Well of course I am in favor of keeping track of, learning about, learning from and benefiting in every way from the wisdom and expertise of your fund managers... I have never held Miller or Nygren's fund as my learning about them and their process did not give me a sense that there was a strong likelihood that they would make active management worth the risk, as there is with Berkowitz and others... and I did move away from Whitman before his big fall due to reasons having to do with portfolio construction, but also due to the increasing evidence that his process was not resulting in a significant excess of after-tax return versus his peers and against benchmarks... but all of those decisions were a combination of not thinking that managers were the smartest in their categories and that the format of their funds did not allow them to succeed...  not that I was perceiving that they bought or sold a particular type of stock that I liked or did not like...

Your perception that FAIRX is not giving you"what I want" could be incorrect as their energy holdings are still quite subsantial although not as substantial as a year ago...  but the idea of holding FAIRX as a proxy for an energy fund is as misguided as those who have said they bought it instead of BRK.A as it was more affordable on a share basis... if you really held this fund for those reasons, then your portfolio likely suffered for it even when the market favored those stocks and sectors as you paid a manager 1% of your assets for his judgement and experience, when you could have been more fully invested in the sectors that you want your portfolio to have exposure...

I completely understand posters who pick at the Fairholme managers process, which is currently evolving and has involved a move of their offices and a change in the structure of the management and the structure of the fund... many of those points are worthy of consideration and might be reasons for dismissing the manager... 

But the fact that you as a layperson disagree with your perception of the sectors the fund holds (which may be incorrect) is probably the worst reason for selling a historically strong performing fund... if you look at FAIRX year to date versus many venerable value funds, it is performing very strongly... plus they have lots of cash available to take advantage of future opportunities... your comparison of FAIRX to balanced and gold/cash/bond heavy hybrid funds is the essence of being misguided...

Hussman and Arnott may save you from declines over the next few weeks or months, but if you look at their long term contributions to a portfolio, they are basically money market returns... although both talk a good game, their processes are clearly not worth the management fees over the long term and folks would be better off holding a good yielding money market fund in their place...do you really want to be adding cash to managers who will do nothing with it at a time in which your returns for the next 10 years are being made by managers who are one or more steps ahead of where you as a layperson are today?  As the market goes down, I want managers who can exploit risk and others risk-aversion to have my cash, not bodybuilders and theorists who have never made a successful equity valuation in their careers... ;)

Ajw