Automatic Stock Quotes

Magrat woke up. And knew she wasn’t a witch anymore. The feeling just crept over her, as part of the normal stock-taking that any body automatically does in the first seconds of emergence from the pit of dreams: arms: 2, legs: 2, existential dread: 58%, randomized guilt: 94%, witchcraft level: 00.00.

At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.

Reaching any goal in trading requires specific domain knowledge and technical skills. But then, after that, it's all mindset management. Yet most people ignore that —they automatically think they have that last part all figured out, and it's a mistake.

Yet they believe blindly in the stock market, and in the abilities of their pension plan manager. Why do they do so? Because they accept that this is what people should do with their savings, because "experts" tell them so. The doubt their own sense, but not for a second do they doubt their automatic purchases in the stock market.

Several years ago, researchers at the University of Minnesota identified 568 men and women over the age of seventy who were living independently but were at high risk of becoming disabled because of chronic health problems, recent illness, or cognitive changes. With their permission, the researchers randomly assigned half of them to see a team of geriatric nurses and doctors—a team dedicated to the art and science of managing old age. The others were asked to see their usual physician, who was notified of their high-risk status. Within eighteen months, 10 percent of the patients in both groups had died. But the patients who had seen a geriatrics team were a quarter less likely to become disabled and half as likely to develop depression. They were 40 percent less likely to require home health services. These were stunning results. If scientists came up with a device—call it an automatic defrailer—that wouldn’t extend your life but would slash the likelihood you’d end up in a nursing home or miserable with depression, we’d be clamoring for it. We wouldn’t care if doctors had to open up your chest and plug the thing into your heart. We’d have pink-ribbon campaigns to get one for every person over seventy-five. Congress would be holding hearings demanding to know why forty-year-olds couldn’t get them installed. Medical students would be jockeying to become defrailulation specialists, and Wall Street would be bidding up company stock prices. Instead, it was just geriatrics. The geriatric teams weren’t doing lung biopsies or back surgery or insertion of automatic defrailers. What they did was to simplify medications. They saw that arthritis was controlled. They made sure toenails were trimmed and meals were square. They looked for worrisome signs of isolation and had a social worker check that the patient’s home was safe. How do we reward this kind of work? Chad Boult, the geriatrician who was the lead investigator of the University of Minnesota study, can tell you. A few months after he published the results, demonstrating how much better people’s lives were with specialized geriatric care, the university closed the division of geriatrics.

Would you believe me if I told you that there’s an investment strategy that a seven-year-old could understand, will take you fifteen minutes of work per year, outperform 90 percent of finance professionals in the long run, and make you a millionaire over time?   Well, it is true, and here it is: Start by saving 15 percent of your salary at age 25 into a 401(k) plan, an IRA, or a taxable account (or all three). Put equal amounts of that 15 percent into just three different mutual funds:   A U.S. total stock market index fund An international total stock market index fund A U.S. total bond market index fund.   Over time, the three funds will grow at different rates, so once per year you’ll adjust their amounts so that they’re again equal. (That’s the fifteen minutes per year, assuming you’ve enrolled in an automatic savings plan.)   That’s it; if you can follow this simple recipe throughout your working career, you will almost certainly beat out most professional investors. More importantly, you’ll likely accumulate enough savings to retire comfortably.

Stocking up" is what our robust Americans called it, laughing nervously, because profligate abundance automatically evokes its opposite, the unspoken specter of dearth.

automatically compound. If you need cash, you can sell stock and pay capital gains tax at a lower rate than a dividend would be taxed.

Investment Owner’s Contract I, _____________ ___________________, hereby state that I am an investor who is seeking to accumulate wealth for many years into the future. I know that there will be many times when I will be tempted to invest in stocks or bonds because they have gone (or “are going”) up in price, and other times when I will be tempted to sell my investments because they have gone (or “are going”) down. I hereby declare my refusal to let a herd of strangers make my financial decisions for me. I further make a solemn commitment never to invest because the stock market has gone up, and never to sell because it has gone down. Instead, I will invest $______.00 per month, every month, through an automatic investment plan or “dollar-cost averaging program,” into the following mutual fund(s) or diversified portfolio(s): _________________________________, _________________________________, _________________________________. I will also invest additional amounts whenever I can afford to spare the cash (and can afford to lose it in the short run). I hereby declare that I will hold each of these investments continually through at least the following date (which must be a minimum of 10 years after the date of this contact): _________________ _____, 20__. The only exceptions allowed under the terms of this contract are a sudden, pressing need for cash, like a health-care emergency or the loss of my job, or a planned expenditure like a housing down payment or a tuition bill. I am, by signing below, stating my intention not only to abide by the terms of this contract, but to re-read this document whenever I am tempted to sell any of my investments. This contract is valid only when signed by at least one witness, and must be kept in a safe place that is easily accessible for future reference.

The feeling just crept over her, as part of the normal stock-taking that any body automatically does in the first seconds of emergence from the pit of dreams: arms: 2, legs: 2, existential dread: 58%, randomized guilt: 94%, witchcraft level: 00.00.

Dunford arrived a few minutes later and gave her an approving nod. "You look lovely, Henry." She smiled her thanks but decided not to put too much stock in his compliment. It sounded like the sort of thing he said automatically to any woman in his vicinity.

This automatic feedback is another reason extreme athletes have found flow so frequently, but what if we’re interested in pulling this trigger without help from the laws of physics? No mystery here. Tighten feedback loops. Put mechanisms in place so attention doesn’t have to wander. Ask for more input. How much input? Well, forget quarterly reviews. Think daily reviews. Studies have found that in professions with less direct feedback loops—stock analysis, psychiatry, and medicine—even the best get worse over time.

a man named Dalton, a District 10 refugee who’d made it to 13 on foot a few years ago, leaked the real motive to me. “They need you. Me. They need us all. Awhile back, there was some sort of pox epidemic that killed a bunch of them and left a lot more infertile. New breeding stock. That’s how they see us.” Back in 10, he’d worked on one of the beef ranches, maintaining the genetic diversity of the herd with the implantation of long-frozen cow embryos. He’s very likely right about 13, because there don’t seem to be nearly enough kids around. But so what? We’re not being kept in pens, we’re being trained for work, the children are being educated. Those over fourteen have been given entry-level ranks in the military and are addressed respectfully as “Soldier.” Every single refugee was granted automatic citizenship by the authorities of 13.

Life as an Enron employee was good. Prestwood’s annual salary rose steadily to sixty-five thousand dollars, with additional retirement benefits paid in Enron stock. When Houston Natural and Internorth had merged, all of Prestwood’s investments were automatically converted to Enron stock. He continued to set aside money in the company’s retirement fund, buying even more stock. Internally, the company relentlessly promoted employee stock ownership. Newsletters touted Enron’s growth as “simply stunning,” and Lay, at company events, urged employees to buy more stock. To Prestwood, it didn’t seem like a problem that his future was tied directly to Enron’s. Enron had committed to him, and he was showing his gratitude. “To me, this is the American way, loyalty to your employer,” he says. Prestwood was loyal to the bitter end. When he retired in 2000, he had accumulated 13,500 shares of Enron stock, worth $1.3 million at their peak. Then, at age sixty-eight, Prestwood suddenly lost his entire Enron nest egg. He now survives on a previous employer’s pension of $521 a month and a Social Security check of $1,294. “There aint no such thing as a dream anymore,” he says. He lives on a three-acre farm north of Houston willed to him as a baby in 1938 after his mother died. “I hadn’t planned much for the retirement. Wanted to go fishing, hunting. I was gonna travel a little.

Let me state clearly that moral capital is not always an unalloyed good. Moral capital leads automatically to the suppression of free riders, but it does not lead automatically to other forms of fairness such as equality of opportunity. And while high moral capital helps a community to function efficiently, the community can use that efficiency to inflict harm on other communities. High moral capital can be obtained within a cult or a fascist nation, as long as most people truly accept the prevailing moral matrix. Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,43 and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

look no further than Peter A. Lawrence’s developmental biology text The Making of a Fly, which in April 2011 was selling for $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) on Amazon’s third-party marketplace. How and why had this—admittedly respected—book reached a sale price of more than $23 million? It turns out that two of the sellers were setting their prices algorithmically as constant fractions of each other: one was always setting it to 0.99830 times the competitor’s price, while the competitor was automatically setting their own price to 1.27059 times the other’s. Neither seller apparently thought to set any limit on the resulting numbers, and eventually the process spiraled totally out of control. It’s possible that a similar mechanism was in play during the enigmatic and controversial stock market “flash crash” of May 6, 2010, when, in a matter of minutes, the price of several seemingly random companies in the S&P 500 rose to more than $100,000 a share, while others dropped precipitously—sometimes to $0.01 a share. Almost $1 trillion of value instantaneously went up in smoke.

After doing a bunch of businesses, I've realized that chasing money doesn't guarantee you money. I think it's about doing the right things long enough; then money automatically follows you,

So, hard cases are not a special fact about the categories male and female. Many categories are bound, eventually, to run into hard cases that can’t be automatically settled one way or the other on present understandings of the category. We mostly form our categories as conceptual tools to help us negotiate the everyday world and the sort of cases we encounter most. So it’s not surprising that, when an unusual case turns up, we don’t always know how to classify it.

The latest of these exponentially growing parallel universes is the world of the Internet and the global information systems. Here too, the irresistible growth, the outgrowth of information, could be posted up in real time in terms of millions of individuals and millions of operations - that information now so extensive that it no longer has any connection with the acquisition of knowledge. As of now, we can say that this immense potential will never be redeemed, in the sense of a use or purpose ever being found for it. Things here, then, are exactly as they are with debt: information is as inexpiable as debt, in the sense that we shall never be able to settle our account with it. Moreover, the storage of data, the accumulation and worldwide circulation of information, in every respect resemble the build-up of an irremissible debt. And, here again, as soon as this proliferating information far exceeds the needs and capacities of the individual and the species in general, it has no other meaning than to bind all humanity in a single destiny of cerebral automatism and mental underdevelopment. For it is clear that, though a certain dose of information reduces our ignorance, a massive dose of artificial intelligence can only convince us of the failings of our natural intelligence and plunge us deeper into them. The worst thing in a human being is to know too much and not to be equal to one's knowledge. It is the same with responsibility and emotional capacity: the media, by perpetually assailing us with violence, misfortune and catastrophe, far from firing some kind of collective solidarity, merely demonstrate our real impotence and plunge us into panic and remorse.

The AR-57, also known as the AR Five Seven, is available as either an upper receiver for the AR-15/M16 rifle or a complete rifle, firing 5.7×28mm rounds from standard FN P90 magazines. It was designed by AR57 LLC and[3] was produced by AR57 of Kent, Washington, United States. The AR-57 PDW upper is a new design on AR-15/M16 rifles, blending the AR-15/M16 lower with a lightweight, monolithic upper receiver system chambered in FN 5.7×28mm. This model is also sold as a complete rifle, supplied with two 50-round P90 magazines.[1] The magazines mount horizontally on top of the front handguard, with brass ejecting through the magazine well. Hollow AR-15 magazines can be used to catch spent casings. Unlike the standard AR-15 configuration which uses a gas-tube system , the AR-57 cycles via straight blowback.[6] A fully automatic version exists and was marketed as a competitor to the P90 and other personal defense weapons.[7] Manufactured by the eponymous AR57 LLC, and chambered in 5.7x28mm, this upper is less powerful than the standard 5.56mm version, but it has certain tangible advantages, including reduced muzzle blast, a high practical rate of fire, nonexistent recoil, and the ability to use folding stocks. Since the buffer is located within the receiver, folding stocks may also be used for compact storage or carry. To load, place the base plate of a standard FN P90 magazine into the recess on the front of the upper, then press the feed lip side down on the catch located above and slightly back of the bolt. To charge, pull on the right-side nonreciprocating handle and release. The right-side charging hand placement makes it accessible for operation by the strong hand. Since it only has to be operated once every 50 shots, the time penalty for moving the hand off the pistol grip isn’t too great. Empties will eject downward through the nominal magazine well. Some people use a 20-round magazine body with the feed lips, spring and follower removed to act as a brass catcher. The magazine has no provision for activating the bolt lock when empty, but the bolt can be locked open using the catch on the lower. The upper runs very cleanly and reliably, requiring no maintenance after the first 500 shots. The AR57 comes with a medium fluted barrel, reasonable for a varmint rifle but excessive for a defensive carbine. Burning around six grains per shot, 5.7x28mm runs much cooler than 5.56mm, which burns four or more times as much. That yields much reduced muzzle blast and far greater heat endurance, of course at the cost of a roughly 40 percent slower bullet.

Brain scans in Peter Kenning’s neuroeconomics lab at the University of Münster in Germany show that when investors consider putting money in foreign markets, the amygdala—one of the brain’s fear centers—kicks in. These findings suggest that keeping our money close to home generates an automatic feeling of comfort, while investing in unfamiliar stocks is inherently frightening. Those responses originate in the biological bedrock of the reflexive brain.

there was a time when you bought books in a bookstore. The bookstore paid rent and therefore had to stock only the best-selling books to ensure that sales revenue per square foot was high enough to cover its rent and staff.

The rifle was disassembled into its component parts, with its stock, barrel, grip, and scope separate to allow it to fit inside a standard-sized briefcase. There was also a long suppressor. Victor’s was the latest variant of the SVD, with stock and hand guards made from high-density polymer to lighten the weight, instead of the original wood furniture. Though not as sophisticated or accurate at long range as some Western sniper rifles, Victor had a fondness for the Dragunov because of its reliability in all conditions and its no-nonsense mechanics. As a semi-automatic rifle, the Dragunov had a much better rate of fire than a typical bolt-action sniper rifle, though the greater number of moving parts that made the rifle semi-automatic also made it less accurate than a bolt-action. But as a semi-auto the SVD could also be used as an assault rifle and was fitted with conventional iron sights and bayonet mount for just such a use. The Soviet philosophy on arms manufacture had been ease of use and reliability over accuracy, and Victor had found there to be a lot of merit in the ideal. Weapons that were world beaters on the range weren’t much use if they didn’t work under battlefield conditions

Sweden, workers who are not ready to choose their own pension investments can have the money placed automatically into a “default” fund, a low-cost index portfolio that blends stocks and bonds. In recent years, roughly 97% of eligible workers have left their money in the default fund, even though they were free to switch at any time to any of more than four hundred other funds. (Luckily, in this case, that’s not a bad choice.)

If your investment horizon is long—at least 25 or 30 years—there is only one sensible approach: Buy every month, automatically, and whenever else you can spare some money. The single best choice for this lifelong holding is a total stock-market index fund. Sell only when you need the cash

Groundbreaking new research in neuroscience shows that our brains are designed to perceive trends even where they might not exist. After an event occurs just two or three times in a row, regions of the human brain called the anterior cingulate and nucleus accumbens automatically anticipate that it will happen again. If it does repeat, a natural chemical called dopamine is released, flooding your brain with a soft euphoria. Thus, if a stock goes up a few times in a row, you reflexively expect it to keep going—and your brain chemistry changes as the stock rises, giving you a “natural high.” You effectively become addicted to your own predictions.

I think it's about doing the right things long enough; then money automatically follows you,

Since I entered the business world, conglomerates have enjoyed several periods of extreme popularity, the silliest of which occurred in the late 1960s. The drill for conglomerate CEOs then was simple: By personality, promotion or dubious accounting — and often by all three — these managers drove a fledgling conglomerate’s stock to, say, 20 times earnings and then issued shares as fast as possible to acquire another business selling at ten-or-so times earnings. They immediately applied “pooling” accounting to the acquisition, which — with not a dime’s worth of change in the underlying businesses — automatically increased per-share earnings, and used the rise as proof of managerial genius. They next explained to investors that this sort of talent justified the maintenance, or even the enhancement, of the acquirer’s p/e multiple. And, finally, they promised to endlessly repeat this procedure and thereby create ever-increasing per-share earnings.

Busy During the Day? Set Automatic Trade Triggers If you work during the day and can’t watch the market, you can set “conditional orders” ahead of time with your broker. It can be a great way to catch a big breakout—even as you’re plugging away at your day job. And when you’re on vacation and can’t watch your stocks closely, you also can set conditional sell orders to lock in your gains or cut short any losses if the stock declines.

_____________ ___________________, hereby state that I am an investor who is seeking to accumulate wealth for many years into the future. I know that there will be many times when I will be tempted to invest in stocks or bonds because they have gone (or “are going”) up in price, and other times when I will be tempted to sell my investments because they have gone (or “are going”) down. I hereby declare my refusal to let a herd of strangers make my financial decisions for me. I further make a solemn commitment never to invest because the stock market has gone up, and never to sell because it has gone down. Instead, I will invest $______.00 per month, every month, through an automatic investment plan or “dollar-cost averaging program,” into the following mutual fund(s) or diversified portfolio(s): _________________________________, _________________________________, _________________________________. I will also invest additional amounts whenever I can afford to spare the cash (and can afford to lose it in the short run). I hereby declare that I will hold each of these investments continually through at least the following date (which must be a minimum of 10 years after the date of this contact): _________________ _____, 20__. The only exceptions allowed under the terms of this contract are a sudden, pressing need for cash, like a health-care emergency or the loss of my job, or a planned expenditure like a housing down payment or a tuition bill. I am, by signing below, stating my intention not only to abide by the terms of this contract, but to re-read this document whenever I am tempted to sell any of my investments. This contract is valid only when signed by at least one witness, and must be kept in a safe place that is easily accessible for future reference.

Embrace Efficiency, Elevate Flavor: Smart Kitchen Tools for Culinary Adventurers The kitchen, once a realm of necessity, has morphed into a playground of possibility. Gone are the days of clunky appliances and tedious prep work. Enter the age of the smart kitchen tool, a revolution that whispers efficiency and shouts culinary liberation. For the modern gastronome, these tech-infused gadgets are not mere conveniences, but allies in crafting delectable adventures, freeing us to savor the journey as much as the destination. Imagine mornings when your smart coffee maker greets you with the perfect brew, prepped by the whispers of your phone while you dream. Your fridge, stocked like a digital oracle, suggests recipes based on its ever-evolving inventory, and even automatically orders groceries you've run low on. The multi-cooker, your multitasking superhero, whips up a gourmet chili while you conquer emails, and by dinnertime, your smart oven roasts a succulent chicken to golden perfection, its progress monitored remotely as you sip a glass of wine. But efficiency is merely the prologue. Smart kitchen tools unlock a pandora's box of culinary precision. Smart scales, meticulous to the milligram, banish recipe guesswork and ensure perfect balance in every dish. Food processors and blenders, armed with pre-programmed settings and self-cleaning prowess, transform tedious chopping into a mere blip on the culinary radar. And for the aspiring chef, a sous vide machine becomes a magic wand, coaxing impossible tenderness from the toughest cuts of meat. Yet, technology alone is not the recipe for culinary bliss. For those who yearn to paint with flavors, smart kitchen tools are the brushes on their canvas. A connected recipe platform becomes your digital sous chef, guiding you through each step with expert instructions and voice-activated ease. Spice racks, infused with artificial intelligence, suggest unexpected pairings, urging you to venture beyond the familiar. And for the ultimate expression of your inner master chef, a custom knife, forged from heirloom steel and lovingly honed, becomes an extension of your hand, slicing through ingredients with laser focus and lyrical grace. But amidst the symphony of gadgets and apps, let us not forget the heart of the kitchen: the human touch. Smart tools are not meant to replace our intuition but to augment it. They free us from the drudgery, allowing us to focus on the artistry, the love, the joy of creation. Imagine kneading dough, the rhythm of your hands mirroring the gentle whirring of a smart bread machine, then shaping a loaf that holds the warmth of both technology and your own spirit. Or picture yourself plating a dish, using smart portion scales for precision but garnishing with edible flowers chosen simply because they spark joy. This, my friends, is the symphony of the smart kitchen: a harmonious blend of tech and humanity, where efficiency becomes the brushstroke that illuminates the vibrant canvas of culinary passion. Of course, every adventure, even one fueled by smart tools, has its caveats. Interoperability between gadgets can be a tangled web, and data privacy concerns linger like unwanted guests. But these challenges are mere bumps on the culinary road, hurdles to be overcome by informed choices and responsible data management. After all, we wouldn't embark on a mountain trek without checking the weather, would we? So, embrace the smart kitchen, dear foodies! Let technology be your sous chef, your precision tool, your culinary muse. But never forget the magic of your own hands, the wisdom of your palate, and the joy of a meal shared with loved ones. For in the end, it's not about the gadgets, but the memories we create around them, the stories whispered over simmering pots, and the laughter echoing through a kitchen filled with the aroma of possibility.

What I hated about it was what a good many people liked about it. It was such a very cheerful war. I hated its confidence, its congratulatory anticipations, its optimism of the Stock Exchange. I hated its vile assurance of victory. It was regarded by many as an almost automatic process like the operation of a natural law; and I have always hated that sort of heathen notion of a natural law.

In marketing, the illusion of exclusivity and scarcity works wonders. Controlled urgency. If you're hard to come by, if your time is limited, your stock automatically goes up

for the common emotional traps mentioned earlier, we offer the following tools for escape: Recency bias. Never assume today’s results predict tomorrow’s. It’s a changing world. Overconfidence. No one can consistently predict short-term movements in the market. This means you and/or the person investing your money. Loss aversion. Be a risk manager instead of a risk avoider. Believing you are avoiding risk can be a costly illusion. Paralysis by analysis. Every day you don’t invest is a day less you’ll have the power of compounding working for you. Put together an intelligent investment plan and get started. If you need help, seek out a good financial planner to assist you. The endowment effect. Just because you own it, or are a part of it, doesn’t automatically mean it’s worth more. Get an objective evaluation. Invest no more than 10 percent of your portfolio in your employer’s stock. Mental accounting. Remember that all money spends the same, regardless of where it comes from. Money already spent is a sunk cost and should play no part in making future decisions. Anchoring. Holding out until you get your price to sell an investment is playing a fool’s game. So is blindly assuming that your financial person is doing a great job without getting an objective reading of what’s really going on. Get a second opinion. Financial negligence. Take the time to learn the basics of sound investing. It’s really pretty simple stuff. Knowing it can make the difference between having a life of poverty or one of prosperity.

If you listen to financial TV, or read most market columnists, you’d think that investing is some kind of sport, or a war, or a struggle for survival in a hostile wilderness. But investing isn’t about beating others at their game. It’s about controlling yourself at your own game. The challenge for the intelligent investor is not to find the stocks that will go up the most and down the least, but rather to prevent yourself from being your own worst enemy—from buying high just because Mr. Market says “Buy!” and from selling low just because Mr. Market says “Sell!” If your investment horizon is long—at least 25 or 30 years—there is only one sensible approach: Buy every month, automatically, and whenever else you can spare some money. The single best choice for this lifelong holding is a total stock-market index fund. Sell only when you need the cash

Life as an Enron employee was good. Prestwood’s annual salary rose steadily to sixty-five thousand dollars, with additional retirement benefits paid in Enron stock. When Houston Natural and Internorth had merged, all of Prestwood’s investments were automatically converted to Enron stock. He continued to set aside money in the company’s retirement fund, buying even more stock. Internally, the company relentlessly promoted employee stock ownership. Newsletters touted Enron’s growth as “simply stunning,” and Lay, at company events, urged employees to buy more stock. To Prestwood, it didn’t seem like a problem that his future was tied directly to Enron’s. Enron had committed to him, and he was showing his gratitude. “To me, this is the American way, loyalty to your employer,” he says. Prestwood was loyal to the bitter end. When he retired in 2000, he had accumulated 13,500 shares of Enron stock, worth $1.3 million at their peak. Then, at age sixty-eight, Prestwood suddenly lost his entire Enron nest egg. He now survives on a previous employer’s pension of $521 a month and a Social Security check of $1,294. “There aint no such thing as a dream anymore,” he says. He lives on a three-acre farm north of Houston willed to him as a baby in 1938 after his mother died. “I hadn’t planned much for the retirement. Wanted to go fishing, hunting. I was gonna travel a little.” Now he’ll sell his family’s land. Has to, he says. He is still paying off his mortgage.7 In some respects, Prestwood’s case is not unusual. Often people do not diversify at all, and sometimes employees invest a lot of their money in their employer’s stock. Amazing but true: five million Americans have more than 60 percent of their retirement savings in company stock.8 This concentration is risky on two counts. First, a single security is much riskier than the portfolios offered by mutual funds. Second, as employees of Enron and WorldCom discovered the hard way, workers risk losing both their jobs and the bulk of their retirement savings all at once.

Interestingly, as I was writing this book, TapImmune (TPIV) left the small stock OTC Exchange and moved up to the NASDAQ Exchange, where stocks have to cost $ 5 or more. But I still just enter TPIV if I want to buy more shares, like I did in the past. And now my order is automatically sent to the NASDAQ, instead of the OTC exchange.

Throughout this book we’ll gradually build an argument that many individuals should consider an automatic approach to investing by relying primarily on mutual funds—specifically index mutual funds, which try to do nothing more than mimic the performance of the stock and bond markets in general.

The defenses that form a person’s character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity. But he is also drawn precisely toward those things that make him anxious, as a way of skirting them masterfully, testing himself against them, controlling them by defying them. As Kierkegaard taught us, anxiety lures us on, becomes the spur to much of our energetic activity: we flirt with our own growth, but also dishonestly. This explains much of the friction in our lives. We enter symbiotic relationships in order to get the security we need, in order to get relief from our anxieties, our aloneness and helplessness; but these relationships also bind us, they enslave us even further because they support the lie we have fashioned. So we strain against them in order to be more free. The irony is that we do this straining uncritically, in a struggle within our own armor, as it were; and so we increase our drivenness, the second-hand quality of our struggle for freedom. Even in our flirtations with anxiety we are unconscious of our motives. We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself. We do it with the stock market, with sports cars, with atomic missiles, with the success ladder in the corporation or the competition in the university. We do it in the prison of a dialogue with our own little family, by marrying against their wishes or choosing a way of life because they frown on it, and so on. Hence the complicated and second-hand quality of our entire drivenness. Even in our passions we are nursery children playing with toys that represent the real world. Even when these toys crash and cost us our lives or our sanity, we are cheated of the consolation that we were in the real world instead of the playpen of our fantasies. We still did not meet our doom on our own manly terms, in contest with objective reality. It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.

Net wages: “It’s not what you make, but what you net” after paying the FIRE sector, basic utilities and taxes. The usual measure of disposable personal income (DPI) refers to how much employees take home after income-tax withholding (designed in part by Milton Friedman during World War II) and over 15% for FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) to produce a budget surplus for Social Security and health care (half of which are paid by the employer). This forced saving is lent to the U.S. Treasury, enabling it to cut taxes on the higher income brackets. Also deducted from paychecks may be employee withholding for private health insurance and pensions. What is left is by no means freely available for discretionary spending. Wage earners have to pay a monthly financial and real estate “nut” off the top, headed by mortgage debt or rent to the landlord, plus credit card debt, student loans and other bank loans. Electricity, gas and phone bills must be paid, often by automatic bank transfer – and usually cable TV and Internet service as well. If these utility bills are not paid, banks increase the interest rate owed on credit card debt (typically to 29%). Not much is left to spend on goods and services after paying the FIRE sector and basic monopolies, so it is no wonder that markets are shrinking. (See Hudson Bubble Model later in this book.) A similar set of subtrahends occurs with net corporate cash flow (see ebitda). After paying interest and dividends – and using about half their revenue for stock buybacks – not much is left for capital investment in new plant and equipment, research or development to expand production.

Let’s suppose an algorithm is showing you an opportunity to buy socks or stocks about five seconds after you see a cat video that makes you happy. An adaptive algorithm will occasionally perform an automatic test to find out what happens if the interval is changed to, say, four and a half seconds. Did that make you more likely to buy? If so, that timing adjustment might be applied not only to your future feed, but to the feeds of thousands of other people who seem correlated with you because of anything from color preferences to driving patterns.

STOP: A stop is simply a computer command that sells your stock automatically if the price begins to drop, helping to minimize your losses and maximize some gains.

You've probably heard of the QQQ. It is a great trading or investment vehicle. When you buy shares of the QQQ, you are getting exposure to Apple, Netflix, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and many other tech (and some non-tech) stocks. If you buy the QQQ and hold it for the long-term, you will be able to profit from the long-term growth of the tech industry. You've probably also heard of indexing. It consists of buying an index (usually using an ETF like the SPY or QQQ), and holding it for the long-term. Indexing is a form of "passive investing." Passive investing refers to any strategy that does not involve a lot of thinking ("which stocks should I buy today?”) or a lot of buying or selling. When you index, you just buy whatever stocks are in the index. You only sell a stock when it gets kicked out of the index. And you only buy a stock when it gets added to the index. Or you just buy the SPY or QQQ, and these index adjustments all get done automatically for you.

The circle between Madison Avenue and Wall Street was complete; they were inexorably linked, in a relationship developed in ten short years, during which the ad men had created an ambience invaluable to the continuing popularity of stock speculation. The limitless, desirable, and expensive goods coming onto the market—often products of companies quoted on the Stock Exchange—could only be sold by determined advertising campaigns. If those campaigns failed, the market would slump. To maintain his place in consumer society, a man was told he needed a car, radio, icebox, and refrigerator; his wife required a washing machine, automatic furnace, and one of the modish pastel-hued toilets. To complete their domestic bliss they would have the latest in bathrooms: a shrine of stunning magnificence, containing, among other items, “a dental lavatory of vitreous china, twice fired.” To buy it would cost the average American six months’ salary. But paying was no problem; there were the installment plans. It was also part of the advertising philosophy that it was no longer enough to buy a car, radio, or refrigerator. People must have the latest model—junking the old one, even though it was still useful. Failure to do so would cause factories to close from the Atlantic to the Pacific, ending what some newspapers called “the golden era.” To protect it, they told their readers, was the patriotic duty of every American; one way to express that was, “to buy until it hurts.

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