@Sven, yes indeed, most of our nut is there. And now that I have bailed from the Yackts and Parnassus, even more.
I have never owned
CAPE on its own. I just track it irregularly, and am always (a little, but decreasingly) surprised to see it outperform all the other ones I like, or used to --- the half-dozen smart secret-sauce LC div / value etfs, e.g. And now SPLV.
@BobC, was not comparing with their benchmarks. SPHD has been superb at shorter times and also overall; I wish I had been in it.
As for ups / downs, just go to M* 10k-growth graphs (put in an mfund to start, like TWEIX or some Vanguard or some other that you favor), and then select time windows of, say, dips that made you jump. Myself, I do not see enough smoothing to matter with SPLV vs
CAPE (which for some reason M* refuses to show today, hmm).
But notes from yesterday: over the pothole starting ~9/18/14, SPLV was notably better. The one starting ~8/13/15, pretty much equivalent. And the one starting before last xmas, meh, with SPLV slightly better.
So given the greater bucks I wind up with from holding
CAPE, I would take it over SPLV if I had to choose b/w them only. That's all. I learned long ago (partly anyway, he claimed) not to sweat market potholes, or at least to ride them out and not flinch, or not do anything much more than flinch.