401a allows employer & employee contribution. So, those could be combo mandatory & optional plans.
401k/403b are optional plans with employee contributions.
All of this is under the IRS code section 401 and within it are subsections 401k, 403, 457, 457b.

No question, fees are high and assets are small on LSLTX. The mainstay here is LCORX, but that is much harder to compare against anything as it holds different asset classes and moves around them tactically. If anything, a somewhat fair comparison would be against a traditional 60/40 indexed balanced fund like VBIAX. My cursory analysis is since its 1995 inception, LCORX has beaten VBIAX with a cumulative 695% return versus VBIAX's 651%, but there has been much fluctuation between the two in recent years. As I've said previously, Leuthold is a good shop. But it's a mistake to ever rule the indexers out.

Harry Markowitz, the Nobel-winning economist renowned for developing Modern Portfolio Theory,
died on Thursday in San Diego. Mr. Markowitz was 95. May he rest in peace.
"Until Dr. Markowitz came along, the investment world assumed that the best stock-market strategy was simply to choose the shares of a group of companies that were thought to have the best prospects."
"But in 1952, he published his dissertation, 'Portfolio Selection,' which overturned this common sense approach with what became known as modern portfolio theory, widely referred to as M.P.T."
"The heart of his research was grounded in the basic relationship between risk and reward. He showed that the risk in any portfolio is less dependent on the riskiness of its component stocks and other assets than how they relate to one another. It was the first time that the benefits of diversification had been codified and quantified, using advanced mathematics to calculate correlations and variations from the mean."
Link
An interesting side note pertaining to behavioral economics.
Jason Zweig interviewed Prof. Markowitz in 1997 regarding his portfolio asset allocation in the mid-1950s.
Mr. Markowitz responded:
"I should have computed the historical co-variances of the asset classes and drawn an efficient frontier.
Instead, I visualized my grief if the stock market went way up and I wasn’t in it – or if it went way down
and I was completely in it. My intention was to minimize my future regret.
So I split my contributions 50/50 between bonds and equities."
Link

The number of publicly listed companies peaked at over 8,000 in 1996
(according to several reports) but has fallen precipitously since then.
The decision by many companies to remain private influenced this decline.
It seems kind of crazy there were almost three times as many U.S. mutual funds/ETFs
(12/31/2022) relative to the number of Wilshire 5000 stocks (03/31/2023).

@MikeW, LSLTX does mild sector rotation with top 3 sectors now being techs, consumer cyclicals, industrials, accounting for 58% of tiny fund assets. This strategy never became popular and not many such funds exist anymore. You also noted its high ER.

Turnover was 105.72% for the year ended 09/30/2022!

The Q1 2023 Quarterly Report indicates LSLTX had net assets totaling $12.8 million.
Per the prospectus dated 01/31/2023, the fund's net annual expense ratio is 1.50%.
The gross expense ratio before reimbursement (contract runs through 11/13/2023) is 1.86%.
The fund's high cost will be a challenging hurdle to overcome.

@MikeW, for LSLTX (seems the only class) Fido shows AUM range of $9.50 (2020) - $19.86 (2017) million for 2014-23; now $11.89 million.
https://fundresearch.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/view-all/527289201?type=sq-NavBar

Very interesting discussion…. A couple of questions about LSLTX…. First on Morningstar it says the fund only has $12M in assets. That seems awfully small for a fund that’s been around this long. Wondering if this is accurate. And Second the expense rate at 1.5% is high. Is Leuthold good enough that he can overcome such a high rate?

DIVO holds these 24 stocks:
MICROSOFT CORP
VISA INC
JOHNSON & JOHNSON
PROCTER AND GAMBLE CO
UNITEDHEALTH GROUP INC
MCDONALDS CORP
CHEVRON CORP NEW
MERCK & CO INC
JPMORGAN CHASE & CO.
GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP INC
APPLE INC
UNITED PARCEL SERVICE INC
DEERE & CO
HOME DEPOT INC
WALMART INC
LOCKHEED MARTIN CORP
GENERAL MLS INC
DUKE ENERGY CORP NEW
MARATHON PETE CORP
SCHLUMBERGER LTD
COCA COLA CO
STARBUCKS CORP
DOW INC
VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS INC
and also this:
UPS US 07/21/23 C190
GS US 07/21/23 C370
DUK US 07/21/23 C97.5
DE US 07/21/23 C440
MPC US 07/21/23 C125
SLB US 07/21/23 C52.5
DOW US 06/30/23 C53
UNITEDHE CLL OPT 07/23 510
GIS US 07/21/23 C85
JOHNSON CLL OPT 07/23 170

How about 2,844 ETFs in 2022?
The total US market (W5000) has only 3,480 stocks now.
https://assets-global.website-files.com/60f8038183eb84c40e8c14e9/6462aa70ae7c2a11c83779e6_FT_Wilshire5000_IndexSeries_May2023.pdf

”It's too bad CCOR is stinking up the place this year as I've been interested in this fund for a while. Admittedly, some of my interest faded when short-term Treasuries started yielding over 4% and now 5%. High quality bonds are far more attractive today than they were at the start of 2022 … “

Well, an early guess of mine (same thread) was that folks have shifted into cash, CDs and the like. If so, the swoon could partially reflect assets moving out of the types of things CCOR owns, or actually fleeing the fund. Without looking, I’d have to guess the latter is true, as today’s fund investors aren’t likely to sit on a stinker like this too long. What I wonder is - if being and an ETF, CCOR might be more susceptible to funds fleeing (and associated damage) than say a mutual fund with tighter trading restrictions? If so, there might be a valuable lesson here for all of us who have gravitated to ETFs.
None of this is intended to overlook the keen insights @DavidSnowball and others have submitted. All of the replies in the thread make good sense to me. And much appreciated.

A danger in many myths is that they contain a kernel of truth. Individual participation in the stock market really took off in the 1990s. "Everyone" invested in the stock market and so they shifted focus from the size of their paychecks to how their little nest eggs were growing. Workers now cheered on CEOs getting larger and larger percentages of profits (from their generous stock compensation packages).
That little kernel of truth behind the myth of democratization changes perceptions. It doesn't require people to have sizeable amounts invested to shift their focus, any amount will do. The ratio of CEO to worker wages has risen from 20x in the 1960s to over 350x in 2000, and is now sitting around 280x.
https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/

The Week in Charts (06/25/23)
A tour of the markets covering the most important charts & themes, including the $32 trillion debt milestone,
the Housing Shortage, the Downtown Downturn, and more...
Video
Blog

It's too bad CCOR is stinking up the place this year as I've been interested in this fund for a while. Admittedly, some of my interest faded when short-term Treasuries started yielding over 4% and now 5%. High quality bonds are far more attractive today than they were at the start of 2022, when nothing looked good. That is what piqued my interest in CCOR. Now, meh, and mismanagement of options as others have pointed out.

Interesting history, worth reading for some of it, but it also perpetuates some false mythology about the democratization of the stock market and “everybody getting rich” off it. The vast majority of Americans who own stocks or stock mutual funds, own them in very small quantities so that the top 1% still owns most of the market just like they always have. Moreover, one of the reasons for the ostensible democratization is that workers were losing their pension plans and being put by their employers into 401ks with stock mutual funds. So now they’re stock owners. The end result was a massive increase in wealth inequality. So, to say everyone was getting rich in the 1990s simply isn’t true.
[snip]

Although wealth inequality was not the focus of the article,
you are correct that the very wealthy own a disproportionate share of stocks.
According to the Federal Reserve, the wealthiest 1% of the population
owned more than 50% of corporate equities and mutual fund shares in Q1 2023.
Link
USA Facts provides more detailed 2019 data regarding stock ownership.
Link

Unfortunately, LSLTX doesn't have a longer history. Comparing VS the SP500 after a huge 5 years run and then losing for the next 10 years isn't fair either.
2009-10 IMO is fairer.

I have a lovely collection of small cap funds . . . that I bought at the end of 2021 when they were less undervalued than they are now.. :)

Average stock likely to perform much better over the next 3-5 years than the average index because the average index is so beholden to a few vastly overextended stars.

I've got average too.
Making a list.
Find the cost of opportunity.
Leuthold sings: "Don't believe me? Just watch."
Working by hindsight.

Notice the conflating of the stock investing with all security (including fixed income) investing:"mutual fund assets jumped ... The charge was led by money market funds"
That leads naturally to the matter of pensions. Agreed that after 1981 pensions shifted from defined benefit (traditional) plans to defined contribution (401(k)) plans. Still, pensions were prominent prior to 1981. Companies must have been investing that pension money somewhere. It was most likely in fixed income, which is why conflating investing in stocks and investing in all securities muddies the narrative.
Of course where companies invested pension money prior to 1974 (ERISA) was ... nowhere. Pensions were not required to be adequately funded. See Studebaker.
This "democratization" of stock trading, however little or much, took time. In 1992, trading a few shares of stock could still cost much more than the purported "bad old days" rate of 1%-3%:

whenever fewer than 100 shares are being traded it may be important to ask how minimums -- the rock bottom charge for a trade, however small -- will affect the fee. In such trades, the discount houses may not always be less costly.
A discount broker like Fidelity Investments would charge its current $54 minimum to sell 25 shares of a $30 stock. At Quick & Reilly the minimum would be $37.50 and at Schwab it would be $42.75. At Shearson Lehman Brothers, a full-service house, the sale would result in a $50 minimum commission. This compares with Shearson's 1987 schedule of charges, when no minimums applied. Back then the trade would have cost $20 plus a $12 odd-lot premium.

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/05/news/strategies-buying-stock-ways-to-save-on-brokers-commissions.html