This RYTNX is a very odd fund when I look it up on Morningstar. It performed much worse than the SP500 index, has about 17% of its assets in cash, and has a high expense ratio of 1.75%. Why would you pay 1.75% of your assets to someone to manage a fund and yield results much worse than SP 500? It has a Morningstar rating of one star (bottom of the heap).
What looks pretty rosy at 200 days changes pretty dramatically if one stretches the X axis back to 980 days (approx. the beginning of 2000). Just as you said, the downside was rather tragic and only if AIM had had rather unusual Cash in reserve would one have been able to buy all the way to the bottom.
Note that QQQ and RYTNX actually look a lot alike in that time frame. Maybe just owning the Q's would have served the same purpose.
For the UOPIX holdings in our alumni group I've been using a different strategy since the 9/11/2001 attacks. It involved using the I-Wave as a Switch for the account. We're now going to a bond fund and AIMing any time the IW heads to High Risk. We remain in that safe shelter until the IW has returned to mid-Average Risk. If it stabilizes there, we then take half the account's value and start an AIM QQQ account.
Should the IW risk level continue to drop, we then would switch the QQQ asset to a UOPIX AIM account when the IW falls to Low Risk. It remains AIM invested in UOPIX until the next High Risk event. The bond fund AIM account can be sacrificed as further Cash Reserve should the Low Risk period last a long time and suck all the cash out of the UOPIX account. In other words, it acts as an emergency cash reserve.
Here's what the account looks like since 9/11/2001:
We're currently about 1/2 in the bond AIM account and 1/2 in the QQQ AIM account. I switched out of UOPIX in late July or early August when the IW nearly touched the High Risk level. I pulled the trigger a bit early on that one, but as it has turned out, not to any severe detriment.
Going back to 2000 I don't believe we're anywhere near "whole" on this account. I don't have the records here at home to be able to give an exact value. My guess is that at this time our "salvage" strategy has brought us back from being down by about 80% to being down about 50% from peak values of 2000. Had we been using the current strategy in 2000, we'd have been heavily in the bond fund and out of the stock funds for essentially most of the bear market.
Thanks for bringing up your activity with one of these leveraged funds. They have a Siren's appeal that is difficult to resist. However, I think there were shipwrecks galore by the unweary. You might want to consider using a similar "switch" strategy with the Rydex fund.
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