation comes down to bipartisanship (Powell (R)) vs. greater regulation that would factor in climate change (Brainard (D)).
They also note that aside from Jimmy Carter, every incoming president since Truman but one reappointed the sitting chair for at least one term.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/21/opinion/federal-reserve-biden-powell-brainard.html

As long as you're comfortable with the fact that 33% of the fund's portfolio is in these two stocks--CRH,19.41%, and Flutter Entertainment,13.82%--then it could be an interesting play.

+1. And thank you. :) . I'm going to bookmark that link!

For those who can access SeekingAlpha, Lyn Alden Schwartzer has added another stimulating discussion. Really, such a good paper. I hope you find it interesting and useful.
SA Article

Perhaps some portion of the population that "retired" during the pandemic will stay retired long term. And, perhaps some younger people who were previously in dual worker households and who opted out of the labor force during the pandemic will remain at home long term thereby causing the the number of single worker households to increase. I suspect both of those changes in the composition of the workforce may be happening. Those issues will factor into the Fed's decision about when to start raising interest rates. That decision will also need to wrestle with the Fed's maximum employment mandate:

Complicating the decision-making and posing a challenge for communications is the much-hailed revamping of the central bank’s strategy in August and September 2020.
Chair Powell, Governor Brainard and colleagues agreed then it would “be appropriate” to keep borrowing costs ultra-low until maximum employment was reached, which they redefined as a “broad-based and inclusive goal.”
One problem: The Fed’s policy framework doesn’t address how officials should balance risks between inflation and employment, an omission drawing criticism from economists such as Harvard University’s Jason Furman, who led former President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Powell or Brainard Will Struggle

msf said: Schwab is projecting average real returns over the next decade of around 4.5% in the stock market and negative bond returns.

Would you please provide a link to Schwab? Thanks

I read the figures straight off the graph; forecasted real returns: 4.5% for US large cap, 5.0% for US small cap, 4.4% for int'l large cap, -0.4% for US IG bonds.
When I post a graph, I usually try to give the page from which it comes:
Source page: https://www.schwab.com/resource-center/insights/content/why-market-returns-may-be-lower-in-the-future
But I did forget to give the source page for the life expectancy vs. income chart. That is:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/for-life-expectancy-money-matters/
After I posted that chart, similar data (different source) was presented in an economics class I'm taking.

John Authers looks at inflation through the lens of the labor market.
"We can put the question of whether the latest dose of inflation is transitory to sleep; it isn’t, and many find it offensive to say so. But the question of how serious elevated price inflation will be and how long it will last is much more interesting, and much harder to answer."
Link