Who said anything about civil war? You are are surely aware of the chaos in Canada’s capital Ottawa and at the U.S. Canadian border crossings at Detroit and Port Huron, Mi.? There’s already a severe shortage of trucks and drivers which is affecting the U.S. / North American economy. One hardly needs to produce links to document that ongoing issue.
Here’s the story I was referencing: https://www.newsweek.com/truckers-california-protest-super-bowl-over-school-mask-mandate-1677777
The USA Truck Convoy, which posts under the tag TruckersForFreedom, announced on the social media instant messaging site Telegram their intent to "shut down" the Super Bowl, moving forward with the plan after "94% from 4500 votes" in the group shared their support for the action and 10 percent said they could come.
"Everyone be ready and tell everyone about the: SUPER BOWL PROTEST! Officials will host a Super Bowl while forcing kids to mask. End the mandates! LET'S SHUT THIS THING DOWN!" a post wrote. "Shut the SUPER BOWL DOWN!!! Surround SoFi Stadium with Trucks!!!"
Pure conjecture whether this type of protest spreads or become commonplace. I sincerely regret if my comment alarmed anyone unnecessarily. Just musing. Will try to be more careful.

May be the OP can indicate what screen found it.
AUXFX is a focus fund with 101 holdings (not so focused?) but with 40% in top 10 (that is focused). AUM at $277 million remains small for an old fund (mid-1999 inception; same manager, Jeff Auxier). M* Quote page shows persistent outflows (concern?). U/D CR is so-so 81/103, so doesn't shine in downside protection. Drawdown in 2020 was bit below category and benchmark index. M* auto-rating (Q-rating) is poor (Neutral). Mentions GARP (a term from old times) in Yahoo Profile (below). Boutique firm has only 1 fund but also runs private accounts. Ed Auxier is an analyst (son? relative?) - see team link below. It is no-load/NTF at Fido and Schwab.
"The fund invests primarily in a diversified portfolio of equity securities that the adviser believes offer growth opportunities at a reasonable price. The adviser will pursue an investment blend of equity securities of growth companies and value companies. Although the fund may invest in companies of any market capitalization, the adviser intends to focus its investments in the equity securities of medium to large U.S. companies (defined by the adviser as companies with market capitalizations above $1 billion at the time of investment)."
Team at website https://auxierasset.com/managed-accounts/team/

I think standard deviation matters a great deal, in particular recent standard deviation, as recent volatility levels may persist. But looking at the numbers without further analysis is a mistake. Why did the volatility or lack-of-volatility occur, and do the same conditions that caused that exist now or are things different? The Sharpe ratio is interesting to look at in the past, but is as the article points not an indicator of the future in the aggregate. But it can provide clues to do further research. Oh, this manager has a high Sharpe/Sortino ratio and handled bad market conditions well before. What did he do to handle those bad conditions? Are the same conditions in existence today? Consider, in March of 2020 we had a pandemic crash in which the world had to switch to virtual distance employment. No surprise, tech stocks and growth funds held up well in that environment and funds with growth tilts had high Sharpe ratios coming out of that crash.. Do the same conditions for market volatility exist today? Not exactly. Inflation and interest rate worries seem to be driving volatility more. Growth stocks with high valuations don't fare well historically as rates go up.

*what else do we have to go on besides looking at past performance.

As I already stated, fees, fees, fees. That expense ratio is like a toll road and the manager is generally going to collect it no matter what. Say you have an index fund with a 0.03% expense ratio and it metaphorically is a $3 toll road you could drive on or there is another road run by a fund manager with a 1.50% expense ratio charging $150 to drive through. That other $150 toll road better be 50 times smoother, safer or faster than the $3 one or you're losing out.

@Lewis
Good callout on investor psychology around upside gains with no downside pains. This is why I prefer Sortino ratio over Sharpe ratio when evaluating fund historical performance.
While manager skin does have some signal value, the challenge here is separating the signal from the noise. I.e. A 30 year old bond fund manager having no skin is noise. I don't know how old Cathy is but if she is in 60's let's say and has no skin in ARKK that is noise too imo.

Not a critique of anybody here -
Personally, if M* says a manager invests $1M+ in a $B AUM fund, it does not impress me. More often than not a Manager's yearly compensation from the fund far exceeds their investment in the fund. (Some fund managers start a fund with $5M of their own money and I can treat that as constituting informational value.)
Mutual fund prospectus mandates are usually very broad. Even when they say small cap, they can still drift to the edge of mid cap or into micro cap.
Why some managers are found not to do a better risk management job than the rest of us? They suffer from the same human limitations as the rest of us. Moreover, obtaining knowledge and acting on it are entirely different skills.
IMO, it is better to find managers that do a better job than others. As an aside, I am willing to give managers a pass for their performance in 2020.
As an example, I would say David Giroux does a good risk management job. Of course, he has to contend with the size of PRWCX, a limitation.

Not a user of DejaOffice, but on search, Dropbox backup/restore feature was added in December 2020. https://www.dejaoffice.com/iphoneapp/notes.html

One of the things I’ve noticed on MFO Premium and Morningstar results is anything with technology held up well in 2020 and has skewed volatility rankings when searching for something less volatile lately. It’s probably skewed things for 10 years, but doesn’t look like it will work going forward if this trend continues.

I charted three approaches:
100% VWINX (larryB Portfolio)
90% / 10% VFINX / VFSTX (Bufffet Portfolio)
100% PRWCX (Moderate Allocation Fund)
If we are at high valuations VWINX would provide the best downside protection, but over the long term not the best choice for capital appreciation.
I tend to like the historical performance of a fund like PRWCX. Historical performance doesn't repeat , but I tend to think it rhymes.
1988 -2022 (starting with $100K and a 4% WD rate):

200-2022 (from Tech High) (starting with $100K and a 4% WD rate):

@david - tks
Here is the two part exercise I did
(1)Screened for international funds older than 5 years, Sortino > 2 and APR > 10. PRWCX Sortino and APR for past 5 years are 2.33 and 15.2 respectively
(2)Run a correlation matrix on the result set with PRWCX
The highest correlated are
WCM Focused International Growth Inst (0.87)
Brown Capital Management International Small Company Inst and WCM International Small Cap Growth Inst both tied at 0.85

I scanned for funds with high five-year correlations to PRCWX and high international exposure. I'm not arguing for or against them, but I'll note the Pax Sustainable Allocation (PAXWX, formerly Pax World) and Fidelity Advisor Multi-Asset Income (FAYZX) have correlations in the 90s with TRP and double-digit exposure to international equities. Both are lower vol / lower return (12% APR vs 15% for TRP) over the past five years but the correlation implies the possibility of some comparable thinking.
The oddball is Prospector Capital Appreciation, which was launched by TRP Cap App's long-time manager (Richard Howard, who left after 7 years) to be a more nimble version of the fund. Fairly high correlation (93) and slightly more international, but distinctly weaker performance (50% greater volatility, 50% lower Sharpe, trailing by 350 bps).
And yes, I am supposed to be writing two lectures for tomorrow's first-day-of-term classes. (sigh)

If an investor does a tax-free conversion of one share class of a fund into another share class, e.g. investor class to admiral class, there are no tax consequences.
But if an investor sells one fund and buys another, even if the second fund is a clone of the first, two taxable things happen:
1) If this is a taxable account, the investor may recognize gain on the sale, and
2) The old fund may have to sell assets to satisfy the redemption, and in the process generate cap gains that may be distributed to the remaining (old) fund shareholders.
That's what happened here. The employer plans were not exchanging share classes in the same fund, but were literally selling shares of one fund and buying shares in a virtually identical but separate fund.
---
The simple response to your second observation is yes, that's generally correct. The complete answer is a bit more complicated.
Any fund, whether active or passive, ETF or open ended, can alter its portfolio holdings in a couple of ways:
1. Sell the old holdings, buy new ones. This could generate cap gains if the old holdings have appreciated.
2. (a) When investors want to redeem shares, instead of handing them money, hand them back the old holdings that the fund wants to get rid of. Yes, even OEFs in theory (but rarely in practice) can do redemptions in kind (see link below). For an ETF, the bundle of holdings that the investor receives is called a "redemption basket".
https://www.dodgeandcox.com/redemption_disclosure.asp (D&C redemption baskets)
(b) When investors want to buy shares, rather than using cash the fund (ETF) requires the investor to hand over a bunch of new holdings. This bundle of holdings is called a "creation basket".
Usually the creation basket and the redemption basket are the same, but they don't have to be. This gives the funds the ability to tweak their holdings, handing off old holdings it doesn't want and taking in new holdings that it does want.
I doubt this is how a passive ETF would deal with a full index reconstitution, but I could envision it being used to replace a single security. So just because an ETF wants/needs to change its portfolio, it doesn't have to recognize gain on the old holding(s).
(From iShare IG Corp Bond ETF LQD's prospectus: "Creation and redemption baskets may differ ...")

The best solution for MFO members would be if Giroux would start up TRP International Capital Appreciation, but alas I don't think that's happening !

unusually high capital gains ... has ... drawn scrutiny from regulators
debate over whether target-date funds are suitable for taxable accounts
The high Vanguard distributions were the result of a technical change Vanguard made. It lowered the min for institutional funds, thus triggering a mass selloff by small company plans as they migrated from retail clones into the institutional funds.
Once one realizes this, the two statements above come off as a nonsequitor.
Suppose that instead of target date funds, Vanguard had lowered the min of VITPX from $100M to $5M. (For the sake of argument, assume VITNX, VSMPX, and VITSX did not exist.) One would expect to see a similar migration of small employer plans from the retail fund VTSAX to the institutional clone VITPX.
This in turn could trigger a large cap gain distribution to the remaining retail investors. VTSAX has unrealized cap gains amounting to about half of the fund assets, according to M*.
Surely one would not suggest that a total stock market fund was an inappropriate choice for a taxable account, just because a poorly planned change could could trigger a torrent of recognized cap gains.
This is a completely different question from whether target date funds are suitable for a taxable account.

And thanks to all of the folks who made it happen.
Quick intros to Devesh, msf and The Shadow in the publisher's letter, plus bits of ARKK Snark and perspective on January.
Snowball profiles Intrepid Income and updates the bang-for-the-buck capture ratio essay from February 2020
Devesh begins what promises to be a long conversation on managing inflation risk and msf takes on risk ... uhh, risk. Charles's look at funds that didn't draw down last year (remarkably few) and did have a positive return; David Sherman's name keeps coming up.
The Shadow casts his eye on industry developments and Lynn Bolin echoes the "don't let volatility scatter your wits" theme in his piece of analysis paralysis and portfolios.
Some old features are - manager changes, funds in reg, launch alerts - are either on hiatus or wrapped into other features. If you'd like to change that or revive them, you're more than welcome to join the crew!
Cheer the guys on, poke them as appropriate, and join the conversation if you can.
As ever,
David

Several past posts:
1) "MSF describes it—blend—a blue chip stock with its heady growth days in the past.
"Agree with msf and Lewis assessment. The fast growing business (iPhones, computers, music, and AppleTV) since Steve Jobs's returned has plateaued. In some area Apple is trailing."
2) "Growth is about revenues, cash flow and earnings versus the benchmark and industry peers and it’s forward looking, not from five or ten years ago."
FD: reality check. After another year. Apple proved it's not just another blue chip stock. It's even more amazing to do it when it's so big already.
Apple 2021 annual EPS was $5.61, a 71.04% increase from 2020. The price followed.

At 1.25% (from the current 0.25%) is still a way below the 2% when the pandemic started in March 2020. In combination with tapering, perhaps it may contain the 6% inflation.

With the Q's down 10+% for the month AND ARKK arguably invested in the most speculative issues within them is anyone really surprised that her fund is being crushed as it is? Do you give her credit for sticking with her investment thesis like you do for Hussman and Grantham who have been wobbly wrong for how long again? Arguably she does stick her views and opinions right out there nearly begging for it but so do many others.
BTW - her fund pulled in some additional $168 million in January to date.
Matt Murray, WSJ: "Over the past week, with prices in Cathie Woods’ ARK Innovation ETF back at mid-2020 levels, investors have put about $168 million into the fund, boosting its net assets to $11.8 billion—a noteworthy vote of confidence for a fund that has dropped 27% this month and lost half its value over the past year, as its brand of investing in largely unprofitable, untested firms has fallen out of favor. "

I bought ENIC using my TRP brokerage account. On Friday, they PAID a very small "interim" dividend. It's still not recorded in my sweep account.
[...]
.....But it's not there....... yet. ORK!

Are you sure that the ADR div has been paid?
Here's a div announcement sheet from Citi saying that ordinary shares were to pay on Jan 28th, but the US ADR payment date was TBA (as of Nov 29th).
Looking at the last time there was a small Jan div (record date Jan 24, 2020), the pay date was two weeks later (Feb 7). Assuming that pattern holds, given that the record date now is Jan 21, 2022, one would expect to see the div paid about a week from now.
Here are sites giving the ADR div's historical ex-, record-, and pay-dates:
Citi, M*, and Dividend Investor, the pay date for the ADR has not been determined.
Ordinary shares underlie ADR shares: https://www.sec.gov/investor/alerts/adr-bulletin.pdf