@hank Does a 1035 exchange ring a bell? Still valid.

the valuation on small caps relative to large caps is as extreme as the late 1990s. Remember that the S&P 50 corrected by 50% in 2000-02. The S&P Equal Weight index and small caps vastly outperformed back then.

Reading this in other places lately. Along with the return of dividends, value . . . and the Talking Heads?
I'm still waiting...I'm still waiting...I'm still waiting...
I'm still waiting...I'm still waiting...I'm still waiting...
I'm still waiting...I'm still waiting...
The feeling returns
Whenever we close our eyes
Lifting my head
Looking around inside
The island of doubt
It's like the taste of medicine
Working by hindsight
Got the message from the oxygen
Making a list
Find the cost of opportunity
Doing it right
Facts are useless in emergencies
The feeling returns
Whenever we close our eyes
Lifting my head
Looking around inside
Happy Friday:

if I recall properly, 403B's were pushed by lobbying groups of the insurance companies to become part of the IRS code. 401k's came later.

College contributions to participants’ annuities have been “before tax” dollars to the individuals since the start of TIAA [by the Carnegie Foundation] in 1918, as are employer contributions to qualified pension plans. This was formalized in broader amendments to the Internal Revenue Code in 1942. In the 1950s, the School of Medicine at Washington University of St. Louis ... and the Johns Hopkins Medical School offered their medical doctors on the staff an arrangement whereby doctors could designate their entire salary or any part of it as annuity premiums, before taxes. Many doctors jumped at this chance.
...
The IRS became interested, and a high Treasury official, Dan Throop Smith, a former professor at the Harvard Business School, pressed an amendment to the Internal Revenue Code that would limit tax-deferred college contributions to annuities to 10 percent of current salary.
...
The final result was a reasonable compromise, permitting annuity contributions of up to 20 percent of current salary, with a formula for past service. In the Technical Amendments Act of 1958, Congress added Section 403(b) to the Internal Revenue Code as a replacement for all that had gone before in the college world.
...But the unexpected development was that the individual could voluntarily elect to fill the rest of the 20 percent if his or her employer was not contributing the full amount. The individual could transform part of his or her salary into “employer contributions” to an annuity under Section 403(b) by so-called salary reduction.
...
Congress established 401(k) plans in 1981, permitting employer-sponsored deferred compensation arrangements within certain parameters.

https://pensionresearchcouncil.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/tiaa04031670.pdf
Pension plans are little more than annuities funded by employers who put money into them; money that could instead have been used to increase employee pay. Section 403(b) makes this relationship between pension funding and reduced pay more explicit. It lets employees elect to forgo even more of their pay in exchange for greater employer pension contributions. Same as with Keoghs and 401(k) plans that came later.

403b for educational and nonprofit institutions originated much earlier and had simpler rules.
401k for corporations came later and accidently. Their rules are more complex and features more restrictive. The fear was that companies with lots of resources would play games with direct-contribution 401k as they did with their direct-benefit pensions. Some 401k reforms only now provide features that were already available in 403b, and many were asking, "So, where is the beef?"
The insurance industry lobbied hard to include annuities among the default options for auto-signups for 401k/403b but only the TDFs were approved. Most recently, a 401k reform allows income/annuitization within the TDF framework and that has forced cooperation among the fund families and insurance companies (only they can provide annuities).
Workplace annuity leader TIAA should be mentioned. There are only 8 CREF VAs covering stocks, bonds, hybrid, m-mkt. The ERs for the cheapest R3 class (for large institutions) range from 0.17-0.26% (all-in), while the ERs for the most expensive R1 class (for small institutions) range from 0.41-0.49% (all-in). These are low ERs by any standard. Some workplace plans may have additional plan level fees that vary depending on whether the institutions subsidize 403b program as HR benefit.
CREF Stock VA is the oldest VA around (1952).
Of course, TIAA also has general (non-workplace) annuity programs that are much more expensive, but that isn't TIAA's main business.

@hank @yogibearbull et al
A unique annuity.
Fidelity Personal Retirement Annuity
A 'lite' overview: Fido's annual fee = .25%. There are 55+ fund choices for investments, each having their own ER's. So, if fund 'x' has an ER of .75%, + the .25% fee, ones total annual charge would be 1%.
Tax deferred growth.
There may be some changes since I first read through the prospectus several years ago.
The link will provide the full overview.
@msf and I discussed this annuity choice several years ago.
And @hank, if I recall properly, 403B's were pushed by lobbying groups of the insurance companies to become part of the IRS code. 401k's came later.

Go to their website for top 5 portfolio effective 6/23.

That's great @davidmoran. Way to go man.
The stock count is right in line with their declared strategy to own 20-25 stocks. So it's nice to know they aren't suffering from strategy creep.
Depending on who you can believe in this crazy internet world, they're around 90% equities and their secret sauce is around10% AGPXX and around -.03 options on stocks in their portfolio. That's not the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. YMMV.

All of this is duly noted here. Thanks for taking the time to spell it all out! One small detail continues to bug me: M* has made it difficult now, to compare funds using the charting feature , for a 10-year time span. 1,3,5 years is pre-set. And "Maximum." But that could be back to 1911 or only as far back as last Tuesday.
In order to compare funds for 10 years, you must enter it yourself. And when you do, the lovely, fabulous and marvelous people at Morningstar seem to have instructed the chart to go to the first or last day of the month, not the day you have entered. It's maddening. And so, I'm using M* less and less.
I have tried Simply Wall Street. Have a couple of portfolios there. For a few days, going back some weeks now, they were all discombobulated. I went back to see what's what by now, and it seems to be functional again.

PRWCX portfolio Top Five. (dated 31 March.)
Microsoft.
Apple.
United Health.
Amazon.
Fortive. (What do THEY do?)
TCAF is quite obviously not a clone, and there is no bond component, either.
I wouldn't own TCAF because the top 5 are what they are. All the companies I love to hate. Granted, PRWCX has owned them, too. Probably does own them still, I'm not sure. I did not look this time, past the Top Five.
Yes, TCAF is bound to attract attention. And Giroux is quite capable. i am using TRP brokerage, still. But I'm less and less impressed with their other funds.....

Watch $25 for TCAF. That was the initial price and it may be supported for a while by the dealers/market-makers. Click 5-day on the Yahoo chart. Break to 24.98 so far doesn't count.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TCAF?p=TCAF&.tsrc=fin-srch

I saw that top 25% of AUM were the huge high-flying tech stocks too. It makes me hesitate to add-to this ETF at this time (I did buy a few shares on the 2nd day to more easily monitor it's progress). All, except GOOGL, have 14-day RSI scores around 70. Maybe not a good buying opportunity. But that said, these tech stocks seem to have been more defensive than any other equity category this YTD.

NASDAQ was up over 30% YTD as of yesterday. Apple hit an all time high. By contrast, the Dow was essentially unchanged YTD. What a disparity. Some pretty good funds aren’t doing much this year. VWINX was up less than 2% YTD as of yesterday. And we all know the sad tale of “safe” CCOR which was off 11-12% YTD at last check. Not meant to pick on any particular fund. Just to point out how crazy the markets have been lately.
I have trouble dealing with fame (in this case Giroux’s), so vacated PRWCX early last year and am staying far away from the obvious attempt by TRP to capitalize on Giroux’s name with a semi-clone that’s much different than PRWCX by many accounts here. Hey, they’ve been losing AUM. Who can blame them?
Re TRP - I think they generally do a good job with their diversified “spectrum-type” allocation funds. Some have reasonable fees. You can gain exposure to a literal rainbow of various equity or fixed income areas in one fund. And I’ve used TCHP in the past as a short term trading instrument. But you don’t want to be holding much of that one when tech tanks. It will be interesting to observe the extent to which TCAF sees use as a short term trading tool rather than a solid long term portfolio hold like its tamer cousin.

I saw that top 25% of AUM was the huge high-flying tech stocks too. It makes me hesitate to add-to this ETF at this time (I did buy a few shares on the 2nd day to more easily monitor it's progress). All, except GOOGL, have 14-day RSI scores around 70. Maybe not a good buying opportunity. But that said, these tech stocks seem to have been more defensive than any other equity category this YTD.

It appears based on todays NAV move, that TCAF is going to run hot (relative SPY). Not a problem if you want that. 25% of AUM are AAPL, AMZN, NVDA, MSFT, GOOGL.
This brings up the question will the T/O be higher than I would have thought? IOW's will TCAF be more tactical in nature.

I don't need to pay .31 to get a lineup like that.

I would be curious if he mentioned gold or real estate. In January he mentioned both to Market Watch.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-crazy-retirement-portfolio-has-just-beaten-wall-street-for-50-years-11672945313

It appears based on todays NAV move, that TCAF is going to run hot (relative SPY). Not a problem if you want that. 25% of AUM are AAPL, AMZN, NVDA, MSFT, GOOGL.
This brings up the question will the T/O be higher than I would have thought? IOW's will TCAF be more tactical in nature.

Thank you for all the effort in this thread.
Sorry, but may I be so bold to ask for the top 10 in Sharpe over 5 years?

Thanks for the update.
3. I wondered about the "analyst" ratings when I saw that nearly all funds had them. Now I know - as far as M* is concerned, analysts can be replaced by a computer - no asterisks ("Q notations") needed.
Here's M*'s paper on Morningstar Medalist Rating Methodology. The date on the paper (Version 1.0) is May 2, 2023. But the date shown for the paper according to a M* search is Jan 31, 2023. (Related to Yogi's comments about dates on M* papers.)
1. While M* still provides its basic screener, it's been very slow in updating its fund categories. So you won't be able to use it to screen for moderately conservative allocation funds.
2. M* started giving each share class its own rating before it retired the "classic" premium fund screener. So adding individual share class ratings did not necessitate dropping the "distinct funds only" feature. As with other screening criteria that were dropped from the Investor screener, dropping "distinct funds only" was strictly a M* design decision. The individual share class ratings merely highlighted an implementation flaw in the premium screener.
In applying "distinct funds only", the premium screener would first eliminate all but one fund class (typically the oldest) of each fund and then apply the other criteria. This meant that sometimes it would miss a fund that had a share class satisfying all the selected criteria. That happened when the oldest share class did not satisfy the criteria. The premium screener should have screened on the other criteria and only then selected one share class of each fund in the result set.

Follow M* intrigues at:
For those with M* access, https://community.morningstar.com/s/question/0D53o00006ce0GGCAY/m-updates-2023
For those without M* access, https://ybbpersonalfinance.proboards.com/thread/460/updates-2023

In my quick search with M* Investor Screener yesterday, I missed some usual hybrid favorites because:
1. M* has (again) changed allocation/balanced categories to descriptors: Conservative, Moderate-Conservative, Moderate, Moderate-Aggressive, Aggressive. IMO, it's good as I never liked the %based names (like Allocation/Balanced 30-50%, etc).
BTW, a new M* Category document that is typically published in April but is overdue (in the past, M* has just slipped in the new document but still with the April date).
2. Another recent M* change has separate ratings for classes, so the M* Investor Screener now shows zillions of AF classes that overwhelm the list. There is no way to suppress that (the old Screener had "Distinct Classes Only" option and that showed either the oldest class or that with the lowest ER). IMO, M* can leave the default as-is but add "Distinct Classes Only" option.
3. Some old favorites are Bronze or Neutral now. That can be explained by the terrible 2022 for hybrids that affected them differently (growth-oriented hybrids suffered more). But I doubt that many holders would swap out of them because of that. I noticed that but limited my mentions to Analysts Ratings of Gold/Silver only. For example, JABAX, a hybrid choice in my Schwab DAF is now Neutral, but if it remains that way, Schwab will likely kick it out and replace with something else.
Another recent M* change is the elimination of computer-generated Q-ratings. Justification provided is that the computer-generated ratings are now as good as genuine Analyst Ratings - may be a wishful thinking. I see lots of gobbledygook in the computer-generated ratings reports. M* needs more work on "Mo", its version of AI chatbot, or just use ChatGPT or Bard in the meantime.
FWIW, M* Analyst Ratings are forward-looking and based on multiple factors, while the Star-Ratings are purely based on past performance over 3, 5, 10 years (weighted). With old regular and Q ratings, this covered universe is now substantial.

The old screener enabled one to select on many criteria, including 5 year trailing percentile ranking. The new tool (I hesitate to call it a screener, with so few screening criteria) returns 452 share classes of moderately conservative allocation funds.
With the exception of various classes of American Funds College 529 funds for 2030 (e.g. CTHFX) and 2027 (e.g. CTSFX), and Dunham Enhanced US Market DASPX / DCPSX / DNSPX, they all have analyst ratings.
I suspect Yogi is surprised that some of the usual names aren't regarded more highly. I've never been enamored with the analyst ratings, so this doesn't surprise me. Though perhaps he can identify some funds that are missing. All the T. Rowe Price and Vanguard moderately conservative funds are rated silver or gold.
As to the OP's question, the Investor Screener says the top 5-10 funds based on five year performance are: FMSDX, VTMFX, USBLX, TNXAX, WBALX, TRIFX, HBLYX, GSBFX, TAIFX. These may not be in precise rank order because funds have multiple share classes and I tried to list the highest ranked share class that could be purchased by a retail investor.