In case anyone has NOT noticed this, the national biz media tends to get a wee bit overly excited about SMALL moves DOWN in markets. Break the 50 dma and there's probably gonna be a CNBC "Markets in turmoil" special coming pretty soon. Ring the registers!
Yeah, many T/A's and investors gotta get back above the 50 to "feel safe" but several T/A guys/gals I read yesterday expressed that we'll likely be at new highs within a coupla weeks. A coupla weeks or a coupla months makes NO difference to me.
FWIW, I welcomed yesterday's slightly DOWN day to continue to build my ITOT position that I recently started but didn't get fully funded by last THU. I've recently revamped my port and started a new 5-yr portfolio effective 10/01/21. So I'm reasonably certain the BTD moves I've made in the past few days will be MUCH higher in the 5 years they'll be invested there. And the seed came from either cash, maturing CDs, and/or bond OEF sale proceeds. So there's that.
The biggest questions EVERY investor who reduces stock allocations during smallish pullbacks (like this one) and plans to re-deploy back into stocks later needs to ask is:
Am I sure the market is headed DOWN further?
Did a bell ring at the interim top?
Where am I going to park these proceeds?
Is that interim parking spot anywhere near the LT investment as the stocks I cashed them from?
WHEN does my crystal ball tell me will be the best time to re-deploy the parked proceeds back into the market?
Have I been successful with these market timing moves before?
Will I be ready when the time is right this time?
Will a bell ring when it's time?
What is my history/odds of timing this thing right on both the "Run and hide" AND "Get back in the game" moves?
And the BIGGIE: WTF do I do if I whiff on my re-deployment timing and the market moves HIGHER, or god forbid, significantly HIGHER than where it was when I ran and hid?
Is there NOT a better strategy than this one?
I employed the "Run and hide" and "Get back in the game" strategy for a while in hopes (ugh, that unviable investment strategy Art Cashin learned about over 50 years ago and routinely reminds us of ) to score a nirvana moment like dumping ALL of my money back IN the market on a day like March 20, 2020.
What's that infamous Peter Lynch quote again on this topic?
FWIW, I currently employ the BTD strategy that has been working flawlessly (for me at least) since the 2020 crash and I feel safe continuing to do it for the next 5 years.
Disclaimer: We're 65, retired for about ten years, have SS and pensions, have 96% of our port in tax-deferred a/c's, have NOT paid a dime in FIT/SIT since retiring in 2012, and have more $ than we're probably ever to be able to spend. But we're gonna start trying! YMMV.

“Powell's chances have fallen from about 80% in August to 61% as of Monday morning. The sharp decline comes amid an ongoing stock trading controversy that has ensnared several Fed governors and led to the resignations of Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren and Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan.”
Story
Third member now implicated amid growing public outcry
Federal Reserve Vice Chair Richard Clarida switched between $1 million to $5 million from a bond fund into stock funds a day before Chairman Jerome Powell said coronavirus poses risks to the US economy, according to his financial disclosures from 2020. Forms filed with the government ethics office show that Clarida shifted funds out of a Pimco bond fund on February 27 last year, and bought into the Pimco StocksPlus Fund and the iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor exchange-traded fund on the same day, Bloomberg reported on Friday.
Story
PS - I’ve played around with the caption - not wanting to allege wrongdoing by Clarida. For better or worse, his trading has drawn suspicion and he’s become part of the larger issue.

From GP's Chairman's letter dated 1/31/2020:
Here is a link to that letter:
https://www.grandeurpeakglobal.com/documents/grandeurpeakglobal-is-20200131.pdf
Excerpt:
There is also a very important strategy that we’ve been developing for several years now, which we call Global Explorer. It follows the same idea as Global Reach, but would be managed by our geography teams rather than the industry teams. Launching Global Explorer is roughly targeted for 2021-2022.
Excerpt from the registration filing link above:
PRINCIPAL INVESTMENT STRATEGIES OF THE FUND
The Fund invests primarily in foreign and domestic micro- to mid-cap companies based on a geography-focused framework intended to identify companies that the Adviser believes are particularly well-positioned for long-term growth.
The Fund will typically invest in securities issued by companies economically tied to at least ten countries, including the United States. The Fund will invest a significant portion of its total assets (at least 40% under normal market conditions) at the time of purchase in securities issued by companies that are economically tied to countries outside the United States, including emerging and frontier market countries. The Adviser generally considers a company to be economically tied to a market based on where the company is organized, headquartered, has its primary stock exchange listing, or has substantial concentration of assets or revenues.

IMHO there was no obvious point at which most people would say they would have sold TPINX, yet most people would have sold at some point. It seemed that this was a good fund to illustrate how one's sell discipline worked in "real life", given that there doesn't appear to be a "correct" answer.
Only one taker, though.
I did have a small position in TGBAX for several years, which I sold in late 2019. I held the position because I wanted, and still want, a smattering of international bonds to diversify the few bonds (funds) I do hold. Given that target allocation, I was not going to sell the fund because of lackluster absolute performance, but because of poor relative performance. Thus I compared with alternative funds.
Lipper shows only 22 international (as opposed to global) bond funds, excluding inaccessible ones like DFA. Currently, one can purchase the following tickers: BEGBX, WISEX (M* classifies as short term bond, I'd call it EM as it invests according to Sharia and seems to hold a lot in the middle east), DIBAX, LWOAX, DNIOX, EPBIX, FBIIX, MPIFX, GARBX (M* call it EM bond), HXIIX (likewise, EM bond), OIBAX, PXBZX, PFORX, PFUIX, RPIBX, TNIBX, TGBAX, TTRZX, FIBZX, TIBWX, VTABX, ESICX.
Ruling out the EM bond funds and funds that weren't even available in 2016 (FBIIX, PXBZX, TNIBX), that leaves just 16 peers not managed by Hasenstab. Of these, only 1/4, 2 PIMCO funds and 2 index funds (Vanguard, TIAA) returned more than 1.75% annualized over the past five years.
So these funds could serve as points of comparison. Here's a PortfolioVisualizer graph comparing TGBAX with the two PIMCO funds since the start of 2011. Actually, TGBAX doesn't look bad compared with PFUIX (unhedged) until 2020.
What happened was that the dollar took off in 2014 and 2015 (see graph here), hurting unhedged funds and apparently also TGBAX. Through the rest of the decade, as the dollar became rather volatile, TGBAX did not respond well. It's a unique fund in that it's a combination of a foreign bond fund and a currency fund. For example, it never had exposure to the Ukranian hryvnia. (More significantly, it tended to short developed market currencies.) The fact that it did not play currency well, which became apparent (to me) only in the late 2010s was a factor in deciding to sell. The fund was not adding value on the currency side.
I will tend to wait three year before pulling a trigger. 2017 was its worst year (relative) since 2011, and while 2018 was a relatively good year, 2019 was a disaster, in both absolute and relative terms. With increasing volatility as well. This, coupled with what now seemed a long term move into exclusively EM bonds, and the aforementioned failure to navigate currencies well said that it was time to leave. Not a single factor, but a combination.
One could easily argue that I should have left years ago. Had I known the dollar would go up so much and that the fund's purported currency expertise was not as advertised, I might have moved years ago into a hedged fund, or into a global fund.
A related question for others: why would you have bought the fund? I ask because in terms of performance being a trigger, if one buys into a type of fund (here, pure international, not hedged back to dollar), then IMHO what matters is performance relative to peers or benchmark. And one should be careful in identifying peers. Global and international funds are different, even if M* chooses to lump them together.

@Stillers: "Friday was a pretty important day in which the Dip/Diplet appears (to me and the people I read/follow) to have abated. At least for the time being that is, and stopping a potential gusher after you've rolled the dice a bit is always an upbeat time for me."
Do you mind sharing with us where you read / follow those people, assuming those are public and free sites? Did these folks also mention why the market went down? It will be good for me to also read other forums.
P.S. to everybody: I happen to buy on Thursday Close and again on Friday - not a high conviction that we have seen the seasonal bottom but I am not good at picking the bottom. As an aside, I could not stop smiling when I read the outrage about Clarida buying multimillion $$ in equity index funds on February 27, 2020 while on February 28, 2020 Powell mentioned the Fed is watching the markets. Clarida lost 25%+ of the investment in less than a month to the March 23, 2020 bottom. If he waited for the required two day cooling period and bought at the open on March 26, he would have avoided 17% of that paper loss or would have bought 27%+ below the February 19, 2020 market top. Poor guy, he must have received an earful from his spouse for his trade! May be the dip/diplet buyers do not have any scar tissue from buying too soon and watching the market keep going down in Feb-March 2020, granted we do not currently have a similar massive unknown (but now we know from the pandemic how vulnerable we are - i.e., there is nobody at the steering wheel). I still do not understand why the market went down in September.

@CecilJK : It's good to see you posting .
Looking at doing #2. Selling to keep most of the gain. 3 funds I bought last Nov. all had gains of 25 % or more. I decided if gain fell below 25 % I would sell. One of the funds has crossed the line a couple of times & will put in a sell if below 25% when I check later today.
Derf

Hmmm...No reasonably intelligent investor thinks the market now has no chance of losing a point over the next three months.
That said, Friday was a pretty important day in which the Dip/Diplet appears (to me and the people I read/follow) to have abated. At least for the time being that is, and stopping a potential gusher after you've rolled the dice a bit is always an upbeat time for me.
As I've posted previously, I've been BTD pretty successfully throughout 2020-21 with few exceptions when they opportunities arose. My experience over that period of time suggests to me I may have played this one right again.
Either way, UP or DOWN from here, yeah, I'm pretty happy I exchanged a bond OEF holding for more stocks when they were in total DOWN ~5% from their highs, and on indv stocks, DOWN >10% from their high.
NOTE: At least one recent study showed that investors are more than 2x more upset when they lose money in the market than they are happy when they make money. Since reading that study, I take every opportunity I can to BE HAPPY when I make worthy trades/make money.
The football reference was simply an analogy. No intention to actually make that bet OR turn this thread into a football discussion.

You're right that JAAA tends to move a bit more in tandem with stocks (R² of about 0.5) than the other ultrashort term bond ETFs I mentioned. Though there's not much default risk in AAA tranches of CLOs (vs CDOs).
On the upside, there's that higher yield:

To be sure, AAA-rated CLOs and the new ETFs investing in them offer the much safer corners of the leveraged-loan market, with layers of default protection yet higher yields than investment-grade bonds. As of Sept. 30 [2020], the average yield of AAA-rated CLOs was 1.6%, more than double the 0.78% yield of AAA-rated corporate bonds.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/collateralized-loan-obligations-clos-are-now-available-in-etfs-should-you-buy-51603184400
(This was written just as JAAA launched; since then it has done well in part because of those higher yields and in part, as you said, because it moved up somewhat along with stocks.)
JBBB is a different story. Lower credit rating => moves more closely with stocks, more risk of default.

BNY has been updated
https://im.bnymellon.com/us/en/documents/manual/tax-forms/2021-early-estimated-capital-gains-november-2021.pdf
Dodge and Cox (new)
https://www.dodgeandcox.com/pdf/shareholder_services/dc_estimated_year_end_distributions_2021.pdf
Evermore (new)
https://evermoreglobal.com/our-products/global-value-fund-distributions/
Harbor Mid Cap Growth is paying 40% (But I think they switched strategies/managers this year) https://www.harborfunds.com/docs/Dividend_Estimates_HMCGF.pdf
Harbor Capital
https://assets.harborcapital.com/docs/Dividend_Estimates_2021.pdf
FPA
https://fpa.com/docs/default-source/tax-dividend-info/all-fund-year-end-2021-distributions-estimates.pdf?sfvrsn=e2d9919d_3&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=176507488&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_pVNDZGWeFi77zgEJdgzwsWk6FOCm1LAz373HAYaS_3Rsc1zSzI2mRqVNIS7x02olDuTg4Ft4U8N2ZL6qRG8bChq3NfQ&utm_content=176507488&utm_source=hs_email

update:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/908802/000139834421019444/fp0069092_497.htm
497 1 fp0069092_497.htm
Filed pursuant to Rule 497(e) and Rule 497(k)
under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended
File Registration No.: 033-65632
SCHRODER SERIES TRUST
(the “Trust”)
Schroder Long Duration Investment-Grade Bond Fund
(the “Fund”)
Supplement dated September 30, 2021
to the Fund’s Summary Prospectus, Prospectus and
Statement of Additional Information (the “SAI”), each dated March 1, 2021, as supplemented
This supplement provides new and additional information beyond that contained in the Summary Prospectus, Prospectus and SAI, and should be read in conjunction with the Summary Prospectus, Prospectus and SAI.
On July 6, 2021, the Trust filed a supplement (the “Original Supplement”) disclosing that the Board of Trustees of the Trust approved the liquidation of the Fund and that the liquidation was scheduled to occur on or about September 30, 2021. The Fund’s liquidation has been delayed to occur on or about October 21, 2021. Accordingly, the Original Supplement has been reproduced below with this new liquidation date.
The Board of Trustees of the Trust, at the recommendation of Schroder Investment Management North America Inc. (the “Adviser”), the investment adviser of the Fund, has approved a plan of liquidation providing for the liquidation of the Fund’s assets and the distribution of the net proceeds pro rata to the Fund’s shareholders. In connection therewith, the Fund is closed to new investments. The Fund is expected to cease operations and liquidate on or about October 21, 2021 (the “Liquidation Date”). The Liquidation Date may be changed without notice at the discretion of the Trust’s officers.
Prior to the Liquidation Date, shareholders may redeem (sell) their shares in the manner described in the “How to Sell Shares” section of the Prospectus. For those shareholders that do not redeem (sell) their shares prior to the Liquidation Date, the Fund will distribute to each such shareholder, on or promptly after the Liquidation Date, a liquidating cash distribution equal in value to the shareholder’s interest in the net assets of the Fund as of the Liquidation Date.
In anticipation of the liquidation of the Fund, the Adviser may manage the Fund in a manner intended to facilitate the Fund’s orderly liquidation, such as by holding cash or making investments in other highly liquid assets. As a result, during this time, all or a portion of the Fund may not be invested in a manner consistent with its stated investment strategies, which may prevent the Fund from achieving its investment objective.
The liquidation distribution amount will include any accrued income and capital gains, will be treated as a payment in exchange for shares and will generally be a taxable event for shareholders investing through taxable accounts. You should consult your personal tax advisor concerning your particular tax situation. Liquidation costs will be accrued on the date of this Supplement and shareholders remaining in the Fund on the Liquidation Date will not be charged any additional fees by the Fund associated with the liquidation. Shareholders will receive liquidation proceeds as soon as practicable after the Liquidation Date.
PLEASE RETAIN THIS SUPPLEMENT FOR FUTURE REFERENCE
SCH-SK-016-0100

@Old_Joe,
I think I have 14 shares and a fraction in total. I am sure I picked up the 98% of them when I first purchased it with a $250 initial investment. I am sitting on a huge amount of capital gains but I am not going to sell it. I think I will wait until I see a split or huge pullback on it.

Comparing Portfolios such as the Golden Butterfly to others, especially during the SWR (Safe Withdrawal Rate) period of life:
(note: this is discussed as if you were a UK investor)
drawdown-strategy

I sold TTRCX in 6/2015 when I discovered a sizeable allocation to Ukrainian debt, which scared the **** out of me ! At that point, return of capital outweighed return on capital . ( Templeton A shares still carried loads then)

There's a difference between liquidating a fund position because one has lost faith in the fund and adjusting the holding because of performance. (Part of the original question included the example: "sell 25% of holding for each 20% gain in a year".)
Performance based adjustments can be done mechanically, based on one's target allocations.
I generally concur with observant1's approach, though I'm more inclined to let a "loser" ride longer, say three years. How much history I use depends on how the fund is managed.
If a fund has a distinctive style, I'll tend to give it more slack. One reason is that it would be difficult to replace. Another more important reason is that because of its style, it may be more likely to do better, or worse, over extended (multi-year) periods.

---

Here's a good exercise, given that "everyone" thinks M* should have downgraded TPINX before now. When would you have sold it, and why?
The fund had great years through 2010, so let's look at the past decade. Here's a M* page with that data. Pay attention to the benchmark index (world gov bond index) rather than the category returns since the fund was not in that category until recently.
http://performance.morningstar.com/fund/performance-return.action?t=TPINX
In relative terms it was only in 2017 that performance began to fall apart. While it beat its index by 2½% in 2018, it underperformed substantially in 2017 (-5%+), 2019 (-5%+), and hugely in 2020 (-14½%).
After its great 2012, in 2013 and 2014 the fund returned very little (2%, 1½%). Would you have sold even though on a relative basis it did great (2013) and average (2014)?
Would you have sold at the end of 2015 after those two low return years followed by 2015 when the fund landed squarely in the middle of the pack and fell just short of its benchmark?
Surely you would not have sold after 2016, which was a fine year (6%+ vs 1.6% for its benchmark).
Would you have sold after 2017 which was the first really clear bad year on a relative basis? Or would you have waited to see what would happen?
If you did wait, would you have felt comforted by the 2018 performance when the fund again beat most of its peers and beat its benchmark by over 2%? Or would you have looked at the absolute performance of 1.27% and said to yourself: this is even worse than 2017 where it returned just 2.35%. I don't care about relative performance, I'm out?
After 2019's relative disaster, would you have called it quits, perhaps because two of the previous three years (2017, 2019) were very bad (each 5%+ under the benchmark)?
Or would you have waited for two successive bad years relative to its benchmark? It took until 2019-2020 for that to happen.

SOXL QQQ or Asml could be good for intermediate to long term. Been trading these recently with good gains
Held QQQ since 2012 very happy with it
May add more ASML tomorrow/maybe on sale

Yes, that's the way that I see it also. Back in 2020 I had owned 50 shares, and sold them for what I thought was a decent 5k profit. Totally stupid move. I'm going to stick around this time. Will buy more if it continues downward.
Thanks again- appreciated your thoughts.
OJ

I appreciate the honesty of posters acknowledging losses as well as gains: you win some, you lose some.

Part of my point anyway was that over 5+ quarters I have had no losses from simply going with my gut. No repeatable or 'point-outable' skill for these repeated gains, just my sense about buying diplets, and then, surely, luck, such has been the continuing and ever-returning strength of the bull sentiment that always plows over and past dips.
Possibly, indeed probably worse outcome than buy-hold. But it is for me way less nerve-racking. I am not about to formalize it w arithmetic trigger criteria.

I appreciate the honesty of posters acknowledging losses as well as gains: you win some, you lose some.
One theory of market timing, and let's be frank here this is timing, is that while it may not improve returns it should reduce volatility. One may not get out at the top or in at the bottom, but that's the point - one is getting a smoother ride by lopping off peaks as well as avoiding deep valleys.
But one of the articles I cited (the one quoting Sam Lee) stated that " it turns out the buy-the-dip strategy [described in the piece] would earn a third of return of a buy-and-hold strategy with much higher volatility."
Thinking that this increased volatility might just be a result of the particular trigger threshold selected, I dug up this 2021 WSJ article writing about a new study:

Although active investors tend to “chase stability”—they are trying to minimize volatility by market timing—they end up doing the exact opposite, according to the research, as they invest in stocks after past volatility is low and before future volatility is high. ... Such investors are chasing safe winners, but they’re actually getting risky losers.

WSJ, Jan 23, 2021 A New Reason Investors Shouldn’t Try to Time the Stock Market
It's worth contrasting this with the Fidelity page bee cited. That also talks about buying less volatile stocks. But unlike the WSJ piece that concerns active traders, the Fidelity page appears to be more about long term positioning of one's portfolio. It gives 30 year performance figures. It discusses how a defensive portfolio performs over a full market cycle as opposed to getting defensive stocks in one part of a cycle and going aggressive in another.
In the interest of full disclosure, I haven't yet read the paper discussed by the WSJ.

Below is some hasty / lazy work for me to show myself my actual practice since covid onset and I sold off nearly everything after return to breakeven summer '20 (as I was sure covid would be this bfd hit to all markets).
- All dip buying and selling were done by feel, not by percentage or any defensible criterion other than 'ooh, ooh, it just went down pretty sharply', ... just because it eventually hit me over the head that p/e be damned, this market was just too strong and kept returning to strength, for all the reasons already mentioned by others.
- I am too chicken to figure out if buy-hold woulda been better, but I suspect so, given said unstoppable market strength.
What the below activity did was make me feel better about my fairly quick / short 'defensive' darts in and out of the traffic.
buys and sells of VON_, AOR, and/or CAPE, plus a TRP mfund
(gains; no losses; all Roth, so no tax consequence)
bot 6/11/20 and sold the next day, >1%
bot 10/28/20 and sold 11/13/20, 10%
bot 2/25/21 and sold 4/9/21, 7%
bot 4/22/21 and sold 5/6/21, >3%
bot 5/12/21 and sold 5/14/21, <3%
bot 6/18/21 & 7/6/21 and sold 9/22/21, <3%
bot 7/2/21 and sold 9/2/21, <1%
bot 7/19/21 and sold 8/3/21, >2%
bot 8/4/21 and sold 8/11-2/21, 1%
bot 8/18/21 and sold 9/1/21, 5%
bot 9/20/21 and sold 9/23/21, 3%
I am again now almost completely out of equities.
And of course the kick-myself revenge makeup motive going on here was to try and recoup the hundreds of thou lost by my summer 2020 selloff decisions, after the big covid dip. If I had stayed the equities course (duh) we would have enough extra now to half-forgive kids' debts to us, lavish on grandchildren education funding, replace a car and roof and such, and give way more seriously to a few charities and colleges.

Since people were writing about the current "dip" (less than 4%) I used current data. I would have gone back only through 2021 except that there was no dip in 2021 worth mentioning. So I looked at a full year (12 months of monthly investing).
Since people were considering a trigger of less than 4% here, and since I'm not going to do every combo, I did only the 3% 2020 trigger comparison:
Lump sum: 17.37% gain if invested Jan 2.
Lump sum: 18.22% gain if invested Feb 24th (after 4.7% drop from Feb 19):
Gains through 12/31/2020 when $100 invested on first trading day of month:
$17.37 + $17.56 + $23.36 +
$54.04 + $34.26 + $24.11 +
$21.54 + $14.80 + $7.07 +
$11.54 + $13.81 + 2.69 = $242.15
Gains through 12/31/2020 when $100 invested on the day market dips 3%+ (dip period in paren):
$18.41 (Jan 17-31) + $18.22 (Feb 19-24) + $26.03 (Mar 4 - Mar 5) +
$54.04 (Mar 26-Apr 1) + $34.66 (May 11-13) + $26.25 (June 8-11) +
$9.26 (Sept 2-3) + $9.26 (Sept 2-3) + $9.26 (Sept 2-3) +
$9.97 (Oct 12-19) + $0 (no 3% dips after Oct) + $0 (no 3% dips after Oct) = $215.36
This isn't even close. BTD helped a little in Jan, Feb, Mar, and June. But in the second half of the year as the market resumed its climb, it was months until there was another noticeable dip. That was in Sept. So a lot of ground was lost by waiting months to invest more money. And with no dips worth notice after October, $200 (the Nov and Dec allocations) remained univested.
FWIW:

• Jan dip was just over 3% for the dates indicated and market didn't go down further.
  
• Feb dip was 4.7% for dates indicated and continued down in Feb for a total of over 12%, so Feb allocation would have been invested at some point regardless of the trigger.
  
• March dipped over 12% by March 9th, so regardless of the trigger, BTD would have bought. And it would have been way too soon. The market continued to drop a total of over 28% in March before rebounding in the last week of the month.
  
• April 1 was the end of a 6%+ decline.
  
• May dip was 3.7% and didn't go down further.
  
• June dip was over 7% and didn't go down further.
  
• Sept dip was 3½% and continued to go down for a total of 9½% through the third week of Sept.
  
• Oct dip was just 3%, but after a 1% bounce, the market resumed its decline for a total of 7½% through the end of Oct.