I had a fair amount of my ‘fixed-income’ money - essentially, living expenses to tide over when the market crunched for 6, 8, 10 years - in a couple of no-load, very low-fee “short-term investment-grade” funds offered by a very large US brokerage house...

Thanks hugely for that great post.

The digging part reminds me of when my father-in-law put his money into the hands of a reputable financial advisor in Canada, to create a portfolio suitable for his retirement. I delved down through the layers of funds and commissions, which as you note is quite the exercise, and discovered that
(a) it was almost entirely in fixed income with yields so low there was no real return or very close to it, with preposterous diversification among things largely equivalent, and
(b) the layers of fees added up to quite a bit more than the weighted average look-through yield: i.e., as a whole the portfolio was by construction guaranteed to lose money over time, with benefit to nobody but the fund managers. Any any middlemen getting kickbacks for selling them.

Jim