There are probably a few things to keep in mind here;

1. Vanguard's paper was about what things might look like over 10 years. Not 3 weeks. I'd probably give it a bit longer to see if they were right. As per the examples given in that thread, most of Vanguards past predictions have been inaccurate over the timescale they chose

2. There were some pretty sensible replies to that thread from other posters who looked at both sides of the coin, looking back it was a good thread. There were some suggested alternatives to "100% risk on".

3. There was 1 poster who said it was toilet paper. The same poster beings up faecal matters quite regularly, often describing things or people as sh*t.

4. My proper response to your question (beyond looking at Vanguard's past predictions for accuracy) stated that some regions will outperform a tracker but you'd need to know in advance which ones to buy. That appears to have come true YTD (but again who knows over 10 years). As an aside I dont have the skill to know this, but I do hold a multi asset fund who use passives and come up with their own global allocation as one of my risk reducers. They're in positive territory YTD due to their big underweight US. Kudos to them too, in their strategic asset allocation review end of last year they moved some of their US holding to equal weight.

5. I also said

If you go on Trustnet and sort global funds by YTD there are 21 pages of results. On page 10, halfway through you get to a global tracker. So as per my comment, if you pick in advance an active which outperforms you're ahead. If you pick the wrong active you're behind. Same goes for this 10 week YTD period.

Personally I am surprised to see posters liquidating their portfolios, especially when just 2 weeks ago some of the same posters going to cash literally posted saying they welcomed a correction and that they were hoping the market goes lower to enable them to buy more.

It's curious seeing the panic when volatility hits, but I think we can learn valuable lessons from it around understanding our actual risk appetite rather than kidding ourselves.

100% invested in global equities to 100% cash and timing reentry seems miles away from a long term sustainable strategy, when there are a myriad of stopping points along the way between those 2 extremities.

Apologies to those who did post helpful comments, I was being slightly tongue in cheek about the wild swings in sentiment between two threads only 3 weeks apart.

@smg8 - Excellent post.

@OP

I am a keen Bloomberg listener/viewer. There is a stream of house Straegists on there - the onlt thing I can be sure of is that they wont be seeing things the same way and they are there to get brand recognition for their empoyer.
vanguard don't have a great record for forecasting. They have made their rep through very simple and very cheap. When they start getting "active" they are somewhere at the back of the pack.
"Toilet paper" is an emotive phrase maybe but, IMPO, a 10 year macro forecast from anyone is probably less useful :)

the problem vanguard has is that as an index player, the indexes aren't reflective of the broad economies any longer. In the long term they are obviously overweight to the US and within the US overweight to a handful of stocks. they are not "a little of everything".

You will have to decide for yourself what is the global macro view and what is the impact of index construction and the Vanguard product portfolio.

The whole art of the long term game is staying balanced. I would argue that an imbalance has been building up that will rewind naturally but that will impact some indicies at the expense of others.

When a global tracker stops tracking the world and starts tracking a very small, very successful subset, you might want to act. In the long term, the imbalance will correct naturally as that is what passives do but, you will get a period of active outperformance over passives.

Ok, so the price currently of 315.23 which was a slight increase on the day before did not take into account the big US drop yesterday…therefore todays midday valuation is nailed on much lower so if you’re buying it will be a favourable price to buy, but not to sell

You can blame the forum or who you decided to listen to. Not everyone was as you stated above.

Never risk your wealth on the say so of a few anonymous individual on a forum like this. The only person to blame (if that’s what is going in here) is yourself.