More thoughts...If you had no income and had no assets and inherited $1M today tax free..... would you invest it all in the market today at a 4% withdrawal rate (many people are 4-5.5%)? This Bull market is up 3.5 times since 3/9/2009 low. Or for that matter DCA into the market?
The above Portfolio Visualizer success rate analysis thru 2017 assumes equal odds of markets moving higher vs markets moving lower from this huge bull run as of today. I personally do not like those odds.
Cost basis is critical. These withdrawal rate calculators/simulations often focus on did the investor run out of money altogether (success rate analysis)? I would argue that permanent impairment of capital can occur without going to zero. An investors quality of life can be affected if annual income is reduced by a significant amount due to decreases in portfolio value (with static 4% withdrawal program).
I am not against buy and hold but I am a proponent of establishing a cost basis with some degree of caution.

Fairport-based Manning & Napier acquired 75% of Rainier more than a year ago after a period of heavy outflows from Seattle-based Rainier. While the three Rainier Funds still don't formally carry the Manning & Napier name (eg., Rainier Large Cap Equity Instl), we've updated the MFO ScoreCard (and our master names list) to reflect it (click image to enlarge).

The MFO 5-Year Great Owl Manning & Napier Rainier International Discovery Series I RAIIX is contractually sub-advised by Rainier. Its portfolio manager is Henrik Strabo.
On the whole, however, the Manning & Napier fund family has not rated well on the absolute-return driven MFO Scorecard (OSC means Oldest Share Class, ASC means All Share Classes), click on image to enlarge:

Similarly, it has no funds on the MFO Honor Roll and 7 on the MFO Three Alarm list (click image to enlarge):

All that said, Manning & Napier's overall numbers suggests a firm that focuses more on risk adjusted returns and capital preservation than absolute returns, which drive the ScoreCard, Honor Roll and Three Alarm designations.
The irony is that their philosophy states: "A Focus on Absolute Returns - A focus on price can help investors avoid permanent loss of capital and is aimed at maximizing absolute returns over the long-term."
David profiled positively Manning & Napier Pro-Blend Conservative Term Series S EXDAX in 2015 and Manning & Napier Disciplined Value Series I MNDFX in 2011.
Since inception, they both hold an MFO Rating of 5, or top quintile in their categories, as do 8 other funds in Manning & Napier's line-up (click image to enlarge):

Hi @expatsp
As I noted, the fund isn't high on the category list at M* against equity style RE funds; and just kinda chugs along with a decent yield and cap. gains. The fund did take about a -32% hit during the market melt.
I suppose the fund for our house, is our toe in real estate (about 10% of our portfolio) that many would consider the "chicken" side of investing in this area. :) I have not checked, but presume our "real estate" equity among other broad based funds adds another few percentage points of exposure to this sector.
Composition:
https://fundresearch.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/composition/316389865?type=sq-NavBar
Chart from Sept. 2004 to date:
http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?FRIFX,IYR,RWR,VNQ,PETDX&n=3296&O=011000

Hi, Ben.
I had the same concern but spoke with the adviser about it. The turnover is a one-time event linked to the move from being an Allianz fund to being independent. Two factors: Allianz wanted large cap and they pulled all of their clients' assets out at the point of transition. F&T then made a special cap gains distribution so that the tax burden fell on the departing shareholders rather than the new ones. They now estimate 0% distribution this year with a small tax loss carryforward.
Based on the management of their small cap separate accounts, they anticipate turnover closer to 24%.
For what that's worth,
David

@Sven - I guess I disagree about Roth taxation. I think they will figure a way to make all investments after-tax with tax-free dividends and capital gains.

@Anna, At present Roth IRAs are funded by after-tax dollars and thus are tax-free upon withdrawal. What I am saying that there was discussion that would tax Roth IRA at later days and that is called double taxation. Obama administration floated that idea but back down quickly when it was released to the press.

Dear friends,
I'm delighted that a number of folks joined us this month who we haven't heard from in a while.

• Sam Lee reflected on the tiff involving Morningstar and the Wall Street Journal.
  
• Mark Wilson shared some brief and welcome reflections on the capital gains season
  
• Dennis Baran wrote a Launch Alert for American Beacon Shapiro Equity Opportunities Fund (SHXPX), which has a phenomenal track record as a private strategy
  
• Likewise, I wrote one for Northern Trust Quality US E.S.G. (NUESX), a really low-cost, low minimum way to target two useful attributes at once: a high quality corporation and a record of avoiding problematic behavior.
  
• Sean Stannard-Stockton participated in an Elevator Talk about his Ensemble Fund (ENSBX)
  
• We profiled Fuller & Thaler Behavioral Small Cap Equity (FTHNX) and, in the process, get to play with Charles's rolling three year average metric to see how consistent the fund has been compared to its neighbors.
  
• Charles debuted a new Premium correlation tool which allows you to identify category outliers; it's an interesting way to find out whether you need to discount a fund's ratings since there's a pretty good chance that a fund with no correlation to its peers or benchmark is probably miscategorized. It is, at the very least, driven by forces unrelated to those driving the category.
  
• Ed vents, just a bit, about the cultural elements that permit sexual harassment in the financial services industry; he's not sure that we've seen the end of this one.

Hope you find some useful nuggets in their somewhere.
David

I'm thinking that sometime in the future Roth withdrawals will be taxed once contribution principal has been removed. So, if you invested 100k in the form of contributions in your Roth, through the years, the first 100k taken will not be taxed; but the investment gains after contributions will be taxed when removed or some form of this. This one of the reasons I never opened a Roth account in the first place.
If and when the government needs money ... Hello, taxation.
My "Crystal Cube" when polled gave the "yes" answer ten out of ten times.

They don't care how much we save, they just want us to pay the taxes if we want the services. I think the richer you are the more you like user fees over taxes.
@Sven - I guess I disagree about Roth taxation. I think they will figure a way to make all investments after-tax with tax-free dividends and capital gains.

@Lewis: No question Greenlight Capital has an outstanding record with an annualized return of 16.1% since it's inception in 1996. However, its a question of what have you done for me over the last ten years, not much !
Regards,
Ted Greenlight Capital S&P 500
3-Year Cumulative -7 (-2.4%/year) 29 (8.9%/year)
5 Year Cumulative 19.1 (3.6%/year) 98.2 (14.7%/year)
10-Year Cumulative 55.6 (4.5%/year) 95.7 (6.9%/year)

https://www.gurufocus.com/profile/David+Einhorn
Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital was funded in 1996 and through August 2006 had stellar 29% annualized returns. Since then not so stellar ending 2016 which shows a NEGATIVE 2.4% annualized for three years, +3.6% annualized for five and +4.5% for ten.

AQR Funds https://funds.aqr.com/news/aqr-funds-distribution-estimates-2017
Artisan Partners https://www.artisanpartners.com/individual-investors/resources/tax-center/distributions.html
BMO Funds https://www.bmo.com/gam/pdf/BMO_Funds_Capital_Gains_2017.pdf
Conestoga Small Cap http://www.conestogacapital.com/conestoga-small-cap-fund/
Lyrical Value Fund https://lyricalvaluefunds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2017_Distribution_Estimate-1.pdf
Manning- Napier Rainier (new) https://www.manning-napier.com/Portals/0/FundsDocs/distributions/summaries/distributions-4Q17.pdf
Marsico Funds https://www.marsicofunds.com/funds/content/distributions.fs
Morgan Stanley
https://www.morganstanley.com/im/publication/forms/tax/2017-estimated-yearend-distributions.pdf?1509384603818
Motley Fool Funds https://foolfunds-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/media/funds/2017_Capital_Gains.pdf
Oak Associates http://www.oakfunds.com/downloads/CapitalGainsEstimates.2017.pdf
RiverNorth Funds https://www.rivernorth.com/mutual-funds/rncix-rncox
Tributary Funds https://www.tributaryfunds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/TRB-Funds-Capital-Gain-Estimates_2017.pdf
Wells Fargo
https://www.wellsfargofunds.com/assets/edocs/communications/20171103-productalert.pdf

This sounds familiar:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/einhorn-wonder-market-adopted-alternative-paradigm-163704878.html

Hedge fund billionaire David Einhorn is struggling to make sense of the stock market. In his latest investor letter, the founder of Greenlight Capital raised an interesting question about valuation.
“Given the performance of certain stocks, we wonder if the market has adopted an alternative paradigm for calculating equity value,” Einhorn wrote in a letter to investors dated October 24. “What if equity value has nothing to do with current or future profits and instead is derived from a company’s ability to be disruptive, to provide social change, or to advance new beneficial technologies, even when doing so results in current and future economic loss?”

Hi @Ted, MSOPX is indeed a nice concentrated fund consisting of about 30 stocks. I've got global growth covered with a sleeve of three funds consisting of ANWPX, SMCWX and THOAX. All of these are long term positions with two of them having a sizeable capital gains tax bill to pay if I sold. Guess, I'll hold with what I've got.
Are you not concerned buying at this time of year with the fund's capital gain exposure? According to Morningstar this is listed just short of 30%.

@MFO Members: For those of you who think all I'm good for is linking articles. I also am a reasonable successful investor. Just received my quarterly CIM .50 dividend. On 6/16/15/ I pruchased shares in CIM at $14.55 per share. The stock closed today @ $18.50 that give me a 27.1% capital appreciation and a yield of 13.7%. On 11/28/16 purchased CIM-A preferred shares @24.64 that closed today @25.90 that gives me capital appreciation of 5.1% and yield of 8.1%.
Regards,
Ted

Disadvantage of a VG Brokerage account:
Can NOT use the 'directed dividends' (d/d) option, which is currently available only to "regular" (i.e., non-brokerage) accounts.

I've read people posting that, and it was probably even true in the past, but it isn't a problem now. From "Moving your Vanguard funds to a Vanguard Brokerage Account", Effective November 2016, Disclosure statement:

What about dividends and capital gains
For all your brokerage holdings, you’ll have two options:
• Reinvest them in additional shares of the distributing holding.
• Distribute them in cash to your money market settlement fund.
Once your Vanguard mutual funds are in your brokerage account, you’ll have two additional options for distributions paid on the funds:
• Have them sent by electronic transfer to your bank.
• Have them sent by check to your address of record.

Thanks for posting, Ted. This is a fascinating topic, and one that I've spent a lot of time pondering.
Faber & Gray are smart guys. But they only told half the story. Buffett recognized that paying dividends robs the investor of the magic of compounding (in addition to imposing current tax liability). Imagine how contrarian that concept was 50 years ago!
As a result of Buffett's rationale, for a long time I never focused on building a dividend stock selection strategy (even though I knew that Buffett did not confine himself to non-dividend paying stocks).
Awhile ago, however, I came across the ideas of Geraldine Weiss, particularly that a stock's dividend yield cycles between highs and lows like PE ratios, and that high relative dividend yields can be a proxy for value. This led to the creation of a very interesting dividend model that produced far more capital appreciation than income in our testing.
So when I read Faber and Gray pit value against yield, my initial thought was "why not both?"

@PBKCM: Given what Old_Skeet said above about unrealized gains and high turnover of your fund, do you have any idea what you'll be paying out in distributions for 2017? Thanks.

Hi @BenWP. We expect to make a distribution in mid-December. I'll update when I know more.

@PBKCM: Given what Old_Skeet said above about unrealized gains and high turnover of your fund, do you have any idea what you'll be paying out in distributions for 2017? Thanks.

FYI: U.S. stock index futures are expected to begin Thursday's trade on a relatively flat note, as investors gear up for another slew of major corporate earnings
Regards,
Ted
U.S.: (MarketWatch)
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stock-futures-steady-after-selloff-as-deluge-of-major-tech-earnings-await-2017-10-26/print
U.S.: (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/us-earnings-fed-ecb-data-on-the-agenda-for-wall-street.html
U.S.:-Europe-Asia: (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-25/stock-slide-to-extend-to-asia-on-earnings-jitters-markets-wrap
Europe: (Marketwatch:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/european-stocks-cling-to-small-gains-as-investors-brace-for-ecb-move-2017-10-26/print
Europe: (Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-markets/euro-heads-higher-as-ecb-heads-for-the-exit-idUSKBN1CV024
Europe: (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/european-markets-focus-on-earnings-ecb-meeting.html
Asia: (MarketWatch)
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/downbeat-market-mood-carries-over-to-asia-2017-10-25/print
Asia: (Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/japan-stocks-close/japans-nikkei-gets-boost-from-earnings-but-kobe-steel-falls-idUSL4N1N12LI
Asia: (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/25/asia-markets-focus-on-corporate-earnings-releases-ecb-meeting-ahead.html
Current Futures: Negative
https://finviz.com/futures.ashx

Thanks AndyJ ! Where in these reports would it describe income and distribution? I see yields, NAVs, Total returns but not Income/expense info.

Not sure which report you're looking at, but it's apparently not the one I'm referring to. It's called "UNII Report," and you get to it like so:
Go to the Pimco site and put any CEF ticker into the search box. When that page loads, scroll down to Documents (or far enough down you can pick Documents from the horizontal menu) and click on UNII Report (should be the top doc in the left column). That'll bring up an Excel sheet that has all the Pim CEFs in a table with cumulative NII, current UNII, current distribution amount, and the distro coverage ratio for three different time periods.
Sometimes you can spot falling trends in those figures that may be early warning signs of div cuts sooner or later. Caution, though; Pimco funds frequently have a surplus in NAV via security or derivative gains that the manager can steer into the distribution stream, so you need to evaluate NAV direction and magnitude before concluding they'll have a hard time paying the current distribution in any specific case.
Good luck, Andy J.