I've looked into this fund as a domestic micro-cap growth fund as I don't need another small-cap growth fund.
http://portfolios.morningstar.com/fund/summary?t=NESGX&region=usa&culture=en-US
M* has given it five stars. It has been a top quarterly performer in the WSJ at least on one occasion that I can remember (one was the April 5, 2020 edition, "Hanging In: Stock Funds’ No. 1 Manager Gained 12.8%." There may have been a couple of other occasions, but I can neither find nor remember.
If you don't have a small cap growth fund, this may be a good option as it has been a good performer for the last several years.
From Needham:
https://www.needhamfunds.com/commentary-insight/in-the-news/?news-category=all&news-topic=all&news-year=all
https://www.needhamfunds.com/mutual-funds/small-cap-growth-fund/
Another article:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210311005645/en/Needham-Small-Cap-Growth-Fund-Wins-Two-2021-Refinitiv-Lipper-Fund-Awards

This topic came up in a different thread. There seems to be a lot of confusion and controversy over these businesses. Solid information is very hard to come by. (I’ve searched for hours.) Apparently, when you access your account at a bank, mutual fund company, brokerage, etc. it’s likely that the actual functionality of that site is being provided by some third party under contract with the firm. Yodlee is one of the largest and a subject of much scrutiny.
One Story
Brief excerpt from above:
Charles Schwab & Co. and Fidelity Investments have finally taken action against "screen scrapers" largely by piping them better data that obviates the need to siphon it intrusively. For the first time, the San Francisco and Boston RIA custodians and retail brokerage giants will openly share data with aggregators -- and competitors like Envestnet-owned Yodlee--as well as each other.
In a nutshell - even if “anonymous” our data is valuable to others like marketers and investment houses who want to know things about how we invest, how much our holdings are worth and whether we’re buying bonds, stocks - or maybe opening a short position. A group of Democratic lawmakers called on the FTC in 2020 to investigate Yodlee for allegedly selling confidential investor information. The FTC took up the case, but I can’t find whether or not anything was ever resolved. I’ve read that a former Trump attorney is suing Yoldee - so they must have antagonized both sides of the political spectrum. FTC Case
Other links / citations welcome.

Better than Bitcoin ….. From this week’s Barron’s (11/1)
“Bitcoin investors are probably thrilled with the coin's 50% gains over the past few weeks. But that's nothing compared with the Squid Game token that popped up this past week. Pegged to an online game inspired by the hit Netflix series, the “play to earn” coin rocketed nearly 5,000% over three days, going from 12 cents to $6. It's now worth $475 million, according to CoinMarketCap.”

From the article:
"The tables show the stock market as a whole did best when rates were steady, as contrasted with what you might expect, with an average annualized return of 26.73% during four such periods. Surprisingly, it did the worst when rates were falling with an average annualized return of -3.72, and with an average annualized return of 10.89 when rates were rising!"
Equal's - by the time the Fed reacts, raising or lowering, the results have already been generally cooked in.
Implications for Investors
"Right now, even though the Fed is highly likely to quite soon begin phasing out its bond purchases, called quantitative easing, that is not the same as actually raising rates. Since the Fed Chairman has repeatedly stated the Fed is not expected to raise rates until those purchases have ended sometime later next year, we can assume that rates will remain stable until then, as they have been since the last series of cuts ended on March 15, 2020. Given this data and the fact that the overall market has shown to perform best when rates are stable, it appears likely that stocks can do considerably well until then."

I was concerned about possible integration issues, so a year ago we took advantage of Schwab waiving account closing fees at TDA and made the move before it was done in mass.

Same here. I've been through brokerage mergers before and wanted to avoid the inevitable chaos/headaches, so I fled TDA in August 2020 for Schwab and kept just a toehold in the account so I can access statements, charting, and live data. I really miss thinkDesktop and can't wait for it to become part of Schwab, though.
The week-long technical problems at TDA at that time which locked many users out of their accounts (and their exec's silence in the face of widespread public complaints) also made it easy to GTFO of there ASAP, too. They handled that situation HORRIBLY.

@Mark: Did you get any important “take-aways” from the most recent newsletter you might distill for us?
I got this far and than they wanted me to setup a free account: “A Steady Fed Suggests Further Gains In The Overall Stock Market”
That’s been the conventional wisdom for a long time now. Money is / has been cheap (since 2008). We could play some games with that widely held belief by plugging in various possible scenarios
1. Rates stay low indefinitely and stocks go up forever.
2. Rates fall even further (below 0) and the Fed begins buying up equities to “protect” investors, 401-Ks and the like. The stock market goes even higher - forever.
3. Inflation soars. Rates stay low. The stock market continues to rise - but your market “winnings” buy substantially less. (This may not persist for long, as debtors would fare better during prolonged high inflation than the wealthier individuals / corporations who lent the money.)
4. Inflation soars. Rates rise steeply. Stocks tumble.

Oakmark
https://oakmark.com/news-insights/2021-fund-capital-gain-distribution-estimates/

No deductions. None. And I assume the tax applies to all income. For all taxpayers including businesses, which is the subject of this thread.
So we eliminate the deduction that mutual funds get for passing through their earnings to investors. Make no mistake, that's a deduction that they get now. See IRC 26 USC § 852, that talks about "the deduction for dividends paid", including "capital gain dividends". Mutual funds will be taxed on their earnings.
And we eliminate the IRA deduction. That's an "above the line" deduction rather than an itemized deduction, but a deduction is a deduction. We want to keep things simple. Obviously HSA, FSA, 401k deductions, and so forth also get tossed.
And income is income, no special cases there either. In the above cited 26 USC § 852 is §852(b)(6). That excludes certain sales of appreciated property from being counted as income. Of course that special treatment has to go in pursuit of simplicity and fairness. That's the exclusion that enables ETFs to spin off capital gains without them being taxed. So now we tax the ETF in-kind transactions like all other income.
Regarding the suggested tax regimen generally, Milton Friedman was more considerate of the poor. In 1962 he proposed what he called a negative income tax. The amount paid on zero income would be negative, and taxes increased (at a flat rate) as one's income increased.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/business/23scene.html
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/negative-income-tax-explained

15% on all forms for income (wages, cap gains, rents, interest, etc.) with zero deductions. None. Give every person (including corporations) a $25,000 personal exemption. This would mean a family of four wouldn't start paying taxes until they hit $100,000. Very easy - just pay at the window.
rono

Nice. I would add a deduction (childcare credit for working parents) or stay at home credit for parents with kids under 5 years of age. If you choose to stay home, a credit. SS and Medicare deductions worked into that credit to recognize that staying at home raising kids is a job. Stay at home requirement - both the child and the parent participant in Pre-K /Adult Training offered in the same facility.
Corporations and small businesses offer a paid / government supported entry level work program for graduating parents. This offers offers full-time pay of $50K / year.
Which leads me to the question of how do we get a handle the welfare side of government programs? Can this be simplified as well?

Howdy folks,
Right now, the dems are imploding in DC proving the adage, that the democrats are stupid and the republicans are mean. Being a 3rd term elected republican, I take it further to state that most republicans are dirty old white men who are racist sexist religinazi creeps that should even be allowed in public off leash and without a handler.
As for taxes, rono rolls out his solution. 15% on all forms for income (wages, cap gains, rents, interest, etc.) with zero deductions. None. Give every person (including corporations) a $25,000 personal exemption. This would mean a family of four wouldn't start paying taxes until they hit $100,000. Very easy - just pay at the window.
and so it goes,
peace and keep wearing the damn mask,
rono

His allocation fund HSAFX isn't all that great, but at least it's up 7% ytd and was up 11% in 2020 (M* figures).

Your post helps tremendously in understanding what you're thinking about. Much appreciated.
My head is full of loosely connected thoughts that would take too long to organize coherently now, so I'll just toss out a few for the moment.
I like BLS's idea of separating out expenses from investments. Just as we don't include stock prices in inflation, OER is designed to exclude the cost of a home as an appreciating asset. At the same time, it attempts to count the costs (including operating costs) of the shelter aspect of one's home. While we can debate how well it accomplishes this, it is a reasonable approach.
Side note: my property taxes are based not on the selling price of comps, but on the theoretical value of my home as rental property. Take market rental rates, and use current interest rates to work backward to compute the "correct" assessment, regardless of what my home would currently fetch. This has got its own set of problems, but serves to show that using OER is not limited to CPI calculations.
Side note: the fact that homes can be viewed as a potentially appreciating asset is something that differentiates homes from vehicles. Except for antique vehicles, which BLS explicitly excludes from the CPI. They're viewed as pure investments, not transportation.
Similar to homes, education has attributes of daily expenses and attributes of an investment. (Perhaps I've been listening too much to Build Back Better's expression of education as an investment in human "capital.") Thinking about this it seems that the two categories of expenses could be treated similarly.
Amortizing the expenses over several years, as a homeowner does with monthly PITI payments could be a reasonable way to incorporate home prices directly and smooth some of the price volatility. Just as students wind up carrying college debt for many years.
Not only do different people experience inflation differently, but inflation on the national level can be different from the way individuals experience inflation. For example, last year the cost (premium) of Medicare insurance went up $3.90, but it should have gone up roughly four times that to cover projected expenses.
From a national perspective medical costs rose by some given amount; it didn't matter who was paying the increase. However, as a result of the subsidy, individuals experienced a lower rate of inflation in 2021. Of course now that this subsidy has expired, Medicare recipients feel like there's a higher rate of inflation. This, despite medical costs having stabilized from a national perspective.
Regarding Forsyth, I haven't really read him. But I did read the cited Carson blog that has much of the same flavor. I tend to tune out things like that because people are good at complaining about perceived wrongs, but tend to be silent when the same measures work out in their favor.
For example, the Senior Citizens League is very good at banging the drum for using CPI-E as opposed to CPI-W for COLAs. But we haven't heard a peep from them this year, not since CPI-W came out a percent higher than CPI-E. What will Fosyth say the next time housing prices fall?

sma3- thanks for your input!! Anna, I too have too much money in the bank, and I dont blame you for moving some of it- thats what I want to do-Im taking another look at Tax managed capital Appreciation- Good Luck to all!~!

Interesting Forbes Commentary Article:

The supply lines of February 2020 were impossibly complicated structures that no politician could ever hope to design. Think billions of individuals around the world pursuing their narrow work specialization on the way to enormous global plenty. Put another way, the shelves in economically free countries were heaving with all manner of products based on economic cooperation that was staggering in scope. Brilliant as some experts claim to be, and brilliant as some politicians think they are as they look in the mirror, they could never construct the web of trillions of economic relationships that prevailed before the lockdowns. But they could destroy the web. And they did; that, or they severely impaired it.

theres-no-supply-chain-shortage-or-inflation-theres-just-central-planning

If you had the stomach hang on to IOFIX from 3/2020 to now it is almost back to even. But there are those 2 weeks when it lost half of it's value.
I don't understand exactly why, other than they had a lot of thinly traded bonds that before the Covid crash were being priced only "mathematically as they were almost never traded.
The lesson I took from this is to be very very cautious about funds that buy things you don't completely understand ( ie black box) , especially without a track record to see how the same strategy withstood earlier crashes. Funds with lots of below investment grade bonds will do poorly in an equity correction, as they have in the past.

@msf said,
"- Inherited Roth IRAs have RMDs."
There is no Require Minimum Distribution for Inheirted IRAs, but instead, a Required Full Withdrawal following the 5 or 10 year rule. One could wait 10 years before making that one full required withdrawal providing an additional 10 years of tax free growth from the date of inheritance.
This article does a good job of explaining Inherited (Roth) IRAs:
https://fool.com/retirement/plans/inherited-iras/
1. A spouse (as a beneficiary) can rollover an Inherited Roth IRA (from a deceased spouse) and continue to enjoy no RMDs.
2. Withdraw the funds as a lump sum. You may withdraw all of the money from the original owner's IRA as a single lump sum. Doing so gives you a lot of money now, but also results in a high tax bill for the current year, unless you're withdrawing the funds from a Roth IRA that the original owner held for at least five years. In that case, you won’t owe any taxes on these withdrawals. However, if the owner didn’t have the account for at least five years, then you could owe income taxes on the Roth IRA earnings.
3. Use the five- or 10-year withdrawal method. The five- or 10-year withdrawal method enables you to withdraw money as often as you'd like and in whatever increments you choose, as long as the money is completely withdrawn within five or 10 years. If you fail to withdraw all the funds in time, then you'll pay a 50% penalty on whatever remains in the account.
You have five years to withdraw all the money from an inherited IRA if the account owner died in 2019 or earlier, and 10 years if they died in 2020 or later.
For all of us, this can be very confusing. If you have a specific scenario (question). I would suggest reader's ask their questions on the Ed Slott (Discussion Forum). It is a great IRA resource.
https://irahelp.com/phpBB

My initial objection was to the assertion as to the reasons for the removal of home prices, nothing more.

You not only objected but offered an alternative explanation regarding the CPI-U calculation. My comments pertained to that alternative explanation, nothing more.
Accepting that explanation, then rather than reintegrate housing prices into the CPI-U as Carson did, we should remove vehicles from the CPI-U. Thus the 2021/2020 (Y/Y) CPI-U increase is actually significantly lower than reported.
That's not being contradictory. That's working with your thesis and exploring its implications. I didn't say whether vehicles should be excluded from the CPI-U. I did ask whether you agreed with where your thesis led - that vehicle price increases should not be counted in calculating the CPI-U.
Maybe, despite the statistics, your gut tells you that on some continuum car purchases resemble day-to-day expenses more closely than do home acquisitions which are "rare years-apart purchases." Perhaps looking at different inflation component will help clarify what you have in mind with this continuum.
College educations, rather than being rare year-apart, are often one time purchases. On average, people tend to attend college once in a lifetime. Many never attend college. Some may attend even multiple times without attaining a degree. Others may make multiple "purchases", i.e. earn multiple degrees.
Regardless of the precise average number of college education purchases per lifetime, the purchasing of college educations would seem to share many attributes with home purchases - infrequent, not a day-to-day type of expense, something one budgets for years in advance, something that is paid for over a period of years, something that is "consumed" over multiple years.
Help us understand whether the reason you gave for excluding home prices from the CPI-U also excludes the cost of college educations.

@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...

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.