Translation: "If you're annoyed by these fees, just buy OUR funds!"
What a lame non-response response by Fido.

From Fidelity Monitor & Insight:
"As we went to press, The Wall St. Journal is reporting that an“obscure fee” charged by Fidelity to third-party fund companies for the right to distribute their offerings on Fidelity’s Funds Network platform, has caught the attention of federal regulators. Of central concern is whether a purported fee of 0.15% is being absorbed by the
fund companies themselves, or if it’s being passed to fund shareholders in the form of higher, undisclosed fees. Note: This matter does not affect Fidelity funds. "

From Fidelity Monitor & Insight:
"As we went to press, The Wall St. Journal is reporting that an“obscure fee” charged by Fidelity to third-party fund companies for the right to distribute their offerings on Fidelity’s Funds Network platform, has caught the attention of federal regulators. Of central concern is whether a purported fee of 0.15% is being absorbed by the
fund companies themselves, or if it’s being passed to fund shareholders in the form of higher, undisclosed fees. Note: This matter does not affect Fidelity funds. "

FYI: When Ed Perks graduated from Yale University in 1992, he packed up his Mitsubishi hatchback and drove from his childhood home in Levittown, N.Y., to San Francisco. The fact that he didn’t have a job waiting for him in California did little to temper his enthusiasm. “The San Francisco area really stood out to me as an opportunity in the early ’90s because of the community that existed here in the finance industry,” says Perks, who is 48. “You had smaller investment banks and hedge funds, but also established asset managers
Regards,
Ted
https://www.barrons.com/articles/income-hunting-ignore-the-market-and-focus-on-companies-says-this-fund-manager-51551445200?refsec=bonds
M* Snapshot FKIQX:
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/xnas/fkiqx/quote.html
Lipper Snapshot FKIQX:
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/fund/fkiqx
FKINX Is Rank #6 In The (30%-50%-E) Fund Category By U.S. News & World Report:
https://money.usnews.com/funds/mutual-funds/allocation-30-to-50-equity/franklin-income-fund/fkinx

FYI: Around this time last year, Elaine Stokes, co-manager of the $11 billion Loomis Sayles Bond Fund, thought the stage was pretty well set for an economic upturn. Most major economic indicators were pointing upward, the Republican agenda was intact, and a recession was the last thing on most people’s minds.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.fa-mag.com/news/bright-lining-43471.html?print
M* Snapshot LSBRX:
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/XNAS/LSBRX/quote.html
Lipper Snapshot LSBRX:
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/fund/lsbrx
LSBDX Is Ranked #15 In The (MB) Fund Category By U.S. News & World Report:
https://money.usnews.com/funds/mutual-funds/multisector-bond/loomis-sayles-bond-fund/lsbdx

@TheShadow - You are on the ball!
I sold $25k of STATX on Thursday, 2/28/2019, and the funds are in my Vanguard settlement account today. It looks to be an orderly closing so far ...

Too easy a charge to make. There were puhlenty of mainstream articles from 20+ years ago, and older, saying that 'here are 5 (or whatever) consistently excellent funds that appear poised to do well over the longterm future'. DODGX, FCNTX, FLPSX, TRBCX, and surely some from Vanguard. And others, but those are in memory. I know because I already owned some and followed their coverage, and w/ OCD about it (then, less so now) was always on the lookout for future adds.

Almost everyone can run a screen that can beet the market looking backwards. Can anyone you tell me how many of them will beat the market in the next 5 years or even 3 years?
Often money managers that had great records with small amounts of money under management struggle with popularity rises and more assets flow in. Other manager take note as well. They analyze the investments and strategy of the manager and try to replicate the success and suddenly too many fishers are fishing in the same pond and alpha is gone.
You know there are incubation funds as well. Fund companies incubate funds for 3 or 5 years and if they are successful they are opened to bigger public. So, the previous record is incorporated to the fund that almost never benefited it. There are a lot of tricks the fund industry is playing to show alpha but rearview investing can take so much. Future is uncertain as ever.

Related. Think Ted post this article last yr
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.kiplinger.com/slideshow/investing/T052-S001-10-funds-beat-the-market-another-decade.html
Most mf have 1 2% annual fees will put large dink in long term returns - long term superior returns may not be possible

@AndyJ- Oh, yes... some 65 years and many floods. They were a lot more fun when I was a kid. The flood in '95 was the last straw for the old original house. We had to tear that one down and then built the new place. And yes, it's still beautiful: the view over the Russian River from our rear deck hasn't changed at all since I was a kid. Timeless. As long as there's no fire, that is.

Fidelity announced a doubling of its NTF ETFs from 250 to 500 immediately after Schwab announced a doubling from 250 to 500.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-fidelityinvestments-etf/fidelity-schwab-expand-commission-free-etfs-to-over-500-idUSKCN1Q12BZ
As of today, per its press release, "Fidelity is [still] in the process of expanding its commission -free ETF platform for individual investors and advisors to include more than 500 ETFs". Its ETF page reports 357 ETFs are NTF, only Fidelity and some iShares.
The only thing that Fidelity did immediately was add some iShares. It's nowhere near the 500 that FA Mag said was coming by today.
Schwab has just posted its 501 NTF ETFs:
https://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/investing/investment_help/investment_research/etf_research/etfs.html?&path=/Prospect/Research/etfs/overview/oneSourceETFs.asp
Meanwhile, Vanguard Brokerage Services has been selling 1800 ETFs without a transaction fee for the past six months. That's supposed to be 90% of the 2000 ETFs on the market.
https://pressroom.vanguard.com/news/Press-Release-Vanguard-Launches-Commission-Free-ETFs-082118.html

A little housekeeping:
Skeet mentioned a number of Vanguard funds using investor class tickers. These are now closed to retail investors; look for the admiral class shares. For example, instead of VIGRX, use VIGAX.
@STB65 writes that PRIDX suggests that one can still get in if one can meet the min. I don't know how (with the usual exceptions of grandfathered 401k plans and the like). It is closed to new investors even going directly through TRP (as of April 2, 2018):
https://www3.troweprice.com/fb2/fbkweb/snapshot.do?ticker=PRIDX
(See also Shadow's post above.)
That is indeed a soft close (since existing investors can add money), but for new investors it might as well be a hard close.
I'm wondering about the statement that "VWIGX will always be open." It's not as though Vanguard doesn't close funds. See VDIGX. Unlike, say, the Primecap run funds, VDIGX is closed even to Flagship customers. Why couldn't VWIGX likewise be closed in the future?
It's true that Vanguard often adds more subadvisors to increase capacity of its funds rather than close them. By that thinking though, VWIGX should be even more likely to close, since Vanguard dropped the number of subadvisors for the fund from three to two in mid 2016.
Regarding using global funds to let managers put money where it can be used best: I like the idea of letting mangers do what I'm paying them to do, i.e. manage. But ISTM that global funds generally (a) have a big hometown bias (50%+ in US) and (b) keep their US/foreign ratios fairly steady. There may be exceptions of course, which means digging through older annual statements to see if they actually do move assets in and out of the US.
Where I think the "delegate to manager" may work better with foreign funds is in deciding which foreign countries to invest in. That is why I prefer broad based foreign funds. Also, a few of these funds more than dabble in EM, so there are some funds that can be used to truly span the globe. Notably, VWIGX has nearly 1/4 of assets in EM.

Nice catch. It's not unusual to see VCs get shares of a private company at a discount, but I've never seen something like that done with seed money for a mutual fund. (That's not to say it's not done, but it's not something I've run across.)
I notice in the same SAI (dated March 29, 2018, supplemented Sept 21, 2018) that it has two controlling (> 25% share) owners: Interactive Brokers (56.92%) and Institutional Secured Credit LLC (29.66%).
Not unusual for brokerages to have a sizeable stake (though rarely this large) in a fund. But that's because they have legal title ("street name") to the shares that their customers own. In this case, Interactive Brokers doesn't sell STATX, so what's it doing owning over half the fund?
That 29.66% is (through a series of companies) completely owned by "Mr. Abarbanel who is the CEO of the fund and owns 100% of the Advisor." (This includes the 10,000 shares purchased at $10/share.)
In a little touch of irony, Institutional Secured Credit is located on Painted Mirage Road, at the same address as the fund and the fund advisor.

Best Ira maybe SEP- Ira if you have a small business or have 1099 incomes... I have one at Vanguard - it's great way to have tax sheltered acct to have for long term holdings because you save so much tax deferred to use for investing
Anyone have DEFINED BENEFITS plans added to their portfolio!?

@johnN you asked this two weeks ago and I stated that "if the object is to maximize allowable contributions, the individual 401(k) is usually superior."
https://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/47567/roth-ira-and-sep-ira-and-defined-benefits-questions
I'll try to be clearer. What are you trying to do with a DB plan? Usually someone looks at these only with high income and after one has maxed out DC options. For most people with self-employment income, they get a higher max with a 401(k) plan than with a SEP-IRA.
The SEP-IRA limit is lower until you hit $280K in net income. Even then, it's still lower if you qualify for a catch up contribution, which you can't do with a SEP.
So if you're trying to increase the amount you can defer, have you looked into a 401(k) instead of a SEP? If you're trying to create a "traditional" pension plan (which is what a DB plan is), have you considered simply annuitizing (part of) your DC plan instead? That's simpler than doing all the annual mortality and funding calculations for a DB plan.
Here's a calculator from Fidelity that will show you what you can contribute to a SEP vs a 401k plan.
https://scs.fidelity.com/products/mobile/sepMobile.shtml
Here's Fidelity's worksheet (with 2017 limits) that shows you what's behind the calculations:
https://www.fidelity.com/bin-public/060_www_fidelity_com/documents/customer-service/401k-self-employed-owner-only-business.pdf
Another reason why a 401(k) plan is superior for some - unlike a SEP, it allows you to make Roth contributions. Vanguard finally added a Roth option to its individual 401(k). For many years, T. Rowe Price was the only one offering a no cost 401(k) with Roth option, which is why I used that. Fidelity's still doesn't have a Roth option.
https://investor.vanguard.com/small-business-retirement-plans/comparison

Wasn't the idea of the tax on SS in fact to tax the "rich"? If I recall the argument, many well-off people with large retirement incomes were (as usual) using loopholes to avoid taxes. Wasn't it the idea that people with lower retirement incomes would not hit the tax threshold for SS but people with the larger incomes would?

@Old_Joe, I don't remember the argument, but what you say about the actual tax computation is true. With lower income, much less of SS income is taxed; 2018 was a low income year for me, and ~ 15% is taxable, versus the usual ~ 85%.
Haven't heard this argument in a while, but I recall that in the past, at least, it was suggested that SS should be means tested ... and it is, via the income tax.
P.S., off topic: do you still have the place in the Russian R. valley? Another flood year there, I'm reading.

For now, do nothing.
Here is some discussion at M*, with additional links inside:
https://socialize.morningstar.com/NewSocialize/forums/p/388268/3992995.aspx#3992995

"The fee is calculated as 0.15% of a mutual-fund company’s industrywide assets, not just on the dollar amount of assets held by Fidelity customers buying shares on the platform, the document says."
This is the kicker -- .15% of a hosted fund company's ENTIRE industrywide assets? So if they are offering XYZ's S&P 500 fund only, XYZ is paying Fido a fee that's based on not only the AUM of that fund but also the AUM of every other fund XYZ sells, even if it's not available on the Fido platform? And does that include retirement plans, SEP accounts, or other managed accounts? Wow .. that's chutzpah!
This sounds like an end-run around declaring a 12(b)-1 fee -- or a 12(b)-1 that's higher than the average for services that are supposed to be paid for from a stated 12(b)-1 fee. TL;DR Typical greed/sleaze move!!

huh, no mention of the 'value' auto-churn strategy for SP500 that, so far as I can see, outperforms at every interval for the last ~6.5y
iow a non-secret for beating the market, or #7
graph CAPE vs FXAIX since fall of 2012 and any sub-period thereafter

It would be 6y old at the end of April, and only $7mm in assets. Matthews launched quite a few funds in the past several years that haven't really broken out in popularity. I just hope they don't start dropping more of them, like my fave MAVRX, their only identified value fund, with ~ $25mm in assets.

AJ,
What are the differences between MAVRX and MAPIX?
Mona

It would be 6y old at the end of April, and only $7mm in assets. Matthews launched quite a few funds in the past several years that haven't really broken out in popularity. I just hope they don't start dropping more of them, like my fave MAVRX, their only identified value fund, with ~ $25mm in assets.

Two portfolio managers resigned?
New team of 5 managers?
Que pasa, Chartwell?