If you recall from the last few issues of the Powerfund Portfolios, we talked about the panic investors felt when the Dow was in the low 7,000's, and how everyone had become severely risk averse. Much money piled into "safe" government bonds, lowering yields. Recently, as the market rallied back sharply, many of these same investors forgot all the things that made them scared in the first place - corporate scandals, a weak economy, looming war and terrorist threats, and lackluster earnings (to name just a few).

While there has been good news on some economic fronts, the sad fact is most of the activity in the markets is primarily from two forces: 1) the alternatives to stocks are bleak 2) the nagging feeling among investors that they if they don't get in now they could miss out on some action.

The conservative portfolio continues being our best performing portfolio, which is how you'd want a safe portfolio to do in a down market. Dragging it down are weak performance in the few stock funds in the portfolio. We are concerned about the future of bonds given that we see little room for rates to go anywhere but up from these levels.

We recently shifted some of our money market allocation in this fund into the very beaten down Vanguard Utilities Income fund. The fund rallied up, then promptly fee in recent market weakness. So far October looks strong for the fund.