Index Futures Quotes

Every good thing you find, no matter how small, is a penny for you to put in your pocket. Gather them close, and treasure them. Someday you'll have a future where you feel rich enough, emotionally, to spend them freely.

The United States should provide an annual income of $12,000 for each American aged 18–64, with the amount indexed to increase with inflation.

Never give up on learning because what you put up there in your brain,” he indicated my head with his index finger, “the Communists won’t ever be able to take away from you.

It didn’t take long to write up our reports, since they mostly consisted of variations on “Rapunzel confirmed downtown, field team dispatched to resolve the incursion; incursion resolved when Agent Winters shouted at it until it agreed to go away. Resolution mechanism not recommended for future incursions.” Demi’s was even shorter: “Barely made it out of the car.

When I was a girl, I loved reading. An archaic pastime, I know; the index and download are faster, more efficient, offering superior retention and acquisition of knowledge.

Becoming a successful investor in future should be effortless when you understand and let the market do the work for you." - Adam Messina

To paraphrase an old philosophical question, if a tree falls on the Internet and no search engine indexes it, does it make any noise?

The average lifetime of a company on the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index has declined from sixty years to a mere ten years

THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL HAVE NO PAPER THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL CARRY NO INVENTORY THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL BE ENTIRELY DIGITAL THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE HAS ARRIVED

Screens tell you not what is really out there but what the government or Facebook thinks you should see. If you searched for something and it wasn’t there, how would you know it really was? To paraphrase an old philosophical question, if a tree falls on the Internet and no search engine indexes it, does it make any noise? As we live our lives increasingly mediated through screens, when it doesn’t exist online, it doesn’t exist.

Investors who focus on currencies, bonds, and stock markets generally assume a normal distribution of price changes: values jiggle up and down, but extreme moves are unusual. Of course, extreme moves are possible, as financial crashes show. But between 1985 and 2015, the S&P 500 stock index budged less than 3 percent from its starting point on 7,663 out of 7,817 days; in other words, for fully 98 percent of the time, the market is remarkably stable.

For a number of years, professors at Duke University conducted a survey in which the chief financial officers of large corporations estimated the returns of the Standard & Poor’s index over the following year. The Duke scholars collected 11,600 such forecasts and examined their accuracy. The conclusion was straightforward: financial officers of large corporations had no clue about the short-term future of the stock market; the correlation between their estimates and the true value was slightly less than zero!

There will be a severe backlash against this drift from the usual suspects, but increased sharing is inevitable. There is an honest argument over what to call it, but the technologies of sharing have only begun. On my imgainary Sharing Meter Index we are still at 2 out of 10. There is a whole list of subjects that experts once believed we modern humans would not share—our finances, our health challenges, our sex lives, our innermost fears—but it turns out that with the right technology and the right benefits in the right conditions, we’ll share everything. How

For example, trading in S&P 500-linked futures totaled more than $60 trillion(!) in 2011, five times the S&P 500 Index total market capitalization of $12.5 trillion. We also have credit default swaps, which are essentially bets on whether a corporation can meet the interest payments on its bonds. These credit default swaps alone had a notional value of $33 trillion. Add to this total a slew of other derivatives, whose notional value as 2012 began totaled a cool $708 trillion. By contrast, for what it’s worth, the aggregate capitalization of the world’s stock and bond markets is about $150 trillion, less than one-fourth as much. Is this a great financial system . . . or what!

Country Future Index. It’s an alternative to the GNP measurement, taking into account debt, political stability, environmental health and the like. A useful cross-check on the GNP, and it helps tag countries that could use our help. We identify those, go to them and offer them a massive capital investment, plus political advice, security, whatever they need. In return we take custody of their bioinfrastructure.

Whenever she’d get mad, she’d take her index finger out and poke me in the forehead. You you you you you, she ‘d say, as if accusing me of being me. She was quick to blame me for the slightest infractions, a spilled glass, a way of sitting while eating, my future ambitions (farmer or teacher), the way I dressed, what I ate, even the way I practiced English words in the car (Thank you! I yelled. Scissors! I screamed).

they pale by comparison to the trading volumes of hedge funds, to say nothing of the levels of trading in exotic securities such as interest rate swaps, collateralized debt obligations, derivatives such as futures on commodities, stock indexes, stocks, and even bets on whether a given company will go into bankruptcy (credit default swaps). The aggregate nominal value of these instruments, as I noted in Chapter 1, now exceeds $700 trillion.

As you will,” Malice agreed, not surprised at Zak’s desire to prove her wrong. Zak placed little value in wizardry, preferring the hilt of a blade to the crystal rod component of a lightning bolt. Zak moved to stand before Drizzt and handed him the coin. “Flip it.” Drizzt shrugged, wondering what this vague conversation between his mother and the weapons master was all about. Until now, he had heard nothing of any future profession being planned for him, or of this place called Sorcere. With a consenting shrug of his shoulders, he slid the coin onto his curled index finger and snapped it into the air with his thumb, easily catching it. He then held it back out to Zak and gave the weapons master a confused look, as if to ask what was so important about such an easy task. Instead of taking the coin, the weapons master pulled another from his neck-purse. “Try both hands,” he said to Drizzt, handing it to him. Drizzt shrugged again, and in one easy motion, put the coins up and caught them. Zak turned an eye on Matron Malice. Any drow could have performed that feat, but the ease with which this one executed the catch was a pleasure to observe. Keeping a sly eye on the matron, Zak produced two more coins. “Stack two on each hand and send all four up together,” he instructed Drizzt. Four coins went up. Four coins were caught. The only parts of Drizzt’s body that had even flinched were his arms. “Two-hands,” Zak said to Malice. “This one is a fighter. He belongs in Melee-Magthere.

Procrastination had always seemed to Waxworth an obvious cognitive failure, either an inability to measure the passage of time or an overvaluing of the present relative to the future. Something more than the daily churn or the pressure of print kept him from this work. Strange thoughts distracted him whenever he sat down to it. He thought about Margo Doyle’s question: Haven’t you ever been transported by your wife? He couldn’t precisely remember his answer, which was something about poetry, about feeling one thing while knowing another, stuff he didn’t believe at all. She’d gotten

At first he assumed that he had screwed up the sequencing. “I thought it was a mistake, because sequencing was hard back then,” he says with a hearty laugh. But by 1992, when his data kept showing these regularly spaced repeats, Mojica wondered if anyone else had found something similar. Google did not yet exist, nor did online indexes, so he manually sorted through citations for the word “repeat” in a set of Current Contents, a printed index of scholarly papers. Because this was in a previous century, when very few publications were online, whenever he found a listing that looked promising, he had to go to the library to find the relevant journal. Eventually he found Ishino’s paper.

In 1907, Pope Pius X declared modernism a heresy, had its exponents within the church excommunicated, and put all critical studies of the Bible on the Index of proscribed books. Authors similarly distinguished include Descartes (selected works), Montaigne (Essais), Locke (Essay on Human Understanding), Swift (Tale of a Tub), Swedenborg (Principia), Voltaire (Lettres philosophiques), Diderot (Encyclopédie), Rousseau (Du contrat social), Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), Paine (The Rights of Man), Sterne (A Sentimental Journey), Kant (Critique of Pure Reason), Flaubert (Madame Bovary), and Darwin (On the Origin of Species). As a censorious afterthought, Descartes’ Meditations was added to the Index in 1948.

Will “trigger warnings” simply be a way of establishing a new secular index, a cautionary list of books and other works dangerous not for religious reasons but because they may offend or upset certain groups or individuals or that contain material which can be viewed as insensitive or inappropriate? Would Grapes of Wrath be upsetting to someone with bad memories of rural poverty? Will the near future necessitate warning labels in front of all published material? Will future editions of The Best American Essays, for example, include a trigger warning in front of each selection so readers can avoid material that might upset them? And will trigger warnings in themselves eventually cause upsetting reactions, just the words and images sufficing to evoke unpleasant memories or anxious responses?

The first concerns how an investor should choose among different types of broad-based index funds. The best-known of the broad stock market mutual funds and ETFs in the United States track the S&P 500 index of the largest stocks. We prefer using a broader index that includes more smaller-company stocks, such as the Russell 3000 index or the Dow-Wilshire 5000 index. Funds that track these broader indexes are often referred to as “total stock market” index funds. More than 80 years of stock market history confirm that portfolios of smaller stocks have produced a higher rate of return than the return of the S&P 500 large-company index. While smaller companies are undoubtedly less stable and riskier than large firms, they are likely—on average—to produce somewhat higher future returns. Total stock market index funds are the better way for investors to benefit from the long-run growth of economic activity.

When I moved to the U.S. at six, I was unrecognizable to my mother. I was angry, chronically dissatisfied, bratty. On my second day in America, she ran out of the room in tears after I angrily demanded that she buy me a pack of colored pencils. You're not you! she sputtered between sobs, which brought me to a standstill. She couldn't recognize me. That's what she told me later, that this was not the daughter she had last seen. Being too young, I didn't know enough to ask: But what did you expect? Who am I supposed to be to you? But if I was unrecognizable to her, she was also unrecognizable to me. In this new country, she was disciplinarian, restrictive, prone to angry outbursts, easily frustrated, so fascist with arbitrary rules that struck me, even as a six-year-old, as unreasonable. For most of my childhood and adolescence, my mother was my antagonist. Whenever she'd get mad, she'd take her index finger and poke me in the forehead. You you you you you, she'd say, as if accusing me of being me. She was quick to blame me for the slightest infractions, a spilled glass, a way of sitting while eating, my future ambitions (farmer or teacher), the way I dressed, what I ate, even the way I practiced English words in the car..She was the one to deny me: the extra dollar added to my allowance; an extra hour to my curfew; the money to buy my friends' birthday presents, so that I was forced to gift them, no matter what the season, leftover Halloween candy. In those early days, we lived so frugally that we even washed, alongside the dishes in the sink, used sheets of cling wrap for reuse. She was the one to punish me, sending me to kneel in the bathtub of the darkened bathroom, carrying my father's Casio watch with an alarm setting to account for when time was up. Yet it was I who would kneel for even longer, going further and further, taking more punishment just to spite her, just to show that it meant nothing. I could take more. The sun moved across the bathroom floor, from the window to the door.

...the post-apocalyptic mode has long attracted writers not generally considered part of the science fiction tradition. It's one of the few subgenres of science fiction, along with stories of the near future (also friendly to satirists), that may be safely attempted by a mainstream writer without incurring too much damage to his or her credentials for seriousness. The anti-science fiction prejudice among some readers and writers is so strong that in reviewing a work of science fiction by a mainstream author a charitable critic will often turn to words such as 'parable' or 'fable' to warm the author's bathwater a little, and it is an established fact that a preponderance of religious imagery or an avowed religious intent can go a long way toward mitigating the science-fictional taint, which also helps explain the appeal to mainstream writers such a Walker Percy of the post-apocalyptic story, whose themes of annihilation and recreation are so easily indexed both to the last book of the New Testament and the first book of the Old. It's hard to imagine the author of Love in the Ruins writing a space opera.

Ownership is dead. Access is the new imperative. International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that by 2020, 50 percent of the world’s largest enterprises will see the majority of their business depend on their ability to create digitally enhanced products, services, and experiences. Focusing on services over products is also a sound business strategy. Zuora’s Subscription Economy Index, which you’ll find at the end of this book, shows that subscription-based companies are growing eight times faster than the S&P 500 and five times faster than US retail sales.

because there’s something joyless and deadening in the air, as if what this room really holds is the decaying miscarried fetus of the human future. Anyone who lingers here will sicken and die, just as if they were stranded in the pyramid on a dead world where once the photo-reconnaissance Concordes flew.

Such creativity with statistics is by no means an isolated incident, as revealed by The Climate Change Performance Index[20] published by Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe in 2014. Again, the wrong countries were at risk of becoming the top performers, and again, the situation was fixed with creative carbon accounting for nuclear. This particular index went even further than WWF did and declared nuclear electricity to have the same emissions as the dirtiest mainstream electricity, coal power. Given that this was an especially climate oriented index, it is interesting to note that a country could improve its score by replacing nearly emission-free nuclear with practically any mix of fossil fuels. One really cannot make this stuff up. We are sure that similar creative ”indices” are already in preparation somewhere. Using deliberately falsified indices and reports for actual, sensible real world policy is of course impossible, as they simply seek to distort the reality to conform to an ideologically preconceived position. We believe that environmental organizations are in fact never going to tell

Such creativity with statistics is by no means an isolated incident, as revealed by The Climate Change Performance Index[20] published by Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe in 2014. Again, the wrong countries were at risk of becoming the top performers, and again, the situation was fixed with creative carbon accounting for nuclear. This particular index went even further than WWF did and declared nuclear electricity to have the same emissions as the dirtiest mainstream electricity, coal power. Given that this was an especially climate oriented index, it is interesting to note that a country could improve its score by replacing nearly emission-free nuclear with practically any mix of fossil fuels. One really cannot make this stuff up. We are sure that similar creative ”indices” are already in preparation somewhere. Using deliberately falsified indices and reports for actual, sensible real world policy is of course impossible, as they simply seek to distort the reality to conform to an ideologically preconceived position. We believe that environmental organizations are in fact never going to tell us which countries have historically cut their carbon emissions the fastest and the most. The leaders in this game are those countries that built a lot of nuclear in the 1980s, like France and Sweden. It is worth noting that these cuts were accomplished with technology from the 1970s, and were achieved completely by accident, as a by-product of energy policy enacted for completely different reasons. There was no active climate policy, but the results were many times better than what Germany has managed with its Energiewende since the early 2000s. It is worth imagining what an active and evidence-based climate policy that pushed aggressively for renewables, energy savings and nuclear could therefore achieve. Image 10 - The best ten years of emissions reductions in four countries. A major part of Germany’s reductions, called “Wallfall”, are due to the country’s unification and the following closure of many of ineffective power plants and industry in eastern Germany. In addition to these countries, also Belgium and Finland have cut their emissions markedly with nuclear power.

Morningstar Exponential Technologies Index. BlackRock promptly licensed the index and in March 2015 launched the iShares Exponential Technologies ETF (ticker symbol: XT) based on it.

NEW BIBLIOGRAPHIC FRAMEWORK To sustain broader partnerships—and to be seen in the non-library specific realm of the Internet—metadata in future library systems will undoubtedly take on new and varied forms. It is essential that future library metadata be understood and open to general formats and technology standards that are used universally. Libraries should still define what data is gathered and what is essential for resource use, keeping in mind the specific needs of information access and discovery. However, the means of storage and structure for this metadata must not be proprietary to library systems. Use of the MARC standard format has locked down library bibliographic information. The format was useful in stand-alone systems for retrieval of holdings in separate libraries, but future library systems will employ non-library-specific formats enabling the discovery of library information by any other system desiring to access the information. We can expect library systems to ingest non-MARC formats such as Dublin Core; likewise, we can expect library discovery interfaces to expose metadata in formats such as Microdata and other Semantic Web formats that can be indexed by search engines. Adoption of open cloud-based systems will allow library data and metadata to be accessible to non-library entities without special arrangements. Libraries spent decades creating and storing information that was only accessible, for the most part, to others within the same profession. Libraries have begun to make partnerships with other non-library entities to share metadata in formats that can be useful to those entities. OCLC has worked on partnerships with Google for programs such as Google Books, where provided library metadata can direct users back to libraries. ONIX for Books, the international standard for electronic distribution of publisher bibliographic data, has opened the exchange of metadata between publishers and libraries for the enhancements of records on both sides of the partnership. To have a presence in the web of information available on the Internet is the only means by which any data organization will survive in the future. Information access is increasingly done online, whether via computer, tablet, or mobile device. If library metadata does not exist where users are—on the Internet—then libraries do not exist to those users. Exchanging metadata with non-library entities on the Internet will allow libraries to be seen and used. In addition to adopting open systems, libraries will be able to collectively work on implementation of a planned new bibliographic framework when using library platforms. This new framework will be based on standards relevant to the web of linked data rather than standards proprietary to libraries

En 1871, Louis Figuier publie Le Lendemain de la mort ou la vie future selon la science, un gros volume dans lequel il se propose de démontrer scientifiquement l'immortalité de l'âme! Selon lui, le corps et la pensée (ou l'âme) sont deux entités distinctes. Puisque d'une génération à l'autre, la matière ne disparaît pas et ne fait que changer d'état, il en est de même pour la pensée: 'Comme la matière, ell doit se transformer, sans jamais se détruire.' Il balaie donc tous les 'traités de l'âme' écrits depuis l'Antiquité, puisque ce 'fait de l'immortalité' est 'évident pour lui-même'. Le vrai problème, c'est ce que devient l'âme après la mort: 'Il nous importerait fort peu, au fond, que l'âme fût immortelle ou non, si notre âme, étant réellement, indestructible et immortelle, allait servir à un autre que nous-mêmes, ou seulement, si revenant en nous, elle ne conservait point la mémoire de son passé. La résurrection de l'âme, sans la mémoire du passé, serait un véritable anéantissement, ce serait le néant des matérialistes.' Louis Figuier cherche donc à démontrer que notre âme nous sera conservée 'dans l'autre vie'. Selon lui, après la mort, elle devient un être surhumain, ce que l'on nomme d'habitude un ange. 'Si l'atmosphère est le milieu, l'habitat, de l'homme, le fluide éthéré est le milieu, l'habitat, de l'être surhumain. Ce passage successif en deux milieus différents d'un être, qui subit une métamorphose quand il pénètre dans le nouveau milieu, n'est pas aussi extraordinaire, aussi anormal, aussi contraire aux lois de la nature, que l'on pourrait le croire.' C'est simplement une métamorphose, semblable à celle qui voit 'la larve more et noirâtre rampant dans la fange des étangs devenir la gracieuse libellule traversant l'air avec grâce et vigueur... On peut dire, de ce point de vue, que l'homme est la larve ou la chenille de l'être surhumain.' Cet être va occuper un nouvel humain, dès sa naissance, à moins que l'homme dont il provient n'ait eu une existence vertueuse. Dans ce cas il subit une autre métamorphose et se transforme en archange. Louis Figuier décrit alors un prodigieux cycle théologico-écologique. À la suite d'une série de métamorphose qui l'amènent à proximité du soleil, l'esprit en devient la matière même, qui revient sur Terre sous forme de rayons bienfaisants. Ceux-ci déposent dans les plantes les germes des âmes qui mûriront ensuite peu à peu, passant des végétaux aux animaux inférieurs, puis aux oiseaux et aux mammifères, jusqu'à l'homme. Très catholique, Figuier estimait pourtant que cette forme de métempsycose était bien préférable aux dogmes chrétiens sur l'enfer et le paradis, qu'il trouvait profondément injustes, et donc incompatibles avec la bienveillance divine: 'Le retour à une seconde vie terrestre est, en effet, une punition moins cruelle, plus raisonnable et plus juste que la condamnation aux tourment éternels. Ici la peine n'est qu'en proportion du péché; elle est équitable et indulgente, comme le châtiment d'un père.' Son livre mis à l'Index par l'Église Catholique, sera réimprimé dix fois jusqu'en 1904, dix ans après la mort de son auteur et, peut-être, sa propre métamorphose.

The California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) provides one example of what leveraging public equities at a system level looks like in practice. It has determined that climate change is a systemic risk and developed a multiyear, multi-asset-class, internally managed Low-Carbon Index (LCI) for passive equity management. Launched in 2017 with a $2.5 billion commitment, the LCI is made up of stocks in all industries in all markets (US, developed, and emerging) around the world. CalSTRS’s goal is for these holdings to have reduced carbon emissions and reserves in each market by between 61 percent and 93 percent in the coming years.4 Since passive index funds hold hundreds, if not thousands, of stocks across all industries, the CalSTRS index will paint a picture of what the future should look like in all companies around the world, in effect setting a benchmark and model for the environmental performance of large corporations on climate change.

To Bogle—who had years earlier battled with Samuelson’s textbook at Princeton—the column was electrifying. It inspired his future mantra that “strategy follows structure,” and this was a strategy that arguably suited Vanguard’s hamstrung structure perfectly. The few existing index funds were almost solely the preserve of pension funds, and while they were beginning to gain traction, none of Vanguard’s competitors in the mutual fund industry—mostly aimed at ordinary investors—would want to start a low-cost product that might show up its pricier, traditional actively managed funds. Meanwhile, Vanguard’s at-cost structure was the perfect match. Plus, he obviously knew a few gunslingers in Boston whom he wouldn’t mind humbling.

FERNANDO IS NO APOLOGIST FOR the investment industry, arguing that despite huge strides over the past two decades there are still many mediocre money managers who spend too much time and money chasing the latest hot idea. As a result, retail investors often “get taken for a ride,” she concedes. But she worries that the now-indiscriminate shift into passive investment strategies is eroding the central role that financial markets play in the economy, with money blindly shoveled into stocks according to their size, rather than their prospects. “The stock market is supposed to be a capital allocation machine. But by investing passively you are just putting money into the past winners, rather than the future winners,” she argues. In other words, beyond the impact on markets or other investors, is the growth of index investing having a deleterious impact on economic dynamism?

But some investors and analysts fret that given the strength of the trend toward greater passive investing, the market’s efficiency will gradually atrophy, with potentially dire consequences. “A given investment in active may or may not be the best decision for an individual particular investor but for the system overall there is a benefit in the efficient allocation of capital,” Fraser-Jenkins argued.21 “Rather than looking at the real economy and seeking to understand its future development, passive allocation self-referentially looks to the financial economy to inform its asset allocation choices.

Moreover, Fama’s thesis—titled “The Behavior of Stock-Market Prices”—corroborated earlier work by the likes of Mandelbrot and Samuelson which argued that markets are close to random, and therefore impossible to predict. As the young economist wrote in the introduction, “The series of price changes has no memory, that is, the past cannot be used to predict the future in any meaningful way.”19

In these uncertain days, bond funds are an especially important option for investors. Unlike stock funds, they have high predictability in at least these five ways: (1) The current yields (on longer-term issues) are an excellent—if imperfect—predictor of future returns. (2) The range of gross returns earned by bond managers clusters in an inevitably narrow range that is established by the current level of interest rates in each sector of the market. (3) The choices are wide. As the maturity date lengthens, volatility of principal increases, but volatility of income declines. (4) Whether taxable or municipal, bond fund returns are highly correlated with one another. Municipal bond funds are fine choices for investors in high tax brackets, and inflation-protected bond funds are a sound option for those who believe that much higher living costs will result from the huge federal government deficits of this era. (5) The greatest constant of all is that—given equivalent portfolio quality and maturity—lower costs mean higher returns. (Don’t forget that index bond funds—or their equivalent—carry the lowest costs of all.)

likelihood of innovating is higher for users having higher lead user index values. The rise in average innovation attractiveness as one moves from left to right indicates that innovations developed by lead users tend to be more commercially attractive. (Innovation attractiveness is the sum of the novelty of the innovation and the expected future generality of market demand.)

In sum, the most commonly used stock and bond market benchmark indexes cause economic harm, distort pricing information, and cause financial behaviours that are inimical with the EU’s aspirations for a competitive low carbon economy.

Over the last decade, other G7 countries have made more dramatic changes to their pension programs than the United States has to Social Security.33 Germany and Japan have put automatic stabilizers into their public pension systems so that the pension benefits rise or fall automatically with the country’s ability to afford them. Italy linked pension age eligibility to life expectancy, while France indexed part of its public pension system to price inflation. These changes amount to huge spending cuts by 2040 compared with previous law—roughly 30 percent in France, 40 percent in Germany and Japan, and nearly 50 percent in Italy.34 Some of the reforms were delayed because of the recession. Nonetheless, the public broadly understands that future benefits should be cut, and the push for reform has come equally from the Left and the Right. The United States, meanwhile, has not managed to pass a major Social Security reform in thirty years.

Another way of posing the problem is to ask oneself: what is the “present”? We say that only the things of the present exist: the past no longer exists and the future doesn’t exist yet. But in physics there is nothing that corresponds to the notion of the “now.” Compare “now” with “here.” “Here” designates the place where a speaker is: for two different people “here” points to two different places. Consequently “here” is a word the meaning of which depends on where it is spoken. The technical term for this kind of utterance is “indexical.” “Now” also points to the instant in which the word is uttered and is also classed as “indexical.” But no one would dream of saying that things “here” exist, whereas things that are not “here” do not exist. So then why do we say that things that are “now” exist and that everything else doesn’t? Is the present something that is objective in the world, that “flows,” and that makes things “exist” one after the other, or is it only subjective, like “here”? This may seem like an abstruse mental problem. But modern physics has made it into a burning issue, since special relativity has shown that the notion of the “present” is also subjective. Physicists and philosophers have come to the conclusion that the idea of a present that is common to the whole universe is an illusion and that the universal “flow” of time is a generalization that doesn’t work. When his great Italian friend Michele Besso died, Einstein wrote a moving letter to Michele’s sister: “Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.” Illusion or not, what explains the fact that for us time “runs,” “flows,” “passes”? The passage of time is obvious to us all: our thoughts and our speech exist in time; the very structure of our language requires time—a thing “is” or “was” or “will be.” It is possible to imagine a world without colors, without matter, even without space, but it’s difficult to imagine one without time. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger emphasized our “dwelling in time.” Is it possible that the flow of time that Heidegger treats as primal is absent from descriptions of the world? Some

Someone must have knocked on the door. She rushes to it, looks through the peephole, and steps back, muttering to herself. I can’t quite read her lips. Emily opens the door, and a man brushes past her. He’s wearing a button-down shirt, a tie, and kicks that cost more than my monthly rent. He puts down his suitcase, shakes hands with Mr. Madison, and turns to Emily. He starts toward her, his arms outstretched. I step forward to get between them, but Mrs. Madison grabs my arm. “Don’t,” she warns. “This will work itself out.” Emily lets him pull her into an embrace, but she doesn’t hug him back. She cringes instead. This warms my heart. She looks over at me, and I see something I don’t quite understand in her gaze. Is it pity? For me? Is she afraid I can’t compete with this man? Who the hell is he, anyway? I draw a circle around my lips, asking her who he is without anyone seeing me. She crooks her index finger into the sign for the letter x. That’s her ex? Seriously? Emily’s past has just walked in the door. And if the look on his face is any indication, he no longer wants to be in the past. He wants more. I look at her father, who’s smirking at me with his arms folded in front of his chest. He doesn’t want the asshat to be in the past either. Fine. I’ll knock his ass into the middle of next week. That’s the only way he’ll ever be a part of her future. I take a step forward flexing my fingers as I go. He’s as big as I am, but I’d be willing to bet his jaw is made of candy, just like his ass.

Index funds outperform approximately 80 percent of all actively managed funds over long periods of time. They do so for one simple reason: rock-bottom costs. In a random market, we don't know what future returns will be. However, we do know that an investor who keeps his or her costs low will earn a higher return than one who does not. That's the indexer's edge.

David Snavely is a highly respected investment advisor with over 40 years of experience in retirement planning and financial strategy. David specializes in helping clients secure their financial futures through personalized investment solutions, including Equity Index Annuities.

Future shock will not be found in Index Medicus or in any listing of psychological abnormalities. Yet, unless intelligent steps are taken to combat it, millions of human beings will find themselves increasingly disoriented, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environments. The malaise, mass neurosis, irrationality, and free-floating violence already apparent in contemporary life are merely a foretaste of what may lie ahead unless we come to understand and treat this disease. Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one’s own society. But its impact is far worse. For most Peace Corps men, in fact most travelers, have the comforting knowledge that the culture they left behind will be there to return to. The victim of future shock does not. Take an individual out of his own culture and set him down suddenly in an environment sharply different from his own, with a different set of cues to react to—different conceptions of time, space, work, love, religion, sex, and everything else—then cut him off from any hope of retreat to a more familiar social landscape, and the dislocation he suffers is doubly severe. Moreover, if this new culture is itself in constant turmoil, and if—worse yet—its values are incessantly changing, the sense of disorientation will be still further intensified. Given few clues as to what kind of behavior is rational under the radically new circumstances, the victim may well become a hazard to himself and others. Now imagine not merely an individual but an entire society, an entire generation—including its weakest, least intelligent, and most irrational members—suddenly transported into this new world. The result is mass disorientation, future shock on a grand scale. This is the prospect that man now faces. Change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it.

McQuown argued that a more scientific approach to investing was the future. In his telling, the traditional approach followed a version of the “Great Man” theory first espoused by the nineteenth-century philosopher Thomas Carlyle. Some preternaturally gifted hero would pick stocks that he thought would rise. When his touch inevitably deserted him at some point—and in the 1960s it was invariably a “him”—the investor would simply transfer their hopes onto another Great Man. “The whole thing is a chance-driven process. It’s not systematic and there is lots we still don’t know about it and that needs study,” McQuown argued.

One of the best and most trustworthy sources of up-to-date AI-related news is the AI Index.

To do index arbitrage, PNP developed techniques in the mid-1980s for finding baskets of stocks that did a particularly good job of tracking an index. We used this very profitably the day after “Black Monday,” October 19, 1987, to capture a spread of over 10 percent between the S&P 500 Index and the futures contracts on it. Quants have honed this to a fine art and, through their trading, generally keep the price discrepancy very small. To cut taxes, start with a tracking basket and, each time a stock drops, say, 10 percent, sell the loser and reinvest the proceeds in another stock or stocks chosen so the new basket continues to track well. If you want only short-term losses, which is usually best, sell within a year of purchase. I advise anyone considering doing this in a serious way to study it first with simulations using historical databases.

That was because of the uptick rule. The rule was part of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (rule 10a-1). It specified that, with certain exceptions, short-sale transactions are allowed only at a price higher than the last previous different price (an “uptick”). This rule was supposed to prevent short sellers from deliberately driving down the price of a stock. Seeing an enormous profit potential from capturing the unprecedented spread between the futures and the index, I wanted to sell stocks short and buy index futures to capture the excess spread. The index was selling at 15 percent, or 30 points, over the futures. The potential profit in an arbitrage was 15 percent in a few days. But with prices collapsing, upticks were scarce. What to do? I figured out a solution. I called our head trader, who as a minor general partner was highly compensated from his share of our fees, and gave him this order: Buy $5 million worth of index futures at whatever the current market price happened to be (about 190), and place orders to sell short at the market, with the index then trading at about 220, not $5 million worth of assorted stocks—which was the optimal amount to best hedge the futures—but $10 million. I chose twice as much stock as I wanted, guessing only about half would actually be shorted because of the scarcity of the required upticks, thus giving me the proper hedge. If substantially more or less stock was sold short, the hedge would not be as good but the 15 percent profit cushion gave us a wide band of protection against loss.

As Henniger conducts a tour of his factory, he brims with pride. He points to the ventilation system that sucks air from fourteen welding tables through tuba-size funnels into a series of Willy Wonka pipes overhead. “Most welding shops are dirty,” he says. “Ours isn’t. I put in a whole system to pull out the dust so these guys have clean air to breathe.” He leans over and sweeps his index finger across the floor. It comes up spotless. Henniger smiles, and casts his gaze across a continent of polished concrete. “You can see it shining,” he says. “We have a Zamboni going around the floor all day.” One can only imagine what kind of Christmas morning moment must it be for a thirty-something guy to take delivery of his own Zamboni.

His party had given up on liberalism. They didn’t even use the word anymore. They said instead that they were “progressives,” as if any movement into the future was necessarily better than the status quo. The Left had an illiberal streak that no one seemed willing to talk about, and Frank could see it in his colleagues’ reaction when he refused to join in the rending of garments over advocating invasion.

Technical analysis is more concerned with the price movements of a stock or an index by examining historical records of trading activity. A technical analyst looks at past data to predict future price movements. They believe that history tends to repeat itself in the stock market and that past performance is the best indicator of what will happen in the future.

K320’s issuance is designed to go on in perpetuity with a mild inflationary bias. That means that, after an initial ramped-up release over eight years, the supply of coins will eventually slot into a steady increase of 3.2 percent per year. This is deliberately just above the 2 percent rate of increase that most central banks target for their countries’ consumer price indexes. The K320 team is aiming for a balance that’s not too deflationary (which can result in hoarding crises like the Great Depression) and not too inflationary (when no one wants to hold the currency, as occurred during Germany’s Weimar Republic in the 1920s).

Moderate P/E ratio. Graham recommends limiting yourself to stocks whose current price is no more than 15 times average earnings over the past three years. Incredibly, the prevailing practice on Wall Street today is to value stocks by dividing their current price by something called “next year’s earnings.” That gives what is sometimes called “the forward P/E ratio.” But it’s nonsensical to derive a price/earnings ratio by dividing the known current price by unknown future earnings. Over the long run, money manager David Dreman has shown, 59% of Wall Street’s “consensus” earnings forecasts miss the mark by a mortifyingly wide margin—either underestimating or overestimating the actual reported earnings by at least 15%.2 Investing your money on the basis of what these myopic soothsayers predict for the coming year is as risky as volunteering to hold up the bulls-eye at an archery tournament for the legally blind. Instead, calculate a stock’s price/earnings ratio yourself, using Graham’s formula of current price divided by average earnings over the past three years.3 As of early 2003, how many stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index were valued at no more than 15 times their average earnings of 2000 through 2002? According to Morgan Stanley, a generous total of 185 companies passed Graham’s test.

way. I monitor the action by following the TLT, the iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF. This security goes down when interest rates go up, and vice versa. When the TLT goes down, you can expect the stock index futures to go down soon after,

In investing, everything begins with decisions. There’s a hall-of-mirrors quality to it as we are assessing the decisions of others. We’re dealing with the unknown future, and the facts are not in evidence. So, as social animals, we seek other opinions, which can be wrong, sometimes dramatically. As individuals, the best we can do is make decisions mindfully, using our System 2 (thinking slowly), aiming for fewer but better choices. Most directly, this means avoiding excessive turnover and trying to invest based on “What’s it worth?” rather than “What happens next?” It also means choosing a format for investing that works for you—whether stocks, index funds, actively managed funds, or something else altogether.

If an investor pursued an exclusive strategy of day trading stock index futures, investment results for the portfolio would have nothing to do with asset allocation or security selection and everything to do with market timing. The lack of widespread frenetic trading by investors stems either from a general sensibility of the investing populace or from a Darwinian winnowing of the day traders’ ranks.

Whenever she’d get mad, she’d take her index finger out and poke me in the forehead. You you you you you, she ‘d say, as if accusing me of being me. She was quick to blame me for the slightest infractions, a spilled glass, a way of sitting while eating, my future ambitions (farmer or teacher), the way I dressed, what I ate, even the way I practiced English words in the car (Thank you! I yelled. Scissors! I screamed). Pg 184, Severance

Another one of the most important leading indicators of global trade is the Baltic Dry Index. This index measures the activity of shipping throughout the world. Did anything significant happen to the Baltic Dry Index in the Shemitah of 2015? The answer

But this may be the place to remark that the very fact that the unit costs of electricity, gas, and telephone services have advanced so much less than the general price index puts these companies in a strong strategic position for the future.3 They are entitled by law to charge rates sufficient for an adequate return on their invested capital, and this will probably protect their shareholders in the future as it has in the inflations of the past.

One version of Borrowed thinking is a technique I call the Different Lens. To begin, brainstorm a list of people, industries, or perspectives. Examples may include: an archaeologist, a 4-year-old, someone living 200 years in the future, Elon Musk, a Navy SEAL, a zoologist, Brad Pitt, Picasso, a professional bowling champion. The more diverse and strange, the better. Next, take a stack of index cards and write one name or role from your list on the back of each. You’re now armed for a Different Lens brainstorm session. First, clearly articulate the real-world challenge you’re facing. Perhaps it is developing a new product to combat a competitive launch. Maybe you’re looking for a way to improve closing rates throughout your sales force, attract and retain Millennial workers, or reduce error-rates in your manufacturing plant. Once the challenge has been identified, turn over one card. If the card reads “architect,” the group brainstorms how an architect would approach their real-world challenge. Once the ideas start to dwindle, flip over the next card and look at the problem through the next lens. Instead of thinking about how your competition is solving this problem, think about how Beyoncé would slay it. Before long, you and your team will see the problem in a whole new light, and by borrowing the thinking from others, you’ll gain a fresh perspective that will lead to the innovative solutions you seek.

Hmm,” said Tammy, “and once more your naive optimism regarding the human species reveals its hopeless disconnect with reality. While it was well-established that prior to the Great EM Pulse following the Benefactors’ arrival in Earth orbit, virtually every human being on the planet had already become a drooling automaton with bloodshot eyes glued to a pixelated screen, even as the world melted around them in a toxic stew of air pollution, water pollution, vehicles pouring out carcinogenic waste gases, and leaking gas pipelines springing up everywhere along with earthquake-inducing fracking and oil spills in the oceans and landslides due to deforestation and heat waves due to global warming and ice caps melting and islands and coastlines drowning and forests dying and idiots building giant walls and—” “All right, whatever!” Hadrian snapped. “But don’t you see? This is the future!” “Yeah, that statement makes sense.” “The future from then, I mean. Now is their future, even if it’s our now, or will be, I mean—oh fuck it. The point is, Tammy, we’re supposed to have matured as a species, as a civilization. We’re supposed to have united globally in a warm gush of integrity, ethical comportment, and peace and love as our next stage of universal consciousness bursts forth like a blinding light to engulf us all in a golden age of enlightenment and postscarcity well-being.” “Hahahaha,” Tammy laughed and then coughed and choked. “Stop! You’re killing me!” Beta spoke. “I am attempting to compute said golden age, Captain. Alas, my Eternally Needful Consumer Index is redlining and descending into a cursive loop of existential panic. All efforts to reset parameters yield the Bluescreen of Incomprehension. Life without mindless purchase? Without pointless want? Without ephemeral endorphin spurts? Without gaming-induced frontal lobe permanent degradation resulting in short-tempered antisocial short-attention-span psychological generational profiles? Impossible.” “The EMP should have given us the breathing space to pause and reevaluate our value system,” said Hadrian. “Instead, it was universal panic. Riots in Discount Super Stores, millions trampled—they barely noticed the lights going out, for crying out loud.

Recall that GDP, gross domestic product, the dominant metric in economics for the last century, consists of a combination of consumption, plus private investments, plus government spending, plus exports-minus-imports. Criticisms of GDP are many, as it includes destructive activities as positive economic numbers, and excludes many kinds of negative externalities, as well as issues of health, social reproduction, citizen satisfaction, and so on. Alternative measures that compensate for these deficiencies include: the Genuine Progress Indicator, which uses twenty-six different variables to determine its single index number; the UN’s Human Development Index, developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq in 1990, which combines life expectancy, education levels, and gross national income per capita (later the UN introduced the inequality-adjusted HDI); the UN’s Inclusive Wealth Report, which combines manufactured capital, human capital, natural capital, adjusted by factors including carbon emissions; the Happy Planet Index, created by the New Economic Forum, which combines well-being as reported by citizens, life expectancy, and inequality of outcomes, divided by ecological footprint (by this rubric the US scores 20.1 out of 100, and comes in 108th out of 140 countries rated); the Food Sustainability Index, formulated by Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, which uses fifty-eight metrics to measure food security, welfare, and ecological sustainability; the Ecological Footprint, as developed by the Global Footprint Network, which estimates how much land it would take to sustainably support the lifestyle of a town or country, an amount always larger by considerable margins than the political entities being evaluated, except for Cuba and a few other countries; and Bhutan’s famous Gross National Happiness, which uses thirty-three metrics to measure the titular quality in quantitative terms.

The obsolete psychological category of 'greed' privatizes and moralizes addiction, as if the profit-seeking tropism of a transnational capitalism propagating itself through epidemic consumerism were intelligible in terms of personal subjective traits. Wanting more is the index of interlock with cyberpositive machinic processes, and of personal subjective traits [...] Addiction comes out of the future [...] Money communicates with the primary process because of what it can melt, not what it can obtain.

In an ideal world, the intelligent investor would hold stocks only when they are cheap and sell them when they become overpriced, then duck into the bunker of bonds and cash until stocks again become cheap enough to buy. From 1966 through late 2001, one study claimed, $1 held continuously in stocks would have grown to $11.71. But if you had gotten out of stocks right before the five worst days of each year, your original $1 would have grown to $987.12.1 Like most magical market ideas, this one is based on sleight of hand. How, exactly, would you (or anyone) figure out which days will be the worst days—before they arrive? On January 7, 1973, the New York Times featured an interview with one of the nation’s top financial forecasters, who urged investors to buy stocks without hesitation: “It’s very rare that you can be as unqualifiedly bullish as you can now.” That forecaster was named Alan Greenspan, and it’s very rare that anyone has ever been so unqualifiedly wrong as the future Federal Reserve chairman was that day: 1973 and 1974 turned out to be the worst years for economic growth and the stock market since the Great Depression.2 Can professionals time the market any better than Alan Green-span? “I see no reason not to think the majority of the decline is behind us,” declared Kate Leary Lee, president of the market-timing firm of R. M. Leary & Co., on December 3, 2001. “This is when you want to be in the market,” she added, predicting that stocks “look good” for the first quarter of 2002.3 Over the next three months, stocks earned a measly 0.28% return, underperforming cash by 1.5 percentage points. Leary is not alone. A study by two finance professors at Duke University found that if you had followed the recommendations of the best 10% of all market-timing newsletters, you would have earned a 12.6% annualized return from 1991 through 1995. But if you had ignored them and kept your money in a stock index fund, you would have earned 16.4%.

Security analysis does not assume that a past average will be repeated, but only that it supplies a rough index to what may be expected of the future. A trend, however, cannot be used as a rough index; it represents a definite prediction of either better or poorer results, and it must be either right or wrong.