LOL !! +1

Notice how @Derf “jinxed” the day with his optimistic early morning market report? :)
A one-page story by James Thurber sums it up nicely: “Don’t count your boobies until they are hatched.”
Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a gold horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. "There's a unicorn in the garden," he said.
Link

Some day it may make sense to buy a little ARKK.......

I considered ditching my small (and shrinking) stake in DKNG today and investing proceeds in ARKK instead. Made some sense. Both are down sharply YTD - although I’ve been able to buy and sell often enough to keep from loosing near as much as ARKK has. What changed my mind is a belief that one of the other players in online gaming will make a buyout offer for DKNG at some point. With ARKK you don’t have the potential for a quick gain. The benefit from such an offer would be diluted. Put in another limit buy at $10 today. No cigar. DKNG closed at $10.27.

Re Tesla:
Following are edited excerpts from an article in this morning's Wall Street Journal:

Last month, Tesla sold just 1,512 cars made at its Shanghai plant, down 94% from a year ago and far below the more than 65,000 it sold in March, according to data from the association.
The impact rippled globally too as Tesla’s exports from China, where the company makes the Model 3 and Model Y, fell to zero. The company exported about a third of the cars it made in Shanghai outside of China last year.
The electric-vehicle giant is struggling to get operations back into full swing despite reopening its Shanghai factory on April 19 after a 22-day suspension. Tesla made 10,757 cars at the plant in April, a fraction of normal output.
On Tuesday, it cut daily output again to fewer than 200 cars because supplies of some key components were suspended, according to people familiar with the matter. Tesla had been aiming to boost capacity to 2,600 cars a day, the pre-lockdown level, by mid-May as more workers are released from lockdowns, the people said.
Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Facebook (and other social-media companies) blames Apple for part of its problems. Apple changed its default ad-settings from opt-out to opt-in. Google may be doing that soon for Android phones.
Apple is also no longer #1 in global market-cap. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/11/saudi-aramco-surpasses-apple-as-the-worlds-most-valuable-company.html

Looking at FAANG, and my how things have changed this year.

Facebook (Meta) - Zuckerberg pivots, company now has tough revenue questions. Very tough.
Amazon - in just the past few months, the FY earnings estimate for 2022 has fallen from $48 down to $16 per share. AMZN trades down at $2,100. The 2023 earnings estimate is over $53/share. But both keep falling. The bloom is off the rose, post Covid.
Apple -still solid. Earnings estimates are holding up fine, so far.
Netflix - traded at high of $700, now down at $166. Enough said.
Google - share price under $2,300 is well off the highs that topped $3,000 per share, but earnings estimates are sliding slowly so far. Good value or value trap?
Tesla's - priced at $734 today, well off the high of $1,243. Consensus earnings estimates have actually gone UP recently (to $12.3 and $16 per year for 2022 and 2023).
What's scary is that the Nasdaq could easily fall another 30% or more. Easily. That would mean some great bargains.

There will surely be more pain..... I'm adding to my oil/gas midstream play, ET....... FINANCIALS have been killing me, constantly, since I bought-in, earlier in '22. Really sucking cow farts. My biggest bite in Financials is in PRISX, TRP. .....Bar Harbor Bank, less so, but nothing to write home about. (BHB.) Still rated "BUY" by the only TWO analysts who bother with it. Regarding my long-time darlings, the big Canadian banks: All are trading at Fair Value (Morningstar) except for CM, at a -13% discount at the moment (Morningstar.) And I still own ZERO in any of them. But if we are in the midst of a "Grand Re-Pricing" event in this moment, now may be a good time to grab me a buncha CM... Decisions, decisions.... What's a mother to do?

Hi Sirs:
Or try
Brandy
SCOTCH
Wild turkey
Works VERY well in this market
Friend A loss -530k last 4-5D
Friend B -350k after all in w Luna crypto over weekend
Few committed suicide in other country per news
Headline tomorrow:
60% crypto traders bankrupted
80% stress depressed
1% contemplating suicide
Lucky I got out cryptos and options 6 wks ago
Still down lots for 6 months

+1

Like the Blood Sweat and Tears-haha! That etf is down another 10% today. Ouch!

There are several differences between the OLD VWELX and NEW VWELX
Most assuredly, as documented in the notes to the Bogle speech I cited. But rarely did those differences have any significant impact on total return performance then and now. It would be different if the fund had changed, say, from a 20/80 to a 60/40 fund over time. But it didn't.
Loads: For many decades, funds with loads generally charged front end loads, and occasionally back end loads. These are not included in total return calculations. The loads that are included are annual fees used as loads, usually classified as 12b-1 charges. Those didn't exist prior to 1980. One might argue that loads made funds somewhat sticky, and this affected how the funds were managed. That's possible, but a bit of a stretch.
What might be more significant is that expenses today are lower than they were in the past. As Bogle states in Postscript #1, Wellington's ER in 1951 was 0.55% and virtually the same (0.56%) in the mid 1970s. Today it is 0.24%. A real, quantifiable difference, but minuscule compared to the current 14% YTD loss.
Managed payouts: Like front end loads, these don't directly affect total return figures, because return calculations assume all divs are reinvested, regardless of the source. Arguably they have both positive and negative indirect impacts albeit small on fund performance.
The higher the payout, the more cash the fund must raise quarterly (forced sales?). OTOH, in Bogle's Postscript #2, competitors were infuriated at Wellington hiding ROC in divs. One infers they felt they were at a competitive disadvantage, i.e. Wellington's managed payouts made the fund more attractive (drew in more money). Presumably that would have helped Wellington with its cash needs for divs.
All in all, managed payouts is not a difference between old and new that would have a significant impact on total returns then and now. Especially since Bogle noted that in 1950, when required to break down the div components, just 3¢ out of 90¢ in divs were from ROC.
There is a difference that is significant. Not between old and new, but a difference unique to 1932 performance. In 1931, Wellington became defensive raising its cash allocation from 3% to 28% at year end (p. 6 of the Bogle speech). This cash drag going into 1932 slowed the losses. Had the fund been managed as "usual", it might have sustained losses much greater than the 29.18% it lost through May of 1932.
And now you know ...

@BaluBalu, in the heady days of allocation/balanced funds, some even touted their performance beating SP500 with one hand tied in the back (i.e. 30-40% in bonds). Of course, that claim couldn't be sustained.
FPURX now is also much different from the past. It used to have value tilt for equities but the new FPURX has been quite growthy for years (VWELX is going through that shift now but it chose a bad time for that). For the time period you looked at, there was no magic but FPURX lost much less than SP500 by 1974 - i.e. it came out way ahead by not losing that much in that bear stretch (1972-74).

Using the FPURX 1/1/65-12/31/80 chart from Yogi's post, I shrunk it to start 2/1/1970 and FPURX nearly tripled in the next eleven years and handily beat SPY. Not sure what conclusions one can make without digging deeper as to the workings of FPURX at that time that allowed that type of performance. Even if we know the answers, how can we use those answers to invest now?

There are several differences between the OLD VWELX and NEW VWELX.
OLD VWELX:
...was a LOAD fund. After the disaster in the 1970s. Bogle got fired from Wellington Management and started Vanguard. A new era began for funds.
...had a managed-distribution policy, whether earned or not. In those days, funds could make distributions from unrealized CGs without disclosing that those were really the ROCs. Rules were changed later. Now, mutual funds/OEFs typically don't use ROC distributions (although they could) but many CEFs do that.
Bogle of course liked to say that it was the same old VWELX since 1929 but that was not the whole story, or as late PH used to say, there is that "rest of the story". Sure, from the sky/cloud level, it has followed the same balanced approach.
http://johncbogle.com/speeches/JCB_WMC1203.pdf

Have the first five months of 2022 been the worst start to any year for moderate and conservative allocation funds?
ISTM that while using calendar year boundaries for losses may make sense from a tax perspective, the market doesn't have that same level of respect for the calendar.
That said, there's an obvious period to look at, albeit one very different from today: the 1930s.
According to M* (old chart), VWELX lost 29.18% from 12/31/1931 through 5/31/1932. Keep in mind that M*'s data for this period seems to be monthly.
So one should set the dates to show five steps, at the end of Jan, Feb, Mar, April, and May. For the old chart, that means using a start date of 1/1/1932, while the new interactive chart works with 12/31/1931 as the start date. Either way, 5/31/1932 is the end date.
1974 was indeed an ugly year, but it took nine months to reach its nadir. Wellington was only off 9% by the end of May. Both 1932 and 1974 differ from 2022 in that our current market decline started this year, while the market had been declining for at least a year prior in the other periods. Our current decline may and probably does have longer to run.
Wellington declined from the beginning of 1973 through Sept 1974. And it declined from its inception in mid-1929 through the middle of 1932. The former period was a deep recession; the latter the beginning of the Great Depression. The US has yet to enter a recession now.
While those eras and in particular those years were significantly different from 2022, differences in Wellington then and now are less clear:
Bogle said that "Wellington Fund has followed the same balanced approach to investing ever since it began operations in mid-1929." And it has paid quarterly divs since 1930.

One of few holdouts CBLDX ... now off 1% ... half of that in last three days.

Here are 2 charts for 1/1/65-12/31/80; unfortunately, M* removed the ability to put multiple tickers in these OLD charts. IMO 1974 was an UGLY start for anything.
VWELX 1/1/65-12/31/80
FPURX 1/1/65-12/31/80

I will look up the old data. I think that 1965-80 was a real stinker stretch for allocation/balanced funds and truly horrible for VWELX (it was a different kind of fund then). Only a few were around then - VWELX, FPURX, DODBX, LOMMX.

Private guarantees for current stablecoins are only as good as their guarantors (until the next run). Wait for the US CBDC for real guarantees (there are some around already, digital-yuan, etc).

Sure. But I still put greater faith in those coins (esp if they're regularly audited and regulated)[1] than those based/pegged to algorithms, insane cross-currency complexity, or needing the good will of the currency's single 'founder' to keep injecting money to try and prop it up during periods of volatility. (Though that model has worked for the USG since the GFC, but that's another story...but then again, the USG has borders, a military, and tax base while TerraUSD/Luna/Anchor does not.)
[1] I still consider crypto risk levels to be akin to junk bonds or futures contracts. So YMMV and caveat emptor, obviously.

Looking nicely green across the board ! Will they get greener , or stay green is the question.

As of 0841, nope. Dow -190 Naz -148....