You are getting great advices here. Please consider moving you accounts to other reputable brokerages, and Wells Fargo is not a good firm to work with.
My parents were in your position many years ago. I helped them to move to Fidelity brokerage. Basically we walked into a Fidelity office and had the asset transferred in-kind to minimize capital gain (as @yogibb stated above). It was quite a straightforward process and you need to have the latest statement ready. We (and several siblings) then managed their account ourselves and saved them from the hefty fees previously paid. Looking back, Fidelity did all the heavy lifting in asset

@WABAC,
Bessent said last week that the administration is focused on long term (10 yr) rates because that is where capital investments happen and that they are not focused on federal funds rate.
After the last FOMC meeting, Trump said the Fed was correct in not decreasing FF rate.
You get the idea what is going on. His Chief of Staff and Bessent sat him down and told him to stick to the script. Whether you and I like it or not, the Trump economic agenda is highly ambitious and not easy to pull off and requires everyone on the team to be hyper focused. But the self proclaimed stable genius has the attention span and ego of _____.
So, expect Trump to run his mouth on Powell after a few days because when his instincts kick in, it just irritates Trump that he is not able to bully Powell and that will make him look weak in the eyes of old MAGA. Of course, Fox is always ready rile Trump up, the co-dependents in the relationship.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/822977/000119312525026998/d919923d497.htm
497 1 d919923d497.htm GOLDMAN SACHS TRUST
GOLDMAN SACHS TRUST
Class A, Class C, Institutional, Investor, Class R6 and Class P Shares of the
Goldman Sachs Global Real Estate Securities Fund
Supplement dated February 14, 2025 to the
Prospectuses, Summary Prospectuses and Statement of Additional Information (“SAI”),
each dated April 29, 2024, each as supplemented to date
At a meeting held on February 11-12, 2025, upon the recommendation of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, L.P., the Board of Trustees (the “Board”) of Goldman Sachs Trust (the “Trust”) approved a proposal to liquidate the Goldman Sachs Global Real Estate Securities Fund (the “Fund”), a series of the Trust. After careful consideration of a number of factors, the Board concluded that it is advisable and in the best interest of the Fund and its shareholders to liquidate the Fund. The Fund is expected to be liquidated on or about April 14, 2025 (the “Liquidation Date”), pursuant to a Plan of Liquidation approved by the Board. The Liquidation Date may be changed without notice at the discretion of the Trust’s officers.
Suspension of Sales. Shares of the Fund will no longer be available for purchase as of the close of business on March 14, 2025, except that existing shareholders of the Fund may continue to purchase shares of the Fund until March 28, 2025. To the extent there are any dividend or distribution payments made prior to the Liquidation Date with respect to the Fund, they will continue to be paid either in cash, in additional shares of the Fund, or in shares of other Goldman Sachs Funds, depending on each shareholder’s current election, as disclosed in the Prospectuses.
Liquidation of Assets. Effective immediately, the Fund may depart from its stated investment objective and policies as it prepares to liquidate and distribute its assets to shareholders. It is anticipated that the Fund’s portfolio will be positioned into cash, cash equivalents or other liquid assets on or prior to the Liquidation Date. In connection with the liquidation, all outstanding shares of the Fund on the Liquidation Date will be automatically redeemed by the Fund. Each shareholder of record of the Fund on the Liquidation Date will receive proceeds of the automatic redemptions equal to the shareholder’s proportionate interest in the Fund’s net assets plus accrued and unpaid earnings of the Fund at the time of liquidation. Shares held in custodial IRA accounts directly with the Fund’s transfer agent on the Liquidation Date will be exchanged for the equivalent share class of the Goldman Sachs Financial Square Government Fund, a registered money market fund, unless an alternative direction is provided prior to the Liquidation Date. The liquidation of the Fund’s portfolio will result in increased transaction costs, which must be borne by the Fund and its shareholders and may result in higher capital gains for taxable shareholders. Shareholders should contact their tax advisers concerning the tax consequences of the liquidation.
Other Alternatives. At any time prior to the Liquidation Date, shareholders may redeem their shares of the Fund and receive the net asset value thereof in cash or in-kind, as provided in the Prospectuses. Shareholders may also exchange their shares for shares of the same class of another Goldman Sachs Fund at net asset value without imposition of an initial sales charge or a contingent deferred sales charge. Redemption of shares by current shareholders between February 14, 2025 and the Liquidation Date will not be subject to any applicable contingent deferred sales charge.
Certain shareholders may redeem all or a portion of their shares of the Fund before the Liquidation Date, and as a result the Fund and its remaining shareholders may experience adverse effects. These shareholder redemptions may also negatively impact a Fund’s net asset value per share.
This Supplement should be retained with your Prospectuses, Summary Prospectuses and SAI for future reference.
RESLIQSTK 02-25

@david: Simple point I didn't manage to make late last night: the reinvestments add to your cost basis, therefore the capital gain showing will drop/capital loss increase. Like Yogi says, all that sets up a good tax loss opportunity if you need/want one.

@david, is the ML account showing a capital loss, like that could have been triggered by a capital gain distribution reinvested?

Part IV: There is a more striking contrast: in Why Globalization Works, he argued that most of the charges of the antimarket critics—whom he called, quoting the economist David Henderson, “new millennium collectivists” and who included people ranging from the British philosopher John Gray to the journalist Naomi Klein to the right-wing demagogue Pat Buchanan—were the result of too little rather than too much globalization. In The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, he finds that the many problems of today’s rentier economy are “principally the outcome of failures of liberalization—above all, a failure to think through the institutional context for markets. The prevailing assumption was that the free pursuit of self-interest is enough on its own: it is not.” Wolf does not say that any of his earlier critics have been proved right by subsequent events. He was not wrong; “the prevailing assumption” was.
In these moments, Wolf uses the distinctive elite construction that the journalist William Schneider named the “past exonerative.” It’s that unmistakable mix of passive voice and past tense that people with power use to say things like “mistakes were made” or that extrajudicial drone murders “have been authorized.” Wolf does this both when his side has done something horrible that he cannot admit and when the other side has done something undeniably good that he cannot acknowledge. Thus we find that “colonial empires disappeared,” “trade unions have greatly weakened,” and “the factories disappeared in the old industrial locations.” The revolutionary struggles for power that these phrases embody are thus rendered invisible.
Wolf’s favored method of historical investigation is to begin with a reference to the ancient world free of any contextual background, followed by an ideological generalization about the nineteenth or twentieth century. Here’s one:
The principal answer [to the crisis of democratic capitalism] is the hollowing out of the middle classes, identified by Aristotle almost twenty-five hundred years ago as the core constituency for a constitutional democracy.
Or another, but in reverse order:
The idea of the perfectly ecological human is quite as much a delusion as Trotsky’s communist superman. Just consider the mass extinctions that followed humanity’s first arrival in Eurasia and the Americas back in prehistoric times.
These adventures in historical analogy and the frequent absence of any human agent serve to make Wolf’s highly ideological opinions appear to be timeless facts. Policies that might otherwise seem to be expressions of ruthless class interest are reframed as basic truths known or prevailing assumptions held by competent, reasonable people, who served to implement and safeguard them from dreamers and despots. But if they are reasonable truths, Wolf is left unable to explain how they have led to such unreasonable ends and empowered such unreasonable people.
Our elites have not suddenly become morally abhorrent; the financial globalization that Wolf championed has allowed them to remove themselves from democratic accountability, state regulation, and communities of obligation. It has also decimated countervailing powers such as organized labor, working-class political parties, and capital controls. The market never was “permeated” by the values of duty, fairness, and decency: it was constrained by nonmarket forces. Wolf has spent his career arguing that reason and freedom demanded the removal of those constraints. And here we are.
The epigraph to chapter 8 of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism is Warren Buffett’s famous quote that “there’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” In the twenty years since the publication of Why Globalization Works, the rich have won their war on the working class, and as Polybius famously did not write about the Romans at Carthage, they have sown the fields with salt so that nothing can grow. Now their tribune wanders the desert they have made, and urges moderation.

Part III: The deeper possibility, unthinkable to Wolf, is that free-market capitalism and liberal democracy may have nothing to do with each other—or may even contradict each other. Wolf calls economics and politics “symbiotic twins,” which shows a poor grasp of both symbiosis and zygosity; he goes on to describe capitalism and democracy—specific versions of economics and politics—as inhabiting a “difficult marriage.” But they proceed from entirely different premises. Democracy is predicated on formal, substantive equality: one person, one vote. Capitalism is not, and is incompatible with substantive equality, because it is composed of workers and owners, success and failure, rich and poor. Capitalism is about self-interest and private gain; democracy is about public interest and civic responsibility. Capitalism’s moral justifications revolve around deservedness, efficiency, and individual risk-taking, none of which are important justifications for democracy. Capitalism is predicated on atomized individuals, democracy on shared publics.
Even the idea of freedom, which Wolf takes as essential to both, is radically different in each case. Private property, which is at the core of capitalism, is fundamentally opposed to unfettered freedom, because property involves the ability to exclude all other human beings from some part of the world. I am not free to live in your house, or even perhaps to walk across your land. I am not free to eat your dinner, even if I am starving and you intend to throw it away—even if I cooked it. Hence the basic insight of Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze that famines can take place without anyone’s property rights being violated. Freedom in capitalist markets entails the freedom of property owners to use and dispose of their property, including the freedom of business owners to run their businesses as little dictatorships, not as representative polities. You do not elect your boss, let alone vote on your wages or working hours. The political scientists Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitch have argued that workplaces are fundamentally places of unfreedom—many workers do not even have enough individual liberty to decide when to go to the bathroom without their bosses’ permission.
The notion that capitalism and democracy are mutually harmonious is a relic of cold war ideology. Contrary to Wolf’s belief, nineteenth-century capitalism did not widely overlap with democracy: the British Empire and the United States were not places with egalitarian universal suffrage. Proponents of market liberalism from John Locke onward worried constantly that universal suffrage would simply mean poor people voting to expropriate the property of the wealthy. Little wonder that nineteenth-century opponents of capitalism referred to themselves as “social democrats.” They understood socialism as a project for expanding democracy beyond the artificially curtailed political sphere to the social and the economic. The enthusiasm with which the United States overthrew democratically elected leaders with even moderately socialist leanings in places like Guatemala, Iran, and Chile in the cold war era also seems to suggest that free markets were quite compatible with political dictatorship well into the recent past.
The marketization and globalization of the world since the 1970s is often referred to as the era of neoliberalism. The word “neoliberalism” appears once in Wolf’s book, to refer to how “freer markets” are described by their opponents. Scholars like Quinn Slobodian, Dara Orenstein, Amy Offner, Sam Wetherell, and Laleh Khalili have detailed at length the ways that neoliberal economic policies have worked to insulate property ownership from democratic politics in the postcolonial age. They have shown the reliance of globalized production on a variety of economic zones with laws, regulations, and systems of accountability different from those of their host polities and separated from democratic accountability. They have also followed the enthusiasm that free-market fundamentalists like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman had for apartheid South Africa, colonial Hong Kong, Singapore, and other places that had little relationship to democracy or individual freedom.
If capitalism and democracy are not fundamentally dependent on each other, then there is no crisis “of” them as a coherent system. The capitalism part seems to be doing just fine. The problem is the threat that unfettered capitalism poses to democracy, and specifically, the inability of the ideology of political liberalism to contain that threat.
As the political theorist Brian Judge argues in his superb book Democracy in Default (2024), modern liberalism has constituted itself around a denial of the need for distributive conflicts. Instead of open conflict over resources and rewards (which is common to other forms of political ideology), liberalism puts its faith in things like education, technology, expertise, and, ultimately, market forces to indefinitely postpone those conflicts. As he puts it, “‘The market’ is a discursive construct operating within liberalism that reconciles the inherent tension between private property and universal consent.”
For decades now, the ideology of free-market liberalism has obfuscated the ongoing distributive conflicts of the world, but it has not blunted the material suffering of the people on the losing end. Since the 2008 crisis, the reality of ruthless distributive conflict has become impossible to ignore, but the failure of market liberalism to reconcile political equality and economic inequality has produced a global crisis of legitimacy and a growing constituency amenable to antiliberal figures like Trump, Orbán, Modi, and Bolsonaro. In his inability or unwillingness to see these contradictions, Wolf cannot reason his way out of the exact set of ideologies and policies that produced the crisis in the first place.
The substance of this book demands one kind of review, but it is not just any book on the predicaments of our moment. It was written by Martin Wolf, one of the most prominent advocates for the neoliberal transformation of the world. The book opens with the statement (drawn from his acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award) that Wolf’s “opinions have altered as the world has unfolded.”
Rereading Why Globalization Works in light of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism does not reveal many alterations of opinion. Both books have a preface entitled “Why I Wrote This Book,” and both prefaces set the stage with the story of Wolf’s parents fleeing the Nazis, which led them to cherish democracy and individual liberty. Both books maintain that states and markets are necessary for each other, and specifically that liberal democracy and market globalization are symbiotic, albeit also in constant tension. Both rely on a sketchy historical narrative involving canonical figures like Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, and Locke to back up the claim that private property is the fundamental condition for political liberty. Both books conceive of Wolf’s opponents as a broad antimarket constituency of ill-informed utopian dreamers who would immediately become icy Stalinists upon gaining power.
Wolf has changed his mind on three main subjects: corporations, finance, and inequality. In 2004 he described critics of multinational corporate power as engaging in “a collective hysteria” and “a series of paranoid fantasies.” While he still thinks that “the ability and willingness of multinational companies to move their capital and know-how across frontiers” has on balance been a positive thing, he now concedes that it has been disadvantageous to workers. In 2004 he thought the purpose of corporations was to add value by using cheap resources (including people) otherwise outside of the global market economy. He now thinks that corporate liability needs to be strengthened and corporate political influence has gone too far, whereas in 2004 he argued that corporations had far less power than governments and that they merely represented one set of influencing forces among many. In 2004 he agreed that the frequency of financial crises in the preceding decade had imposed large costs and political setbacks on the project of globalization. But despite many blunders and painful experiences, he maintained that “emerging-market economies should ultimately plan to integrate into the global capital markets.” Today he notes that “the financial sector wastes both human and real resources. It is in large part a rent-extraction machine.” In 2004 he acknowledged that inequality had “apparently risen” in high-income countries, but thought that globalization’s contribution to this trend was unclear, and its main consequence had been poverty reduction. Today he notes that from 1993 to 2015 the top one percent captured over half of all increases in real pre-tax incomes, and he concedes that wealth is a source of power, through political influence, media ownership, philanthropy, and so on.

https://nybooks.com/articles/2025/01/16/never-too-much-the-crisis-of-democratic-capitalism-wolf/
Never Too Much’
Trevor Jackson
If globalization has allowed elites to remove themselves from democratic accountability and regulation, is there any path toward a just economy?
January 16, 2025 issue
Reviewed:
The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
by Martin Wolf
Penguin Press, 474 pp., $30.00
Illustration by Matt Dorfman
Something has gone terribly wrong. In his 2004 book Why Globalization Works, the economics journalist Martin Wolf wrote that “liberal democracy is the only political and economic system capable of generating sustained prosperity and political stability.” He was articulating the elite consensus of the time, a belief that liberal democratic capitalism was not only a coherent form of social organization but in fact the best one, as demonstrated by the West’s victory in the cold war. He went on to argue that critics who “complain that markets encourage immorality and have socially immoral consequences, not least gross inequality,” were “largely mistaken,” and he concluded that a market economy was the only means for “giving individual human beings the opportunity to seek what they desire in life.”
Wolf wrote those words midway through a four-decade global expansion of markets. Throughout the 1980s in Britain, the United States, and France, governments led by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and François Mitterrand set about privatizing public assets and services, cutting welfare state provisions, and deregulating markets. At the same time, a set of ten policies known as the “Washington Consensus” (because they were shared by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the US Treasury) brought privatization, liberalization, and globalization to Latin America following a series of sovereign debt crises. In the 1990s a similar set of policies, then known as “shock therapy,” suddenly converted the formerly Communist economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to free markets. Around the Global South, and especially in the rapidly industrializing countries of East Asia after the 1997 financial crisis, “structural adjustment” policies that were conditions for IMF bailouts again brought liberalization, privatization, and fiscal discipline. The same policies were enforced on the European periphery after 2009, in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain, again, either as conditions for bailouts or through EU fiscal restrictions and restrictive European Central Bank policy. Today there are far more markets in far more aspects of human life than ever before.
But the sustained prosperity and political stability that these policies were meant to create have proved elusive. The global economy since the 1980s has been riven by repeated financial crises. Latin America endured a “lost decade” of economic growth. The 1990s in Russia were worse than the Great Depression had been in Germany and the United States. The austerity and high-interest-rate policies after the 1997 East Asia crisis restored financial stability but at the cost of domestic recessions, and contributed to political instability and the repudiation of incumbent parties in Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea, as they did again across Europe after 2009–2010. Global economic growth rates in the era of globalization have been about half what they were in the less globalized postwar decades. Around the world, violent racist demagogues keep winning elections, and although they all seem very happy with the idea of private property, they are openly hostile to the rule of law, political liberalism, individual freedom, and other ostensible preconditions and cultural accompaniments to market economies. Both democracy and globalization seem to be in retreat in practice as well as in ideological popularity. Or, as Wolf writes in his new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism:
Our economy has destabilized our politics and vice versa. We are no longer able to combine the operations of the market economy with stable liberal democracy. A big part of the reason for this is that the economy is not delivering the security and widely shared prosperity expected by large parts of our societies. One symptom of this disappointment is a widespread loss of confidence in elites.
What happened?
Martin Wolf is probably the most influential economics commentator in the English-speaking world. He has been chief editorial writer for the Financial Times since 1987 and their lead economics analyst since 1996. Before that he trained in economics at Oxford and worked at the World Bank starting in 1971, including three years as senior economist and a year spent working on the first World Development Report in 1978. This is his fifth book since moving to the Financial Times. The blurbs and acknowledgments are stuffed with central bankers, financiers, Nobel laureates, and celebrity academics. The bibliography contains ninety-six references to the author himself.
Wolf’s diagnosis is impossible to dispute: “Neither politics nor the economy will function without a substantial degree of honesty, trustworthiness, self-restraint, truthfulness, and loyalty to shared political, legal, and other institutions.” But, he observes, those values have run into crisis all over the world, and, especially since about 2008,
people feel even more than before that the country is not being governed for them, but for a narrow segment of well-connected insiders who reap most of the gains and, when things go wrong, are not just shielded from loss but impose massive costs on everybody else.
He describes in detail the mistaken policies of austerity in the US and Europe, the rise of a wasteful and extractive financial sector, the atomization and immiseration of formerly unionized workers, the pervasiveness of tax avoidance and evasion, and the general accumulation of decades of elite failure.
Most people have accurately realized “that these failings were the result not just of stupidity but of the intellectual and moral corruption of decision-makers and opinion formers at all levels—in the financial sector, regulatory bodies, academia, media, and politics.” And thus his conclusion: “Without ethical elites, democracy becomes a demagogic spectacle hiding a plutocratic reality. That also is its death.” Forty years of the corruption of our plutocratic elites has now led to what he views as an alarming populist reaction. Voters, especially young ones in the core democratic capitalist countries, have lost faith in the power of markets and liberalism. Serious international rivals have also emerged, in the forms of “demagogic authoritarian capitalism” in places like Turkey and Russia, and “bureaucratic authoritarian capitalism” in China, and Wolf views these systems, unlike earlier systemic rivals like communism, as serious threats. Liberal democratic capitalism is in danger both from within and without.
It’s a grim picture, and one that nearly any reader of any political persuasion can agree with. But for Wolf, these epochal global crises do not require radical change. The motto of the book (as he puts it) is “Never too much,” and he maintains that “reform is not revolution, but its opposite.” He is consistently contemptuous of any sort of structural change, quick to invoke despotism as the inevitable outcome of utopian thinking and to cite Edmund Burke on the inhumanity and impossibility of rebuilding society around first principles.
Instead, he prefers “piecemeal social engineering,” an idea that he adopts from the unconventional libertarian philosopher Karl Popper, and that he takes to mean “change targeted at remedying specific ills.” His targeted solutions for the specific ills that constitute the global crisis of democratic capitalism run from the anodyne to the surreal. Examples of the former include the idea that “public sector cash-flow accounts should be complemented with worked-out public sector balance sheets and accrual accounts,” or the need for corporations to have “excellent accounting standards” and diligent, independent auditors. Both are very reasonable proposals, and perhaps, at the margin, they really would erode the grip of plutocracy.
Others are standard repressive-technocrat fare. He rejects free higher education because too many people would go to college, imposing too high a fiscal burden on governments, and he doubts whether taxpayers should have to guarantee tertiary education as a universal right. He thinks there should be “controls on immigration that recognize the potential economic gains while also being politically acceptable and effective.” He thinks that defined-benefit retirement plans should be replaced by large-scale defined-contribution plans run by trustees who “would be allowed to adjust pensions in light of investment performance.” It is difficult to imagine many people democratically choosing a system in which unelected trustees could cut their pensions when the stock market does poorly, and there are good reasons to think that education is advantageous to both capitalism and democracy.

msf: "ETFs can't be closed."
What is the law or rule that says an ETF is not allowed to close inflows?

There's no rule of law that gives ETFs an advantage over OEFs when it comes to taxes. In fact, the law that says a fund can make embedded gains vanish by offloading them onto investors was written many years before ETFs ever existed.
It's not a rule of law, but a rule of reality - pragmatism - that prevents OEFs from doing this. In order to dump cap gains onto an investor redeeming shares, a fund must redeem those shares in kind. A few OEFs are even known to do this, e.g. Sequoia. But generally only for larger redemptions.
Similarly, it's not that ETFs are prohibited by law from closing, but as others have explained above, pragmatically the chaos it would cause is an effective bar.
Sequoia fund gives departing shareholders stock instead of cash (Investment News 2016)

A provision in the 1940 Investment Company Act allows funds to pay redemptions in securities, rather than cash, but it's a provision that's rarely used, in part because in-kind redemptions could damage a fund's reputation. ... Under the law, the fund doesn't have to distribute in-kind redemptions in proportion to the fund's holdings.

Sequoia prospectus, May 1, 2024

• Unless otherwise prohibited by law, the Fund may pay the redemption price to you in cash or in portfolio securities, or partly in cash and partly in portfolio securities.
• The Fund has adopted a policy under which the Fund may limit cash payments in connection with redemption requests to $250,000 during any ninety (90) day period. As a result, the Fund may pay you in securities or partly in securities if the amount of Fund shares that you redeem is more than $250,000.
• It is highly likely that the Fund will pay you in securities or partly in securities if you make a redemption (or series of redemptions) in an amount greater than $250,000

You wrote: "some arrogance involved. primecap and wellington had many years to ask vanguard to adopt an etf structure for tax\trading benefits."
Seems a bit presumptive to infer that they didn't ask vanguard to adopt an ETF structure merely from the fact that Vanguard didn't do so.
Regardless, if Primecap had wanted to run some funds with an ETF structure it had its own company to do this.
I wrote that AUM didn't seem to be a major concern of Primecap. Perhaps I should have written that growing AUM doesn't seem to be a major objective. Primecap has always been concerned about the size of its AUM being too large. That's why both Vanguard and Primecap Odyssey funds have had multiyear (even multidecade) closures. Even though that impeded "how they get paid". Responsible managers do things like that.
ETFs can't be closed. Why would Primecap open wide the inflow spigot with ETFs while simultaneously keeping their OEF funds closed?
primecap and wellington dont care bout their fund AUM plunges
What AUM plunge? Despite closures, despite outflows, Vanguard Primecap's AUM stands at or near its all time peak:
Current: $75.9B (per M*)
Sept 2024: $78B
Sept 2023: $65B
Sept 2022: $56B
Sept 2021: $74B
Sept 2020: $64B
Sept 2019: $63B
Sept 2018: $69B
Sept 2017: $58B
Sept 2016: $47B
Sept 2015: $42B
Prospectus Jan 31, 2025 and Prospectus Jan 31, 2020

I hold a big chunk of VDIGX. The long time mgr moved off the fund a year go though still with the organization. It seems to even underperform VIG - a passive ETF with similar strategy. Getting frustrated with it. VEIPX also had a mgr change but is doing just well enough. I don't know the I have the patience that Russell Kinnel suggests you should have its this fund.

I am a long time holder of VDIGX in my taxable account. As you noted, the fund has underperformed, while producing high year-end distributions. As I recall, in December, capital gains were about 8% of NAV. Ouch!
I have been slowly selling shares Spec. ID that have no or small capital gains. With the March, June, and December distributions, I have been purchasing VIG. If I held VDIGX in a non-taxable account, I would have sold all of it and purchased VIG.

Got it. You still use the QD worksheet as explicitly instructed on Line 22 of Schedule D.
(That's in the Schedule itself, not in its instructions.)
The way this works is that net cap losses cannot be used to offset qualified divs. So the QD worksheet excludes your net loss (in line 3 of the worksheet you put $0 for cap gains). Then you proceed normally with that worksheet, calculating your cap gains rate tax on just the qualified divs.
You get to apply up to $3,000 of the loss against ordinary income. This comes from Line 21 in Sched D. The remainder is carried over to next year.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1498498/000119312525022772/d933521d497.htm
497 1 d933521d497.htm ASHMORE FUNDS
ASHMORE FUNDS
Supplement dated February 7, 2025
to the Statutory Prospectus for Class A, Class C and Institutional Class Shares
of Ashmore Emerging Markets Low Duration Fund
On February 5, 2025 the Board of Trustees of Ashmore Funds approved a plan of liquidation (the “Plan of Liquidation”) for Ashmore Emerging Markets Low Duration Fund (the “Fund”), with such liquidation scheduled to take place on or about February 7, 2025 (the “Liquidation Date”). On or before the Liquidation Date, the Fund will seek to convert substantially all of its portfolio securities and other assets to cash or cash equivalents. Therefore, the Fund may depart from its stated investment objectives and policies as it prepares to liquidate its assets and distribute them to shareholders. Any shares of the Fund outstanding on the Liquidation Date will be automatically redeemed on that date. As soon as practicable after the Liquidation Date, the Fund will distribute pro rata to the Fund’s shareholders of record as of the close of business on the Liquidation Date all of the remaining assets of the Fund, after paying, or setting aside the amount to pay, any expenses and liabilities of the Fund.
The Fund may make one or more distributions of income and/or net capital gains on or prior to the Liquidation Date in order to eliminate Fund-level taxes. For taxable shareholders, the automatic redemption on the Liquidation Date generally will be treated like other redemptions of shares generally – that is, as a sale that may result in a gain or loss to shareholders for U.S. federal income tax purposes.
Effective as of the close of business on February 7, 2025, Institutional Class Shares of the Fund are no longer available for purchase by new or existing investors or be available for exchanges from the other series of Ashmore Funds, except for shares that may be purchased as a result of dividend reinvestments.
At any time prior to the Liquidation Date, shareholders may redeem their shares of the Fund pursuant to the procedures set forth under “How to Sell or Exchange Shares” in the Fund’s Prospectus.
Shareholders may also exchange their shares for shares of a different series of Ashmore Funds, subject to any investment minimums and other restrictions on exchanges as described under “How to Sell or Exchange Shares” in the Fund’s Prospectus.
Investors Should Retain This Supplement for Future Reference

Thanks for taking the time to reply, MSF. I should have been clearer. When I say had a capital loss from sold assets I meant that lines 15 and lines 16 are both losses on my schedule D for 2024. That is less than zero.
That's why I am asking. I know the instructions for line 16 say to use the QD worksheet if *any* of those 3 conditions apply, not if all apply. I reported qualified dividends on line 3a. So it would seem I can use the QD worksheet, which I would prefer to do. But elsewhere the IRS implies that this worksheet should be used only if lines 15 and 16 are positive. But it is implicit, not explicit.

I'm not sure where the instructions you mention in your first sentence come from. Here are some of the instructions for Line 16:

Schedule D Tax Worksheet. Use the Schedule D Tax Worksheet in the Instructions for Schedule D to figure the amount to enter on Form 1040 or 1040-SR, line 16, if:

• You have to file Schedule D, line 18 or 19 of Schedule D is more than zero, and lines 15 and 16 of Schedule D are gains; or
• You have to file Form 4952 and you have an amount on line 4g, even if you don’t need to file Schedule D.

But if you are filing Form 2555, you must use the Foreign Earned Income Tax Worksheet instead.
[These are all unusual situations - so you likely don't have to use the Sched D worksheet]
Qualified Dividends and Capital Gain Tax Worksheet. Use the Qualified Dividends and Capital Gain Tax Worksheet, later, to figure your tax if you don’t have to use the Schedule D Tax Worksheet and if any of the following applies.

• You reported qualified dividends on Form 1040 or 1040-SR, line 3a.
• You don’t have to file Schedule D and you reported capital gain distributions on Form 1040 or 1040-SR, line 7.
• You are filing Schedule D, and Schedule D, lines 15 and 16, are both more than zero.

Since you had a sale of assets, you have to file Schedule D. Assuming that you had net gains (subtracting your cap loss from your MF cap gains), then both line 15 (net long term gains) and line 16 (net cap gains) will be positive.
In summary:
- Don't have to use Sched D worksheet - check
- Have positive numbers on Sched D lines 15 and 16 - check
So you're supposed to use the Qualified Dividends and Capital Gains Worksheet.

Seemed like a good day to do some more simplifying in the IRA.
I sold FDSVX. I get enough tech to suit my IRA from FMILX and PRWCX.
Sold micro positions in GRID, FIW, XBI, PTH, and BUFSX. There were micro gain and micro losses. I don't think the small losses would be healed any time soon. Recent dramas have been wearing away at the micro gains.
When the dust settles, I'll probably be adding MRFOX to the IRA. It appears to be a very boring fund that has been relatively untroubled by the alarums and excursions.
In the very near future I expect to be taking a look at the bond funds in the IRA.

For a muni fund with a wide range of duration, one can look outside the box (national muni funds).
STWTX / STWVX (Hartford Schroders Tax-Aware Bond Fund) was classified as a muni fund through 2018. Since then it's been classified as a taxable bond fund. As M* describes the fund:

It often holds 70%-80% of assets in munis but will make big shifts to this allocation when its managers see more value there. [In 2020-2021 it dropped munis to 50%-60% of the portfolio. Since 2022 munis have constituted 70%+ of the fund.]

Currently, 93% of its assets are muni bonds.
With respect to duration:

The Fund may invest in fixed income securities of any maturity or duration. The Fund’s effective duration may vary overtime

Summary Prospectus.
M* shows that over the past five years, the fund's style box has ranged from short term/middle grade to long term/high grade. In words, M* writes:

duration stood at just under 4.0 years for most of 2019 through the end of 2021, but it extended again throughout 2022 and 2023 to over 9.0 years

Where the rubber meets the road:
Even on a pre-tax basis, BSNIX has performed significantly better. But as its prospectus says, it does not go long. (See also its fixed income style map here.) Both funds are five star funds. I'd stick with the lower risk, higher performing Baird fund.
Wide ranging funds, even five star funds, are not always what they're cracked up to be.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1539996/000116204425000126/dss497.htm
DSS AmericaFirst Total Return Bond Fund
Class A: DGQAX
Class U: DGQUX
Class I: DGQIX
FEBRUARY 6, 2025
SUPPLEMENT TO THE PROSPECTUS AND SUMMARY PROSPECTUS DATED NOVEMBER 1, 2024
______________________________________________________________________________
The Board of Trustees of DSS AmericaFirst Funds (the “Trust”) has concluded that it is in the best interests of the DSS AmericaFirst Total Return Bond Fund (the “Fund”) and its shareholders that the Fund cease operations. The Board has determined to close the Fund and redeem all outstanding shares no later than the close of business on February 28, 2025.
Effective immediately, the Fund will not accept any new investments. In the near term, the Fund will begin liquidating its portfolio and will invest in cash or cash equivalents (such as money market funds) until all shares have been redeemed. The Fund will not be able to pursue its stated investment objective once it begins liquidating its portfolio. Shares of the Fund are otherwise not available for purchase.
Even though the DSS AmericaFirst Total Return Bond Fund is closing, you may wish to continue your investment with another fund in the DSS AmericaFirst fund family. Prior to February 28, 2025, you may exchange your shares, in accordance with the “How to Exchange Shares” section of the Fund’s Prospectus, which allows shareholders to exchange their shares in the Fund for the same share class of another DSS AmerficaFirst fund, as listed below. The Board is waiving the share exchange minimum so that exchanges may be made with any amount of shares.
DSS AmericaFirst Income Fund
Class A: AFPAX Class U: AFPUX Class I: AFPIX
DSS AmericaFirst Monthly Risk-On Risk-Off Fund
Class A: ABRFX Class U: ABRUX Class I: ABRWX
DSS AmericaFirst Alpha Trends Factor Fund
Class A: SBQAX Class U: SBQUX Class I: SBQIX
You may exchange shares either by telephone by calling 1-877-217-8501, if you have not canceled your telephone privilege, or in writing. Written requests for exchange must provide the following:
·current Fund’s name;
·account names and numbers;
·name of the Fund and share class you wish to exchange your shares into;
·the amount you wish to exchange;
·specify the shareholder privileges you wish to retain (e.g., Telephone Privileges); and
·signatures of all registered owners.
To exchange shares by telephone, you should call 1-877-217-8501 on any day the Funds are open. The Fund will process telephone requests made after the close of business on the next business day. You should notify the Funds in writing of all shareholder service privileges you wish to continue in any new account opened by a telephone exchange request. Please note that the Funds will only accept exchanges if your ownership registrations in both accounts are identical.
Prior to February 28, 2025, you may redeem your shares, in accordance with the “How to Redeem Shares” section of the Fund’s Prospectus. Unless your investment in the Fund is through a tax-deferred retirement account, a redemption is subject to tax on any taxable gains. Please refer to the “Dividends, Distributions and Taxes” section in the Prospectus for general information. You may wish to consult your tax advisor about your particular situation.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR RETIREMENT PLAN INVESTORS
If you are a retirement plan investor, you should consult your tax advisor regarding the consequences of any redemption of Fund shares. If you receive a distribution from an Individual Retirement Account or a Simplified Employee Pension (SEP) IRA, you must roll the proceeds into another Individual Retirement Account within sixty (60) days of the date of the distribution in order to avoid having to include the distribution in your taxable income for the year. If you receive a distribution from a 403(b)(7) Custodian Account (Tax-Sheltered account) or a Keogh Account, you must roll the distribution into a similar type of retirement plan within sixty (60) days in order to avoid disqualification of your plan and the severe tax consequences that it can bring. If you are the trustee of a Qualified Retirement Plan, you may reinvest the money in any way permitted by the plan and trust agreement.
ANY SHAREHOLDERS WHO HAVE NOT REDEEMED THEIR SHARES OF THE FUND PRIOR TO FEBRUARY 28, 2025, WILL HAVE THEIR SHARES AUTOMATICALLY REDEEMED AS OF THAT DATE, AND PROCEEDS WILL BE SENT TO THE ADDRESS OF RECORD. IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS OR NEED ASSISTANCE, PLEASE CONTACT YOUR FINANCIAL ADVISOR DIRECTLY OR THE FUND AT 1-877-217-8501.
________________________
The Prospectus, Summary Prospectus for the Fund and Statement of Additional Information each dated November 1, 2025, and as may be supplemented, each provide information about the Fund and should be retained for future reference. These documents have been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and are incorporated herein by reference. All of these documents are available upon request and without charge by calling toll free 1-877-217-8501.
Please retain this Supplement for future reference.

IRS says the Qualified Dividend Worksheet may be used by those whose only capital gains are from distributions. It says nothing about capital losses.
I am puzzled. Maybe someone here has the facts as the IRS also contradicts itself in its instructions in various places.
My only 2024 capital gains are mutual fund distributions. I also have qualified dividends from mutual fund distributions. I have no capital gains from sale of assets. But I *do* have a capital loss from sale of assets (selling mutual fund shares, as it happens).
Am I permitted to use the Qualified Dividend Worksheet to figure my tax?

Am I missing something? REMIX/BLNDX knocks the socks off LCORX, and the other competitors mentioned by several members in this thread.

REMIX / BLNDX is not a direct competitor of other funds mentioned. It and the others are not only in different categories, but as M* views them in different asset classes - alternative and allocation respectively. (The latter is why I highlighted CRBDX, as it eschews fixed income, atypical for an allocation fund.) Lipper concurs: REMIX / BLNDX is in "Alternatives", while LCORX is in "Mixed Assets".
This M* piece may help to see the fine distinctions among the various alternative fund categories and more broadly the difference between alternative funds and allocation (tactical or otherwise) funds. The section entitled "What Are Alternatives?" is a good starting point. There is another paragraph that explains why DRRIX is classified as tactical allocation rather than multistrategy or macro trading (REMIX has drifted between those two). This explanation is helpful in the context of this thread.
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/xnas/blndx/performance
Different types of funds react differently to varying market conditions:

Category	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024	5 yr avg
Multistrategy	1.63%	6.86%	-2.07%	6.24%	6.09%	3.94%
Macro Trading	4.54%	3.86%	0.01%	2.62%	6.55%	4.03%
Tactical Alloc	9.83%	13.36	-15.49	10.74	10.20	5.20%