"740% drop in the NASDAQ from its earlier high"
Don'tcha just love Wikipedia? A long-only portfolio cannot drop more than 100%. What it means to say is that in 2½ years (March 2000 - October 2002) the NASDAQ composite gave back 92.5% of the gain it achieved in the roughly five preceding years (1995 - March 2000).
Wikipedia does not give a citation for its claimed 800% of the NASDAQ composite over those five years, nor its claimed 740% (of the 1995 starting value) decline of the NASDAQ composite in the subsequent 2½ years.
Yahoo reports a gain (including divs) in the NASDAQ composite of 579% between Jan 3, 1995 and March 10, 2000 (adjusted closing vals of 743.58 and 5048.62). Yahoo reports that between March 10, 2000 and Oct 9, 2002, the composite lost 78% (adjusted closing vals of 5048.62 and 1114.11). Here's another site reporting a decline of 76.85%: https://finbold.com/guide/dot-com-bubble/

WSJ article quoted: https://www.wsj.com/articles/read-the-ingredients-before-buying-this-25-billion-etf-2e9b279d
The excerpt in isolation is a bit confusing: "This should have been a great year" for contrarians. The wording suggests that the past 18 months (ending June 30th) was not great for value. Yet the 7.6% figure for IVE indeed blows away the S&P 500 index (VFIAX proxy) return of -4.3%.
The point of the full article is that value (or growth) is not well defined, and performance figures vary depending on how value is defined. Bill Miller's Legg Mason Value owned growth companies when he felt they were value plays (undervalued).
A value strategy not mentioned in the article, dogs of the dow (highest yielding stocks), when applied to the S&P 500 (SDOG) shows very different results - nearly flat (small losses) in 2022 (-0.13%) and YTD through June 2023 (-0.84%). (Data from ALPS; M* figures slightly different.)
Despite its superficial stability, SDOG was 10% more volatile (std dev) than IVE over the past 18 months, per Portfolio Visualizer.

Not today. I’m referring to the mania of the late 90s which culminated in a 740% massive drop in the NASDAQ from its earlier high beginning in March 2000. Other major markets also suffered heavy losses.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
(The above article notes that Barron’s had began sounding warnings at about this time and that Sir John Templeton made a small fortune by shorting tech prior to the wreck.)
Notably, all 4 panelists on the famous Wall Street Week With Louis Rukeyser show’s end of year program December 31, 1999 sounded downright “bubbly” in forecasting the year ahead. Not one, including the program’s distinguished host, foresaw the approaching train wreck. (So much for “the experts”)

I'll add this with my experience with what I considered an early A.I. My wife was working on her Masters thesis in 1999. We were both working full time and this was a daunting task for her. As my typing skills were very good, I assumed the task of dictation/transcribing from yellow legal sheets, her notes and statements for this work. At the time, we had a '1997' desktop computer running Windows 98 which also had the MS Word program. This was fine, but still not getting the work done fast enough. I purchased the 'Dragon Systems NaturallySpeaking 1.0 ' voice recognition program. This was simply the program and a headset microphone. I spent about 1 week, during off hours, teaching the program my voice 'sounds' for whatever word I spoke. The error rate became very small for its understanding of how I spoke numerous words. I could now read into the Word document what had been written or spoken by my wife. There were always some corrections to be made (typed) from words not understood or known, but the speed of producing the final printed document increased a great deal. I was amazed with the use of a computer interfaced with this program. Voice programs are available now, too; and are embedded into some office suite packages (MS 365, etc.) And cell phones.
I remain most hopeful, using A.I. and computing power, with the speedy process(es) for medical applications of all types.
NOTE: This was written by me without use of any additional programming features.
Below, about the Dragon speak program.

Dr. James Baker laid out the description of a speech understanding system called DRAGON in 1975.[5] In 1982 he and Dr. Janet M. Baker, his wife, founded Dragon Systems to release products centered around their voice recognition prototype.[6] He was President of the company and she was CEO.
DragonDictate was first released for DOS, and utilized hidden Markov models, a probabilistic method for temporal pattern recognition. At the time, the hardware was not powerful enough to address the problem of word segmentation, and DragonDictate was unable to determine the boundaries of words during continuous speech input. Users were forced to enunciate one word at a time, clearly separated by a small pause after each word. DragonDictate was based on a trigram model, and is known as a discrete utterance speech recognition engine.[7]
Dragon Systems released NaturallySpeaking 1.0 as their first continuous dictation product in 1997

Remain curious,
Catch

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I bought the wrong CEF Friday. Historical performance too volatile and fees too high. Have better one in sight, but need to wait for $$ to settle before selling the former. Meanwhile it has bumped up nearly 1.5% today. With some luck will be able to pocket a few dollars from the short hold. Casino for sure. But nice to be able to trade in out of these vehicles almost at will.
I’m certainly not in the euphoric camp as equities go. But who knows?
@Level5 - 5.5% is a nice return for sitting on your hands.

Invested a hefty (for me) chunk of 6-month t-bills at 5.5% through Vanguard Brokerage.

@david_snowball I am surprised (shocked) that you find it difficult to identify and buy the 50 stocks in the S&P 500 that are up 56% this year. I might just have to start traveling on other discussion boards at this rate.

While July has historically shown to be a good month for stocks I'm of the opinion that we will see the market hold or drift down over the next few months rather than surge to the tune of a new bull market. If the institutional folks are not buyers at these levels there's no reason for me to be either. Therefore I sold DIVO and 25% of my SCHD position. I captured no gain or loss on DIVO and a small short term loss on SCHD. In return I gather a 4.7% distribution which is greater than either of these two ETF"s were paying by contributing the proceeds to my MM position while I wait and see what happens. I could be wrong but I'm used to it.

Ha! Yes, 7.6% net gain (0.69 * 1.56) over 18 months ... or, 7.6% per month gain since January if you were lucky enough to apply the strategy.
It's easy ex-post.

Today's WSJ "Wealth Adviser" newsletter begins with this item:

This should have been a great year for contrarian investors. The 50 stocks in the S&P 500 that fell the most last year lost an average of 31%, then rebounded a startling 56% this year. Simply buying the losers at the end of December was a winning strategy.

"A winning strategy." If I'm doing the math right, that's stunning volatility for a 7.6% gain over 18 months?

@dtconroe- Hey, thanks much for your follow-up. I'll be watching closely to see if the Fed does in fact raise rates again soon... if they do, that might up the rates a bit.
OJ

Projecting what the FEDs will do next, is a complex aspect of CD investing. I will be pleasantly surprised if shorter term rates stay comfortably above 5% much longer. I am interested in longer term CDs and "hope" they settle closer to 5% than they are now, but suspect it will be in the mid to high 4% range for 2 to 3 year CDs. If I am accurate, that will present some challenges, for at least me, in my CD renewal decisions.

Dallas firm expects to hand back keys to 19 hotels, including two in Plano
The Plano properties are among a portfolio that would have required a paydown of $255 million and $80 million in capital spending.
Read in The Dallas Morning News: https://apple.news/AegWIHgtISIa34X7E9rHjDQ
I am assuming this is the right thread to post the above, given the OP. If not, please feel free to move it to the right thread.
I know everybody talks about office RE being the only sore spot in real estate. A few weeks ago two landmark hotels were surrendered by the owner in SF and I told myself that SF probably has some idiosyncratic issues and this is likely limited to SF and that if travel and entertainment is booming, the office contagion is unlikely to get to hotels.
I guess I need to read the Baron funds link @devo posted to understand the nuances of the RE.
Edit: Baron funds link covers Travel related real estate on page 8 of the 16 page document. Note that the fund, while talks about the great prospects for travel related RE, has allocated only 4.4% to Hotel & Leisure (15+% going to Casinos (grouped in Travel)).
Hotels 2.0
Timeshare Operators 1.5
Ski Resorts 0.9

These things do change depending on where the starting line is.
The difference in daily returns from June 21, 2016 (mid-summer) is 8.58%.
The difference in daily returns from August 4, 2016 (the day Albert died) is a little over 4%.
Monthly return from the end of August 2016 is 1.35 in favor of SPY.
From the end of September the advantage to SPY was down to .61
Monthly from 10/31/2016 to 7/7/2023 it's NICSX 135.13 to 132.39 for SPY.
Looking at MFO premium (July through June) I see:
7years SPY 16.26 David 16.13
6years SPY 12.55 David 13.55
5years SPY 12.22 David 13.82
4years SPY 12.69 David 13.24
3years SPY 13.48 David 15.29
2years SPY 3.28 David 5.69
1years SPY 19.39 David 26.57
That's good enough for me for an IRA watch list where I would be considering risk factors, in addition to total return.

@WABAC
>> Pretty sure NICSX has beat the 500 since David took over after his father passed.
I don't know when that was exactly, but this is not at all the case since midsummer 2016 (AN died that August): SP500 up 7% over Nicholas.

FAFRX (bank loan) continues to do well YTD. Other good ones are GIFIX, then FFRHX. The first two funds...YTD>7%...one year>10-11%...3 year>19-21%. All 3 funds SD is about 4.2.
But that's not all, compare this to PRCPX+TUHYX and you can see that HY has a much higher volatility. You want to achieve higher performance with lower volatility.
YTD Chart(https://schrts.co/CuXmBygK)
To see the volatility use only two funds: BL=FAFRX vs HY=TUHYX. See (https://schrts.co/vsTRCtXv) For YTD from Peaks and troughs, FAFRX was down only 1.5%, but TUHYX lost over 5%

(This Article First Appeared in Bloomberg)
“UP AND down Wall Street, forecasters were caught flat-footed by how the first half of 2023 unfolded in financial markets. That seems to have rattled their faith in what the winning playbook for the rest of it should be. Heading into the year, a handful of predictions dominated strategists’ annual outlooks. A global recession was imminent. Bonds would trounce stocks as equities re-tested bear-market lows. Central banks would soon be able to stop the aggressive rate hikes that made 2022 such a year of market misery. As growth stumbled, there’d be more pain for risky assets.
“However, that bearish outlook was shattered as stocks rallied even as the Federal Reserve continued to ratchet up interest rates in the face of stubbornly elevated inflation. And what was supposed to be the year of the bond fizzled: US Treasuries have nearly wiped out their tiny gain for the year as yields test new highs and the economy remains surprisingly resilient in the face of the Fed’s monetary policy onslaught. As a result, financial soothsayers have rarely disagreed more about where markets are headed next.
“There’s a 50 per cent difference between the most bullish one from Fundstrat (which sees it rising nearly 10 per cent more to 4,825), and the most bearish call from Piper Sandler (down some 27 per cent to 3,225), according to those compiled by Bloomberg. The mid-year gulf hasn’t been that wide in two decades. “
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/wealth/wall-street-soothsayers-have-rarely-been-so-bewildered-about-whats-next

@dtconroe- Could you advise time to maturity on those? Can't find anything on Schwab better than 5% going out to 2025.
Thanks- OJ

I just checked CD rates at Schwab. They do offer a 18 month CD, that matures in January 2025, that pays 5.2%. It is offered by Leader Bank, which is an A+rated bank, paying semi-annually. That seems pretty attractive to me for anyone wanting something maturing in 2025. 2 year CDs pay 5% from several banks.

July 8 Episode

Royce discusses why his Royce Pennsylvania Mutual Fund has outperformed its benchmark for over half a century and why he believes small-caps are laying the foundation for an extended cycle of above-average returns.

chuck-royce-shares-50-years-of-investment-wisdom-on-his-small-cap-outperformance/