Using QQQ as a comparison, ARK's performance (ARKK) over the last year appears to be off by 30% while QQQ is up 17%.
Is that reflection of ARK owning over hyped, over bought companies?
I am thinking yes.
That said, shorting seems like just another hype.
That said, it appears ARK is still correcting, as it is making lower lows.

If I may digest from the original post on EM small caps for a moment. There are still few EM opportunities still available in larger caps. I use NWFFX for a number of years as a lower risk EM fund. The broader mandate allow companies that derive majority of their revenue from EM including Microsoft.
https://morningstar.com/articles/975441/go-active-in-emerging-markets

This Rekenthaler M* article on EMs may be worth a read. He finds that shareholders like us (I.e., outsiders, not insiders) have not seen our EM investments pay anywhere near what the growth rates of the various countries would suggest, especially since the GFC.
https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1032995/emerging-markets-equities-a-promise-half-fulfilled

Thanks for putting up those figures, @JonGaltill. I got caught with ARTYX.
Strangely, WAEMX, (Wasatch EM SC Fund) holds, according to M*, only 8.72% in SC and MC, whilst it has 53.43% in giant and LC. It's no small-cap fund, but it has done just fine this year. Avoidance of China (some 5%) and big slices of Indian and Taiwanese stocks appear to be the secret sauce. Wasatch itself has this to say: "Seeks the highest-quality small-cap growth companies in emerging markets."

What a difference a year makes. Fun reviewing previous commentary about the EM market now that it's close to year end.
Here's the performance YTD:
ARTYX -4.19%
FSEAX -8.55%
WAESX +16.11
MIOPX -2.02
WAEMX +24.13
And a link on WAEXS courtesy of Kiplinger/ Nov 24: https://www.kiplinger.com/investing/mutual-funds/603792/wasatch-emerging-markets-smallcap-goes-its-own-way
ARTYX and FSEAX = not my finest choices for 2021. Should have exited back in March.

@hank - Aside from a minor nit, I agree with you. Though a fund that's 94% long and 6% short is net 88% long. TSMRX (equity) is 31.74% long, 37.54% short, for a small net negative position of -5.80%.
What you wrote about the quality of bonds being what matters tends to weaken the idea the BAMBX made money on Friday basically because it was in bonds. Especially with these funky funds, you can't tell much from their allocations alone.
Here's an interesting comparison. Two funds with very similar allocations, both across asset classes and by bond ratings:
Asset allocations (fund 1 vs fund 2):
US equity:       11.28% vs. 10.32%
Foreign equity:-0.70% vs. 0.90%
Fixed income: 77.38% vs. 82.64%
Other:             0.00% vs 0.04%
Cash:             9.90% vs 4.72%
Not classified: 2.14% vs. 1.38%
Viewed from the perspective of equity and debt (fixed income + cash), the two sets of allocations are close together. In addition, while both funds' equity lean toward value, fund 1 has a lower average market cap. Lower market cap stocks tended to do worse on Friday. (Source: morningstar home page, with a style box currently showing Friday's returns for each style.)
Bond allocations (fund 1 vs. fund 2)
AAA: 31.6% vs. 33.5%
AA:  1.4% vs. 4.21%
A:   12.9% vs 12.3%
BBB: 13.9% vs. 16.4%
BB:  19.7% vs. 16.10%
B:   15.0% vs. 13.0%
Below B: 0.9% vs 3.55%
Not Rated: 4.5% vs 1.0%
Fund 1 has less in IG bonds (BBB and above) in nearly every category, and it has more BB and B junk bonds. Given Friday's flight to quality, as with the equity side this suggests that fund 1 would likely have done worse than fund 2.
Overall the differences are minor. The first fund, not surprisingly given the 77% allocation to bonds, is BAMBX. Lewis wrote in Barron's that the core of the fund (about half) is high quality bonds. M*'s take is a little different, it characterizes this part of the portfolio as multisector. 35% junk does lend support to that. So I compared this fund to a multisector bond fund.
Some multisector funds went up on Friday, some down. For a good allocation match, I used RPSIX as the second fund. A nearly plain vanilla multisector fund with a dash of equities. It went down 0.2% Friday, while BAMBX went up 0.2%.
Bond funds go up, bond funds go down, even with the same credit quality allocations, even with the same 10% net allocation in equities. Especially on any given day. It doesn't seem to matter so much that BAMBX is 77% in bonds as what those bonds are (type and duration).
With this I'm just echoing what you wrote:

Likely that includes many other types of credit. Quite conceivably, very short dated treasury

Sources (all portfolio figures are as of Sept 30, 2021):
- for asset allocations, the funds' respective M* portfolio pages.
- for credit quality allocations: M* portfolio page for RPSIX; Blackrock's fund fact sheet for BAMBX.
https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/literature/fact-sheet/bambx-systematic-multi-strategy-fund-factsheet-us09260c1099-us-en-individual.pdf

Excerpt from Saturday’s (November 27) Wall Street Journal
“Investors’ hunt for higher fixed-income returns has powered sales of low-rated corporate bonds to a record. U.S. companies, including medical supplier Medline Industries LP and videogame maker Roblox Corp., have sold more than $455 billion of bonds with speculative-grade credit ratings this year through Monday … That already beats the full-year total for 2020, when junk-bond sales set a then-record of $435 billion.
“This year’s bond sales mark a notable reversal from the spring of 2020, when investors’worries about widespread bankruptcies and defaults sparked a selloff in low-rated debt … In a recent report, the International Monetary Fund warned that increased leverage could make the financial system more vulnerable to corrections…”
Subscription Required https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-yield-bond-sales-soar-to-record-as-investors-have-few-other-places-to-go-11637931601?mod=hp_lead_pos4

That was oil crash! Overdone IMO.
https://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=$WTIC&p=D&b=5&g=0&id=p35620695103

Excerpt from Saturday’s (November 27) Wall Street Journal:
“South Africa’s warning of a new and fast-spreading strain of coronavirus walloped the energy sector on Friday, leading to the sharpest declines in oil prices since the global economy locked down early last year to slow the spread of the deadly virus. Oil prices fell more than 11%. Gasoline and diesel futures each dropped more than 12%.”
Subscription required https://www.wsj.com/articles/oil-price-slumps-on-fears-of-new-covid-19-restrictions-11637953717
Wanted to post this because somewhere else I reported the one-day drop at around 6%. Actually it was double what I first thought. A lot of natural resource & commodities funds have heavy weightings in energy. Personally, I’ve pretty much vacated those funds. Was way too early, but glad to be out.
From watch-list Friday: BRCAX -3.6% / PRAFX -3.13% / PRNEX -2.8%

Apparently I didn't communicate well. I was trying to point out that one can't infer much from percentages of long and short, let alone net allocation percentages, for much but vanilla funds.
So in observing that BAMBX was 165/65, which superficially looks reminiscent of 130/30 funds, I should have emphasized "superficially". Strategy matters a lot.
In market neutral funds, shorts roughly balance the longs (as in BAMBX, where the equity portion is 53/43 long/short). Market neutral funds use shorts to tamp down volatility. OTOH, funds that are net long (~100%) in the market while shorting generally are using the shorts aggressively as a source of cash to add to their long positions.
Likewise, my observation that TMSRX lost money on Friday despite its substantially long bond position (and insignificantly short equity position) was a response to the speculation that "77% in bonds likely reason [BAMBX] was up a bit yesterday".
If 77% in bonds helped BAMBX, wouldn't 48% in bonds similarly have helped TMSRX? Not last Friday. Often one can't glean much from net allocations. Especially day to day.
Regarding TMSRX, it currently uses ten different strategies. At least that's how TRP enumerates them:

T. Rowe Price is continuously researching new strategies that may be employed at any time. The current strategies used as components of the fund’s overall portfolio are as follows:
Macro and Absolute Return Strategy ...
Fixed Income Absolute Return Strategy ...
Equity Research Long/Short Strategy ...
Quantitative Equity Long/Short Strategy ...
Volatility Relative Value Strategy ...
Style Premia Strategy ...
Dynamic Global FX ...
Dynamic Credit ...
Global Stock ...
Sector Strategies ...
Each of the strategies is constructed using its own specific investment process ...

Fund prospectus.
That's just the strategies. Tactics seem to include buying and selling almost anything under the sun. And it's hard to tell what the fund is "thinking".

M* Portfolio "% Below 52-wk High" is price-based and is not reliable as distributions are not accounted for. The other thing to note is that for bond funds, the high was in December 2020 while for stocks in November 2021. Stockcharts provides better information.
LINK1 Prices
LINK2 Reinvested

“It's not so easy to figure out what these sorts of funds are doing.”
Agreed, it’s very difficult to get “under the hood” of a fund like this. But, if anyone here can, it’s probably @msf - :) With TMSRX’s meager low single digit returns (and apparently many fleeing for greener pastures) I’m not too worried about the degree of risk they’re assuming. If the fund were cranking out 15% annual, I wouldn’t own it. That would be completely out of character with its stated purpose and the risk profile Price has established for it.
“TMSRX is net 48% long in fixed income and net 6% short in equity, both of which should have helped its performance Friday, yet it dropped ½%.”
Not so fast. There are 5 different investment approaches outlined and utilized by the fund. You’ve mentioned 2 or 3. And Friday may have been an aberration for a number of reasons, including very thin trading in the U.S. plus the fact that many international exchanges had suffered severe losses before the U.S. even opened.
Let’s look at how some some common hedges fared Friday. Real Estate and Utilities both were off 2% or more - despite falling rates. Commodities / metals fell in sync with equities. Long bonds prospered - but do you want to own a lot of those? Furthermore, fixed income need not consist of “long only ” bonds. Several of Price’s allocation funds utilize its Dynamic Income fund which tends to move opposite the direction of typical bonds. The investor class, RPIEX, actually lost .82% percent Friday.
http://www.funds.reuters.wallst.com/US/funds/overview.asp?symbol=RPIEX.O.
Let’s give TMSRX another day or two to prove itself - assuming Friday was the beginning of something worse. The benefits of a fund like this don’t always kick-in on day 1 of a broad market selloff. If folks aren’t comfortable with these types of funds, that’s fine. There are other ways to hedge risk, including building cash. I will tell you I work very hard to run a hedged portfolio, including about 5% currently in TAIL - Yet TMSRX did better than I did Friday.

FYI: For those who don't have a subscription to Barron's, here is the link to the complete fund profile of BAMBX that was written by Lewis Braham and published in November of 2020: https://webreprints.djreprints.com/57836.pdf
Fred

Thanks Fred. Awesome piece of writing by Lewis.
The fund? Sounds more like lasagna - a layered approach.

@fred495,
Thanks for the link.
The article provides important information regarding the fund's strategy and its upside/downside ratios.
Since many alternative funds have complex strategies and high costs, I avoid this category.

FYI: For those who don't have a subscription to Barron's, here is the link to the complete fund profile of BAMBX that was written by Lewis Braham and published in November of 2020: https://webreprints.djreprints.com/57836.pdf
Fred

BAMBX is more akin to a hedged bond fund with a small amount of equity than a 130/30 equity fund. It has a three bucket strategy--long high quality bonds, long strong highly leveraged stocks short weak highly leveraged stocks, and a macro strategy that goes long and short global bonds: https://barrons.com/articles/a-2-9b-alternative-fund-that-actually-works-51606264740
The "defensive equity" bucket tends to do pretty well in declines as the weakest stocks with high leverage tend to fair very poorly in declines while strong highly leveraged stocks do better. The managers favor highly leveraged companies on both the long and short side as they tend to have the highest dispersion in returns so that the worst do much worse than the best during downturns while the best highly levered companies hold their own during upturns. It's a complex strategy admittedly.

I'm inclined to agree with @Baseball_Fan that multi-strategy funds are generally a bunch of spaghetti.
Even if one does understand how each alternative strategy tends to work in isolation and even if one does understand how they interact, IMHO two wildly optimistic assumptions, one still does not have any sense of how they are being allocated/used. A fund saying that it "seeks to provide total return ... in both periods of strong returns and periods of market stress" tells me almost nothing about how it uses those alternative strategies.
More studying of a fund may not make it any clearer. M* gave DBLTX a "not rated" mark for two years (2014-2016) because "when ... evaluating sophisticated bond strategies like DoubleLine Total Return Bond, publicly available information often does not suffice."
https://www.morningstar.com/articles/759331/why-were-moving-doubleline-total-return-bond-funds-rating-to-neutral
Yet for most of us peons, public info is all we have to work with. And it's hard to deny that funds like BAMBX are employing sophisticated strategies, bond and other. FWIW, M* decided to change the rating of DBLTX from "not rated" to "neutral" because M* felt it was more informative to say that based on what they knew they could not recommend the fund ("neutral") than to say nothing.
With respect to the BAMBX's portfolio, Lipper is showing net allocations. According to M*, the fund is comprised of 65% short positions and 165% long, which adds up to 100% of the portfolio, net. A lot of shorting going on.
At a superficial level (i.e. just looking at the 165/65 figure), this looks like the 130/30 funds of a decade ago on steroids. Except that for BAMBX that's just a summary of its holdings and not its strategy. Here's a M* piece on the 130/30 funds of yesteryear, and the risks they carried.
https://www.morningstar.com/articles/287718/article
TMSRX is net 48% long in fixed income and net 6% short in equity, both of which should have helped its performance Friday, yet it dropped ½%. It's not so easy to figure out what these sorts of funds are doing. Even less so for BAMFX with a 500% turnover rate.

Not everything was down Friday. DKNG, which has stunk up the joint for several months, sliding from mid-$50s to under $35, gained +1.29% yesterday - bucking the trend.
I’ve long since ditched their stock, but with collegiate basketball and NBA in full swing … am using them for another purpose. :)

So you're going to put your monies into something like that based on one day's performance? [...]
Your money, do with it what you feel is best for you. This fund is not for me. Been burned by iqdax,. Learning my lesson.
I wish you good investing and good luck @fred495
Baseball Fan

What am I missing? There was nothing in my comment about BAMBX's performance record over the past five years that would indicate I was going to put my money into this fund. I would certainly never purchase any fund based on one day's performance.
Seems you misunderstood the purpose of my posting, Fan.
Good luck,
Fred

So you're going to put your monies into something like that based on one day's performance?
My spaghetti bowl statement stands, who knows how any of those positions interact with each other and at what time. It's an obvious guess by the fund managers as to what the tea leaves excuse me models are telling them what will happen going forward.
Your money, do with it what you feel is best for you. This fund is not for me. Been burned by iqdax,. Learning my lesson.
I wish you good investing and good luck @fred495
Baseball Fan