Your Social Security benefits are a significant retirement asset, worth more than $1 million of lifetime benefits for many readers. The present value of Social Security benefits at retirement, which can total hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, joins home equity as the two largest assets available for most American retirees, easily dwarfing the value of their investment portfolios.
For many lower- and middle-income Americans, Social Security may end up providing the vast majority of retirement income. The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College notes an interesting statistic that Social Security provides 70% of the income for 70% of households aged 80 or over.

introducing-the-social-security-claiming-decision/

Nov 13 Episode:
"Middle America is the new Emerging Market"

Copied From the Big Bang Investing Board and edited for posting on the MFO Board.
This briefing is for the week ending November 12, 2021.
The Index Review
The major market indices finished down for the week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gave back -0.63%%. the S&P 500 Stock Index declined -0.31%, the Nasdaq Composite was down -0.69%% while the Russell 2000 Small Cap Index lost -1.04%. The three best performing major equity sectors for the week were materials +2.60%, health care +0.72%, and industrials +0.48%. The widely followed S&P 500 Index closed the week with a dividend yield of 1.27% while the 10-year US Treasury bond's yield was listed at 1.57%. Year to date the S&P 500 Index is up +24.67%.
Global Equity Compass: For the week my three best performers in my global equity compass were FXI (China) +5.29%, BKF (BRIC Countries) +3.55% and EWZ (Brazil) +3.04%.
Fixed Income Compass: For the week my three best performers in my fixed income compass were SHY (1-3 Yr US Treasuries) -0.24%, HYG (Corporate High Yield) -0.74% and AGG (US Agg Bond) -0.78%.
Commodity Compass: For the week my three best performers in my commodity compass were SLV (Silver) +4.79%, GLD (Gold) +2.71% and DBA (Agiculture) +2.49%.
Producer Compass: For the week my three best performers in my producer compass were GDX (Gold Miners) +6.17%, SIL (Silver Miners) +6.07% and XME (Metals & Mining) +4.28%.
Currency Compass: For the week my three best performers in my currency compass were UUP (US Dollar Bullish) +0.87%, FXB (British Sterling) -0.51% and FXY (Japanese Yen) -0.60%
A Blurb About Old_Skeet's Portfolio: Thus far, I am up 6.28% in my spiff (special investment) position which I opened back in September. Since, this spiff is invested in Voya Corporate Leaders 100 Fund (VYCAX) I have no plans to add to it until after it makes it's annual year end distribution estimated to be in the 6% to 8% range. I will be building cash during the most part of the 4th quarter while being fully invested within the confines of my portfolio's (20/40/40) asset allocation (cash, bonds and stocks). I will rebalance, if warranted, during the 1st quarter of 2021.
Articles of Investment Interest
US STOCKS-Wall Street ends higher with boost from big tech
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-stocks-idUSL1N2S323Z
NY Fed Releases First Monthly Bond-Buying Schedule Reflecting Taper
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-fed-purchase-schedule-idUSKBN2HX2D3
Is Cash a Good Low "Risk" Hedge?
Ooops ... Link to ZeroHedge article removed for briefing posting on the MFO Board.
Old_Skeet's Favored Reference Links
Short Volume S&P 500 Index ... https://nakedshortreport.com/company/SPY
Breadth Reading ... https://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=$SPXA50R&p=D&b=5&g=0&id=p25768973625
S&P 500 Chart, Elder Ray System ... https://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=SPY&p=D&b=5&g=0&id=p20881173280
T/A Stock Opinion, SPY ... https://www.barchart.com/etfs-funds/quotes/SPY/opinion
T/A Bond Opinion, AGG ... https://www.barchart.com/etfs-funds/quotes/AGG/opinion
Thanks for stopping by and reading; and, I wish all "Good Investing."
Old_Skeet

A couple of more to consider. Blackrock International is a foreign large blend that scores in the top 10% across most time frames for its category. Impressive fund. Grandeur Peak Global stalwarts has had a very nice couple of years in the Global Small/mid cap space. David has written a lot about this fund family. Thanks for the advice on MIEIX @Observant1. Wasn’t aware of that one. Great candidate for a taxable account too. I’m personally leaning to starting an account with WCMIX. I will be reading up more on these other funds too. BGAIX is also interesting but it’s very high PE multiple gives me pause.

“ There is a lot of fear mongering ….. Those are worthwhile discussions to have.”
Nicely put. Thanks for the detailed analysis @LewisBraham
I try to read as much of the popular financial press as I can - by no means a comprehensive amount. But what often surfaces in these analyses is: (1) Central banks (notably the Fed) do not want to tank the markets. (2) They do, however, want to curb speculation. Unfortunately, there’s emerged over the years a certain amount of conflict there. When they do attempt to tighten (slow speculation) the equity markets become turbulent and fall or threaten to fall. “Taper tantrum” is the phrase often used. (3) This conflict leads (it seems invariably) to stage #3 in which the central banks / Fed “cave” to the markets and loosen the reins again. Repeat the process. Market players understand the game.
So now after years (decades?) of monetary stimulus we sit at near 0 short term rates with the Fed still buying bonds (albeit at a reduced rate) and talking obliquely about needing to further stimulate until “full employment” is reached. (Have you tried having your home roofed or painted lately?) Meanwhile, the markets march merrily along, The question left unanswered is - What further can the Fed and central banks do to keep the magic market money wheel churning next time the economy and / or stock market begins to shudder? What happens to those elevated asset prices when the stimulus runs out and people begin to realize the tank is empty?
One pundit I follow expects that coming inflation will force the bond market to take control - irregardless of Fed policy. In other words, faced with growing losses of purchasing power bond investors will sell en mass, forcing rates higher and eventually toppling stocks. I don’t necessarily siubscribe to this view, But think it’s one (of many) worth considering.

In the Foreign Large Blend category, I like SCIEX and MIEIX*.
The SCIEX management team also manages 30% of VWILX.
MIEIX has below average costs, low turnover, and usually provides good downside protection.
Mr. Ling started managing MIEIX on 10/01/2009; Mr. Webber began managing SCIEX on 03/01/2010.
Portfolio Visualizer Results from Mar 2010 - Oct 2021
*Morningstar fund category was Foreign Large Growth prior to 2020

I don't care if an active fund tracks an index on the upside, but I do care if it tracks an index on the downside. The SPY lost like 38% in the GFC while PRBLX was down only 22. I'll take positioning & performance like that anyday.

From M* PRILX Fund Analyst Report:
"Downside protection has been a strength for this
fund’s focused, roughly 40-stock portfolio. Since
Ahlsten became a manager on the fund, the strategy
has outperformed the S&P 500 in every market
correction, including the 2007-08 financial crisis, 2018’s
end-of-year pullback, and early 2020’s pandemic-driven
sell-off. One reason for that is that almost all holdings
have narrow or wide Morningstar Economic Moat
Ratings. While the fund typically lags in the ensuing
rallies, the managers have shown skill in picking up
depressed names that have proved beneficial in the
rebound."

+1

The first thought through my mind was: the IRS would never consider TWVLX "substantially identical" to whatever index one would like. For tax purposes at least that would get laughed out of court.
The article conflates active share and correlation. The former was defined in a 2006 working paper by Martijn Cremers and Antti Petajisto as a measure of how much overlap (or lack thereof) the actual components of a fund have with the components of an index. More formally:
Active Share = ½∑ | weight portfolio (sub i) - weight benchmark (sub i) |
https://www.fidelity.com/bin-public/060_www_fidelity_com/documents/leadership-series_active-share.pdf
FWIW, ActiveShare.info reports TWVLX has an active share of 65%. Not great, but better than 31% of large cap funds. By this measure, almost a third of funds would be at risk of being sued.
OTOH, correlation is a measure of how closely a fund's movements resemble (or can be "explained by") an index's movements.
The way the suit is described (" plaintiff’s attorneys cited a metric that suggests more than 90% of the fund’s movements can be explained by the benchmark"), it sounds like, not surprisingly, the complaint is concerned with the fund's performance, not how closely its holdings match those of the index.
Morningstar reports that the 3 year R² of TWVLX and the R1K value index is 96.84%. Perhaps there's an argument to be made. The problem is that just because a portfolio moves like an index doesn't mean that the portfolio is being managed for that effect. TWVLX is significantly more volatile. Its three year standard deviation is 10% above that of the index. That's reflected in magnified upside/downside capture ratios of 103/110. Likewise, its beta relative to the R1K value index is 1.09.
For a fund with underwhelming performance, that higher level of volatility is not something especially desirable. Nevertheless, it shows that this unleveraged fund is not a mere index tracker.

First of its kind? https://www.marketwatch.com/articles/american-century-investments-lawsuit-51636672247?mod=mw_latestnews
Suit is against American Century Funds and directed to TWVLX. "American Century told Barron’s in an email that the allegations are “false and completely without merit” and that it will vigorously defend itself against the lawsuit."
In the Large Cap thread I posted about PRBLX and how I admire its performance but I have a hard time switching from FXAIX or SPY to it because the performance is so similar. Am not implying that it's a closet indexer as I've done ZERO research on the subject on this fund but when I read the story above about closet indexing (something I wasn't familiar with) ... it made me think of my recent post. I'll have to take a closer look at several examples.
Wonder how many other funds too closely mirror their benchmark index?
Corrected… American Century… not American.

I think there may be some interest in a discussion on World and Foreign Stock funds or International as some were mentioned in @KHaw24 thread on Large Caps and @MikeW and @Observant1 weighed in with some good commentary on LC and Foreign.
So, I asked about a few above and will repeat below. I'm interested in WCMIX and maybe more now that Observant said its going to soft close on 11/30. Most of mine is in MGGPX and now PRGSX. Are there any other favorite International funds or ETFs?
After all, it's 20 percent or so of my port. Thanks @BenWP and @rforno for commenting as well.
Foreign LG:
PWJZX +22.04
MFAIX +20.00
BUFIX +19.94
WCMIX +19.11
World LG
PRGSX +16.70
BGAIX +15.73
MGGPX +8.85 <-- Not great.

and much of Europe
https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?campaign_id=116&amp;emc=edit_pk_20211112&amp;instance_id=45273&amp;nl=paul-krugman&amp;productCode=PK&amp;regi_id=22268089&amp;segment_id=74259&amp;te=1&amp;uri=nyt://newsletter/3f1d215b-ccd4-5aa0-a71f-7e709f371a37

Here ya go...added comments
WCMIX (Int'l Gowth) - Great performance, Concentrated
CIVVX (Int'l Value) - True to their Style
PRIDX (Int'l Small/Mid) - One of my favorite funds and categories
GQGPX (EM) - Replaced Harding Loevner 2 years ago
In my other accounts ...I have a Roth IRA with Vanguard and own VWIGX, My 401k has DODFX, BUFIX, ARTJX and ARTYX

Nice fund selection!
Personally, I'm not fond of Causeway Intl Value and am unfamiliar with Buffalo Intl.
I would have purchased PRIDX if it wasn't closed to new investors.
For those interested in WCMIX, the fund will soft-close after 11/30/2021.

The article is stupid because of what it says:
Try to imagine what would happen if stocks lost 70% and stayed down for years.
What useful or actionable comes from such imagining? To anyone?
And what would have been the conditions for such? Asteroid? Worse plague?

The Nasdaq peaked at 5,048.62 on March 10, 2000.
From that point it generated a maximum cumulative loss of ~80% until October 2002.
I'm not aware of any major plagues or asteroid crashes during this period.
All that was needed for this to occur was a bit of irrational exuberance!
The Nasdaq did not climb back above 5,000 until March 2015.

There is a lot of fear mongering about the economy and inflation for obvious reasons, but I don't see a lot about the stock market. I think Roth is right to get people to try to conceptualize the risks even if a little ham-handed. Here's Zweig on the subject of optimism:

In February 2020, before the pandemic had fully hit home, these [surveyed Vanguard] investors estimated the odds of such a bear market at an average of only 4%. By April, just after the S&P 500 had fallen by one third, their expectations that the market would plunge again in the coming year nearly doubled to 8%.
Those fears swiftly faded. By last December, investors in the Vanguard survey estimated the probability of another crash in the ensuing 12 months at only 5%. That was slightly lower than their average estimate during the three years before the pandemic.
It’s as if the speed of the recovery had erased the pain of the decline, or made a recurrence seem even more improbable. Just like that, a grizzly bear turned into what feels more like a teddy bear.
That complacency takes a toll—even among Vanguard investors, who tend to be cautious. These people often follow the philosophy of the firm’s late founder, Jack Bogle, who preached patience and repeatedly warned that stocks are risky. If anyone should come through the sharpest market decline in decades unperturbed, it’s the people in this survey—typically about 60 years old, with about $225,000 in Vanguard investments, roughly 70% in stocks.
Yet they didn’t all sit tight. One group in the survey stood out: those who went into early 2020 with the highest expectations for stock returns in the upcoming year. They ended up reducing their exposure to stocks much more sharply during the crash of February and March 2020 than those who had been expecting lower returns.
They also tended to turn around and buy back much of the stock they had just sold—but not until prices had already shot above the March lows.
Investors elsewhere seem to have concluded from the swiftness of the recovery that stocks aren’t risky at all. After last spring’s rebound, Dave Portnoy, a social-media celebrity, declared “Stocks only go up” so often that it began to seem like a magic incantation.
And, for the past year, just about every stock has gone up.
That’s largely because the Federal Reserve has backstopped markets by squashing interest rates toward zero and by buying more than $2.5 trillion in Treasury securities since February 2020, along with other massive interventions. Meanwhile, emergency government programs pumped trillions of dollars of stimulus into the economy.

As for useful actions, I can think of quite a few--save more, spend less being an obvious one. But there are others. Roth's story has a table I can't reproduce here for some reason of which asset classes did well in previous bear markets. It's worth thinking about which might do well in the next one. The I-bond thread already points to an interesting avenue for saving. Options funds if you can find the right one are interesting. Are Treasuries worth it, REITs, high quality value stocks with strong balance sheets? Gold bullion? Cash? Paying down your mortgage or refinancing it? Those are worthwhile discussions to have.

Jon raises some great points about large cap blend. If you already hold SPY then you probably have this area covered well. But it is a wonderful fund. We all have our different favorites. I'm curious what funds you have as your international holdings. International has underperformed for so long now that I find that to be much more difficult in terms of fund selection. My main fund here is MIOPX which has great performance over the long term but has lagged some this year because of China. One fund that I'm currently evaluating is WCM focused International Growth. However, I would love to find a strong international blend fund. The performance just hasn't been there though for that asset class over the past 10 years. Would be interested if anyone has found a good one.

Here ya go...added comments
WCMIX (Int'l Gowth) - Great performance, Concentrated
CIVVX (Int'l Value) - True to their Style
PRIDX (Int'l Small/Mid) - One of my favorite funds and categories
GQGPX (EM) - Replaced Harding Loevner 2 years ago
In my other accounts ...I have a Roth IRA with Vanguard and own VWIGX, My 401k has DODFX, BUFIX, ARTJX and ARTYX

JonG

Good post @KHaw24 . The OP mentioned growth, blend and value. But just focusing on Blend for the moment - I agree with @MikeW on PRBLX over PRDGX for the reasons he mentioned. I don't own the fund because every time I look closer at it - I compare it to the plain old S&P 500 or FXAIX and have a hard time justifying peeling some from FXAIX with a .015 ER vs PRBLX with a .84. The disparity in max DD, Ulcer and StdDev is not that much to me.
There could be an entire thread about LC Growth funds (so many).
For Value, I really like PARWX and am invested there. I think when you compare it to HCMAX, you'll find it outperforms in almost every category/time period. Worth looking at.
PRWCX is just a great fund. Wished I owned it and might if it opens up. Until then, happy to stay with FBALX and FMSDX for now. Best to you.

Thanks...I owned PARWX for a while in my 401k but started transitioning to cost effective OEF's and ETF's like the Fido Funds you mentioned. ISn't there a looming retirement on Endeavor's PM team? Not certain if I am correct on that...

Jon raises some great points about large cap blend. If you already hold SPY then you probably have this area covered well. But it is a wonderful fund. We all have our different favorites. I'm curious what funds you have as your international holdings. International has underperformed for so long now that I find that to be much more difficult in terms of fund selection. My main fund here is MIOPX which has great performance over the long term but has lagged some this year because of China. One fund that I'm currently evaluating is WCM focused International Growth. However, I would love to find a strong international blend fund. The performance just hasn't been there though for that asset class over the past 10 years. Would be interested if anyone has found a good one.

Good post @KHaw24 . The OP mentioned growth, blend and value. But just focusing on Blend for the moment - I agree with @MikeW on PRBLX over PRDGX for the reasons he mentioned. I don't own the fund because every time I look closer at it - I compare it to the plain old S&P 500 or FXAIX and have a hard time justifying peeling some from FXAIX with a .015 ER vs PRBLX with a .84. The disparity in max DD, Ulcer and StdDev is not that much to me.
There could be an entire thread about LC Growth funds (so many).
For Value, I really like PARWX and am invested there. I think when you compare it to HCMAX, you'll find it outperforms in almost every category/time period. Worth looking at.
PRWCX is just a great fund. Wished I owned it and might if it opens up. Until then, happy to stay with FBALX and FMSDX for now. Best to you.

Hey when I look at the trailing p-e of QQQ and it’s over 40 and the trailing p-e of IVV and it’s over 33 when the long-term average for stocks is about 15, it seems surreal to me. And this isn’t off trough earnings either. This is after massive amounts of stimulus when the tech sector, the dominant one in both indexes, did quite well. How much ammo does the Fed have left to prop things up if things go wrong? And if you read Zweig’s article—not a dummy by any means—he would argue that even the 08-09 bear was short by historical standards. I think it’s important to put things in perspective and I liked the fact the article showed how different asset classes performed well in different kinds of bears. That’s very important for investors to understand—what might work depending on the kind of bear we will have. Stocks could fall 50% from here and still not be at historical norms. And it’s an important question whether such a decline lasts a few months or several years. So, I’m not sure why the article is stupid.
From Zweig's piece:

With the exception of a 100-day rebound after an interim drop in early 2009, [the 2020 recovery is] the fastest-ever recovery to a prior peak. The S&P 500 has fallen at least 20%—the conventional definition of a bear market—26 times in the past nine decades, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Recoveries to previous highs have typically taken almost three years, often much longer.