Howdy folks,
@Hank can't say I disagree with anything. Is the market highly valued? Yeppers. Overvalued? Define overvalued. It feels very stretched. Yeah, it's the only game in town and the whole world is cash flush. How can it not be overvalued.
Problems? You've got several Black Swans circling like vultures . . . and those are the ones we know about. The Fed is screwed. They're so far behind the curve on inflation and tapering that they have no power WSFever. Besides. with the insider trading scandal, I no longer will bet on Powell staying. Congress is a disaster as always so no help there.
Be careful, this smells like bubbles I've enjoyed before. Perhaps most like 1999.
and so it goes,
peace and wear the damn mask,
rono

My initial objection was to the assertion as to the reasons for the removal of home prices, nothing more.
>> removed from the official price indexes owing to political and statistical issues.

A lame, misleading (not only silly and tendentious meaning promotional) attribution, I say.
Meanwhile, did everyone listen to Yellen yesterday? (link above) May she be right. Will take a while.
Meanwhile 2, some booga-booga:
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-hyperinflation-us-economy-consumer-prices-2021-10

@crash - it's not for everyone but
IOFIX - 1yr.: +18.29% although after last year there really wasn't much place to go but up.
YTD: +13.7%
Yield: 3.98%

IOFIX generated excellent category returns from inception (05/28/2015) through 2019.
IIRC correctly, volatility was low and the Sharpe ratio was high during this period.
The fund then delivered an unpleasant surprise when it returned -36.18% during Q1 2020.
IOFIX seemed like a safe fund for years...

Two petty technical points:
- You're supposed to calculate the RMD for each IRA and then add them together. Usually that comes out the same as adding the values together and then dividing, since:
$A / N years + $B / N years = $(A+B) / N years.
But in rare cases you could have a different N for two IRAs.
If on one IRA the sole beneficiary is your spouse, who is more than 10 years your junior, you use Table II (Joint Life and Last Survivor Expectancy) for the divisor. If the situation is different on another IRA (e.g. beneficiary is sibling), then you use the customary Table III (Uniform Lifetime) to find the divisor.
- Inherited Roth IRAs have RMDs.

@msf
Grateful for all that info. It's an eye-opener. And yet, "what's a mother to do?" Short-term funds, to me, are "return-free risk." Not like STOCKS, of course. Or rather, the risk is in not getting much of anything back on your investment. IG-rated stuff might offer you (me, that is) a monthly dividend which MIGHT cover the cost of an Uber ride somewhere.
PTIAX was paying a 14 cent div. during the mortgage boom. Now it varies, but still better, per share, than my other two. And nowhere near 14 cents anymore. They are all actively managed, and I like that.
We don't normally talk in terms of hard-dollar figures here, about the size of our portfolios. I'm still below a quarter million. 56% in bonds, trying to grow the bond-stake and reduce the proportion in stocks. Last week was a good week for stocks. I'll take it.

The Barron's quote of Carson which elicited your comment was about how including home costs in the CPI-U would make that number much higher. It concerned the CPI-U, or what Carson calls "the official price report".
You posited (in)frequency of transactions as a rationale for excluding home prices from the CPI-U. Not from some sort of core CPI, not from some "embedded" inflation calculation, but from the CPI-U. I simply pointed out that if that were the rationale, then vehicle prices would also be excluded.
ISTM that given this exclusion rationale there are three alternatives:

1. vehicle prices should not be included in the CPI-U. They are purchased at about the same frequency as homes and can be just as volatile: used vehicles up 24% Y/Y, homes up 19.5%.
2. there is some other continuum (what?), aside periodicity or potential volatility, that distinguishes the housing component from the used vehicle component
3. the periodicity rationale given is at best incomplete (kindly complete)

The bottom line is simple: CPI-U is a measure of inflation as seen by the "average" consumer. The average consumer sees wildly fluctuating prices, including gasoline (up 42% Y/Y) and medical supplies (down 1.6%). Welcome to the real world.
Whether one should worry about this or how one should smooth out the volatility is a different question, and not the point of the Barron's piece.

Here’s a good read on the subject.
As stocks soar to historical highs, some experts say conditions ripe for correction
Odd photo of Chairman Powell. Is he floating bubbles?

Drawdown on junk bonds in March 2020 is over 10% until the Fed’s rescue. Junk bonds are up this year while the quality bonds, government and corporate, are all in red.
I have shifted to bank loans and short-term TIPs. Next year could be even more challenging with higher rates.

My understanding is that RMD only affect the total sum of IRA, not Roth IRA and Roth 401k). Roth accounts came from after tax dollars thus there is no distribution upon withdrawal.
You need to add up all non-Roth IRA accounts and use the life expectancy table to compute the $ requires to withdrawal for the following year. Assuming you have more than one IRA accounts, it is easier to take the $ from one or more of these accounts since you know the exact amount. You repeat the same process again the following year.
Both Vanguard and Fidelity offer these services. It is really not that complicated to do it yourself.

@crash - it's not for everyone but
IOFIX - 1yr.: +18.29% although after last year there really wasn't much place to go but up.
YTD: +13.7%
Yield: 3.98%

As I understand the IRS instructions, you have to use the total amount of all your IRAs to calculate the RMD.

Do not calculate in your Roth IRAs, but do include your Roth 401Ks as part of your RMD (though that portion would be tax free). Once the Roth 401K portion is distributed it loses it Roth status. All this can be avoided.

There are presently no RMD on Roth IRAs as it stand right now.
If I owned any Roth 401Ks I would roll them over into Roth IRA status and enjoy the benefits afford Roth IRAs.

You can avoid having to take future RMDs from a Roth 401(k) by rolling the money over to a Roth IRA. Roth IRAs are not subject to required minimum distributions. If some of your money is in a Roth 401(k) and some is in a traditional 401(k), roll the traditional 401(k) money into a traditional IRA and the Roth 401K money into a Roth IRA to avoid any tax complications. “That will make record keeping a whole lot easier,” says Stuart Ritter, a certified financial planner with T. Rowe Price.

Avoiding Required Minimum Distributions from Roth 401(k)s

There has been plenty of discussion about whether recent inflation is transitory or not.
The "experts" disagree on this topic.
Here's a look at S&P 500 (and its predecessor) calendar year returns along with annual inflation.
Link

Our last defense against market manipulation is the whistle blower program - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/21/us-regulator-awards-whistleblower-200m-record-payout-over-benchmark-rigging-case.html

Why should rare years-apart purchases be included in widely impacting run-of-the-mill inflation calcs? ...

Do you disagree with the BLS for including the prices of new and used motor vehicles in its CPI calculations?

It's a continuum, arguable, debated, ...

The only antecedent for "it" I can see is periodicity of purchases, so I'll infer that this continuum is the length of time between purchases.
Until the past decade or so, average time of home ownership was about four years. For example:

Source page: https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-length-of-homeownership
New car ownership in 2017 was almost seven years, or just a shade less than home ownership since the GFC.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/28/car-owners-are-holding-their-vehicles-for-longer-which-is-both-good-and-bad.html
Is this minuscule difference in holding periods really what you want to pin your continuum premise on?
I'm sure you're aware that when housing costs (including investment attributes) had been used in calculating the CPI, those costs included mortgage interest, property taxes, insurance, and maintenance expenses. That's in the paper I cited.
Paraphrasing your original question, why should frequent, periodic cash outflows (interest, taxes, insurance, and maintenance costs) be excluded from widely impacting run-of-the-mill inflation calcs? Even if those costs fluctuate wildly from month to month as construction (maintenance) costs have done this year.

Just updating -
M* indicates no investment from managers. The fund launched with $2M AUM and currently has $2.7M AUM. The M* chart since inception looks acceptable performance for this fund.
The Sept fact sheet is here - https://www.williamblairfunds.com/resources/docs/funds/factsheets/2021-09-30/William-Blair-China-Growth-Fund-Class-I-9-30-2021-Fact-Sheet.pdf

Rather than spend a fair amount of time searching for an ratings agency (NRSRO) default report, I'll just refer you to M*'s figures. In Exhibit 2 on p. 4 of this M* paper is a table that includes "default score" by credit rating. Those aren't default rates, but represent relative rates of default. BBB has a score of 5.0, BB has a score of 17.78, meaning that BB bonds default at roughly 3½ times the rate of BBB defaults.
There really is a big difference, which is why M* doesn't simply score A's as 1, B's as 2, C's as 3 and so on when calculating a portfolio's average quality.
https://www.morningstar.com/articles/354597/credit-quality-demystified
PTIAX may be a mere poseur. Between 2012 and 2020 it was classified as a multisector bond fund, typically meaning that it had even more junk than a core plus bond fund. In 2021 it was classified as an intermediate core plus fund, and in 2011 it had been classified as an intermediate core fund (before core plus funds were given their own category).
As the linked article (about the new core plus category) states, the median amount of junk in a core plus fund is (or was, at the time) about 8%. DODIX has 11%, all BB (including NR bonds). PTIAX has more than that (12½%) in bonds rated lower than that (or NR). Plus another 5% rated BB. Then there's BCOIX, with less than 4% junk (including NR), nearly all at BB.
I suspect you'll find a fair degree of correlation between funds' YTD performance and the amount of junk in their portfolios. PTIAX > DODIX > BCOIX.
Note:edited to fix typo, per @BaluBalu's suggestion.

Thanks @msf for the pricing of a new or used vehicle question.
One person told me he had been ask to cough up an extra 10 k on a new drive at a dealer , 5k at another place & finally coughed up an extra $750 for his new ride.
EXTORTION NOT ? , Derf

Yellen explaining a few weeks ago;
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/10/05/yellen-sees-inflation-staying-higher-for-the-next-several-months.html
And from this morning:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2021/10/24/full-interview-with-secretary-janet-yellen.cnn
We’ll see.

Some potentially worrisome thoughts …
- Could Zukerberg someday control the universe through this augmented reality?
- Would an augmented reality “Big Mac” taste as good as the real thing? (If it could be made 0 calorie I might buy one.)
Also - Elon Musk, arguably one of the smartest visionaries alive, has been warning about the dangers of AI for several years now.
2018 Article

The answer depends on what you mean. If you are asking whether you can instruct Fidelity to (a) compute your RMD for each account, (b) add those figures together, and (c) schedule an automatic withdrawal in that amount from the IRA account you specify, all without any interaction on your part, I don't see how to do that at Fidelity. I also have my doubts about any brokerage providing that level of automation.
OTOH, if all you're asking for is to be able to schedule a future withdrawal from a single IRA in an amount that will satisfy your RMD requirements, then sure, pretty much any institution including Fidelity will let you schedule future withdrawals. It could be to satisfy RMDs, it could be to gift assets (which has its own tax implications), it doesn't matter, they don't care.
As a courtesy, Fidelity, like most institutions, will calculate your RMD for each account.
https://digital.fidelity.com/search/main?q=RMD automatic&type=o-NavBar
Regardless of what your institution calculates, it is your responsibility to get it right. Don't assume the figures are correct. Especially in 2022, when the RMD tables change.
There's always the small possibility that some institutions won't update their RMD tables. More likely is the possibility that they don't correctly recalculate the RMDs for inherited IRAs. "The IRS regulations include a special 'reset' provision for calculating RMDs for nonspouse beneficiaries who inherit before January 1, 2022." It's not a matter of simply looking up a new divisor.
https://www.irahelp.com/slottreport/irs-issues-new-rmd-tables-2022