S&p 500 Quotes

If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow. Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.

Pretend your vagina is worth something of VALUE. Pretend it’s a $500 bill.   Would you give a man you just met a FREE $500 bill?

Nearly every time I strayed from the herd, I've made a lot of money. Wandering away from the action is the way to find the new action.

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.

On a timeline that shows the 15 billion years of the universe as one year, the first human appears only at 10:30p on December 31 (about 3 million years ago). Stonehenge is built and Egyptian civilization arises at 11:50:54p (about 3,000 years ago). The Buddha appears on the timeline at 11:59:55p (2,500 years ago), and Christ shows up at 11:59:55p (2,000 years ago). The European Renaissance occurs at 11:59:59p (450 years ago), on the last day of the year.

Just 2 percent of the world’s population and 5 percent of white people in the U.S. have blond hair, but 35 percent of female U.S. senators and 48 percent of female CEOs at S&P 500 companies are

If you are trading S&P 500 stocks, for example, the average transaction cost (excluding commissions, which depend on your brokerage) would be about 5 basis points (that is, five-hundredths of a percent).

Broad-market indexes like S&P 500 must rise over the long term. The upward path is the only logical direction. Prices can be suppressed for a short period, but eventually, the index will continue its course.

need to know three things to evaluate a CEO’s greatness: the compound annual return to shareholders during his or her tenure and the return over the same period for peer companies and for the broader market (usually measured by the S&P 500).

If you buy an S&P 500 index fund, your investment is highly diversified and its performance will match that of 500 leading U.S. corporations' stocks. Is it possible to lose all of your money? Yes, but the odds of that happening are slim and none. If 500 leading U.S. corporations all have their stock prices plummet to zero, the value of your investment portfolio will be the least of your problems. An economic collapse of that magnitude would make the Great Depression look like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent, like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us, for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light our obligations are yet with us.   —Daniel Webster Argument on the Murder of Captain White, APRIL 6, 1830. VOL. VI., P. 105.

500,000 halos outshined the mud and history. We washed and drank in God's tears of joy, And for once…and for everyone…the truth was not a mystery. Love called to all…music is magic. As we passed over and beyond the walls of Nay, Hand in hand as we lived and made real the dreams of peaceful men— We came together…danced with the pearls of rainy weather, Riding the waves of music and space…music is magic…magic is life… Love as never loved before… Harmony to son and daughter…man and wife…

It goes something like this: I am one person among 6.5 billion people on Earth at the moment. That's one person among 6,500,000,000 people. That'a lot of Wembley Stadiums full of people, and even more double-decker buses (apparently the standard British measurements for size). And we live on an Earth that is spinning at 67,000 miles an hour through space around a sun that is the centre of our solar system (and our solar system is spinning around the centre of the Milky Way at 530,000 mph). Just our solar system (which is a tiny speck within the entire universe) is very big indeed. If Earth was a peppercorn and Jupiter was a chestnut (the standard American measurements), you'd have to place them 100 metres apart to get a sense of the real distance between us. And this universe is only one of many. In fact, the chances are that there are many, many more populated Earths - just like ours - in other universes. And that's just space. Have a look at time, too. If you're in for a good run, you may spend 85 years on this Earth. Man has been around for 100,000 years, so you're going to spend just 0.00085 percent of man's history living on this Earth. And Man's stay on Earth has been very short in the context of the life of the Earth (which is 4.5 billion years old): if the Earth had been around for the equivalent of a day (with the Big Bang kicking it all off at midnight), humans didn't turn up until 11.59.58 p.m. That means we've only been around for the last two seconds. A lifetime is gone in a flash. There are relatively few people on this Earth that were here 100 years ago. Just as you'll be gone (relatively) soon. So, with just the briefest look at the spatial and temporal context of our lives, we are utterly insignificant. As the Perspective Machine lifts up so far above the woods that we forget what the word means, we see just one moving light. It is beautiful. A small, gently glowing light. It is a firefly lost somewhere in the cosmos. And a firefly - on Earth - lives for just one night. It glows beautifully, then goes out. And up there so high in our Perspective Machine we realize that our lives are really just like that of the firefly. Except the air is full of 6.5 billion fireflies. They're glowing beautifully for one night. Then they are gone. So, Fuck It, you might as well REALLY glow.

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!

The same thing is true with weekday nights. If work can claim hours after 5:00 p.m., then life should be able to claim hours before 5:00 p.m. Balance, remember. Give and take.

Pulsaciones - 1,500 Oración de conflicto. B. ojo de águila, 50 = 1,500 T. R. A. C. P. E. M.

So tell me, Ray, what are the percentages you would put in stocks? What percentage in gold? and so on."... "First, he said, we need 30% in stocks (for instance, the S&P 500 or other indexes for further diversification in this basket)... "Then you need long-term government bonds. Fifteen percent in intermediate term [seven- to ten-year Treasuries] and forty percent in long-term bonds [20- to 25-year Treasuries]."... He rounded out the portfolio with 7.5% in gold and 7.5% in commodities... Lastly, the portfolio must be rebalanced. Meaning, when one segment does well, you must sell a portion and reallocate back to the original allocation. This should be done at least annually, and, if done properly, can actually increase tax efficiency. p390

The global aid community is mobilised into fighting drought in a district that gets 1,500 mm of rainfall annually. The reverse spiral begins. Donor governments love emergency relief. It forms a negligible part of their spending, but makes for great advertising. (Emergencies of many sorts do this, not just drought. You can run television footage of the Marines kissing babies in Somalia.) There are more serious issues between rich and poor nations—like unequal trade. Settling those would be of greater help to the latter. But for that, the ‘donors’ would have to part with something for real. No. They prefer emergency relief.

While we advance exponentially in technological capability, our spiritual or 'biological technology,' our maturity as a species, is still two or three thousand years in the past. This is because many of us live according to ideas that were original and groundbreaking... in 500 B.C. Most people are unwilling or unable to ask the hard questions- as in, why do we do things the way we do, and what will the end results be?" (p.120) Generation Hex

The world remembers the battle ever since by the taxis. A hundred of them were already in the service of the Military Government of Paris. With 500 more, each carrying five soldiers and making the sixty-kilometer trip to the Ourcq twice, General Clergerie figured he could transport 6,000 troops to the hard-pressed front. The order was issued at 1:00 P.M., the hour for departure fixed for 6:00 P.M. Police passed the word to the taxis in the streets. Enthusiastically the chauffeurs emptied out their passengers, explaining proudly that they had to “go to the battle.” Returning to their garages for gas, they were ordered to the place of assembly where at the given time all 600 were lined up in perfect order. Gallieni, called to inspect them, though rarely demonstrative, was enchanted. “Eh bien, voilà au moins qui n’est pas banal!” (Well, here at least is something out of the ordinary!) he cried. Each with its burden of soldiers, with trucks, buses, and assorted vehicles added to the train, the taxis drove off, as evening fell—the last gallantry of 1914, the last crusade of the old world.

Data sliced sufficiently finely begin once again to tell stories. The top 1 percent of the income distribution—representing household incomes in excess of roughly $475,000—comprises only about 1.5 million households. If one adds up the numbers of vice presidents or above at S&P 1500 companies (perhaps 250,000), professionals in the finance sector, including in hedge funds, venture capital, private equity, investment banking, and mutual funds (perhaps 250,000), professionals working at the top five management consultancies (roughly 60,000), partners at law firms whose profits per partner exceed $400,000 (roughly 25,000), and specialist doctors (roughly 500,000), this yields perhaps 1 million people. These are surely not all one-percenters, but they are all plausibly parts of the top 1 percent, and this group might comprise half—a sizable share—of 1 percent households overall. At the very least, the people in these known and named jobs constitute a material, rather than just marginal or eccentric, part of the top 1 percent of the income distribution. They are also, of course, the people depicted in journalistic accounts of extreme jobs—the people who regularly cancel vacation plans, spend most of their time on the road, live in unfurnished luxury apartments, and generally subsume themselves in work, encountering their personal lives only occasionally, and as strangers.

Mayflower-Plymouth has created The Permaculture Index as an alternative to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P, the Nasdaq and the Nikkei. The purpose of The Permaculture Index is to provide a more holistic representation of the health of the economy. And then we have several sub-indices which aim to present a more holistic representation of specific markets.

As soon as my watch showed 5:00 p.m., I walked in. Gene was at the lectern of the darkened theatre, still talking, apparently oblivious to time, responding to a question about funding. My entrance had allowed a shaft of light into the room, and I realized that the audience's eyes were now on me, as if expecting me to say something. 'Time's up,' I said. 'I have a meeting with Gene.

Total available Calories divided by Population equals Artistic-Technological Style. When the ratio Calories-to-Population is large—say, five thousand or more, five thousand daily calories for every living person—then the Artistic-Technological Style is big. People carve Mount Rushmore; they build great foundries; they manufacture enormous automobiles to carry one housewife half a mile for the purchase of one lipstick. Life is coarse and rich where C:P is large. At the other extreme, where C:P is too small, life does not exist at all. It has starved out. Experimentally, add little increments to C:P and it will be some time before the right-hand side of the equation becomes significant. But at last, in the 1,000 to 1,500 calorie range, Artistic-Technological Style firmly appears in self-perpetuating form. C:P in that range produces the small arts, the appreciations, the peaceful arrangements of necessities into subtle relationships of traditionally agreed-upon virtue. Think of Japan, locked into its Shogunate prison, with a hungry population scrabbling food out of mountainsides and beauty out of arrangements of lichens. The small, inexpensive sub-sub-arts are characteristic of the 1,000 to 1,500 calorie range.

Churchill admired the division of powers in the American government, but he thought they were copied from much older British practices. In 1950 he said: [T]he division of ruling power has always been for more than 500 years the aim of the British people. The division of power is the keynote of our parliamentary system and of the constitutions we have spread all over the world. The idea of checks and counter checks; the resistance to the theory that one man, or group of men, can by sweeping gestures and decisions reduce all the rest of us to subservience; these have always been the war cries of the British nation and the division of power has always been one of the war cries of the British people. And from here the principle was carried to America. The scheme of the American Constitution was framed to prevent any one man or any one lot, getting arbitrary control of the whole nation.

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.

In cases of invasion or insurrection, if the town-officers neglect to furnish the necessary stores and ammunition for the militia, the township may be condemned to a fine of from $200 to $500. It may readily be imagined that in such a case it might happen that no one cared to prosecute; hence the law adds that all the citizens may indict offences of this kind, and that half of the fine shall belong to the plaintiff. See Act of March 6, 1810, vol. ii. p. 236.

Putting it all together, fluctuations in attitudes and behavior combine to make the stock market the ultimate pendulum. In my 47 full calendar years in the investment business, starting with 1970, the annual returns on the S&P 500 have swung from plus 37% to minus 37%. Averaging out good years and bad years, the long-run return is usually stated as 10% or so. Everyone’s been happy with that typical performance and would love more of the same. But remember, a swinging pendulum may be at its midpoint “on average,” but it actually spends very little time there. The same is true of financial market performance. Here’s a fun question (and a good illustration): for how many of the 47 years from 1970 through 2016 was the annual return on the S&P 500 within 2% of “normal”—that is, between 8% and 12%? I expected the answer to be “not that often,” but I was surprised to learn that it had happened only three times! It also surprised me to learn that the return had been more than 20 percentage points away from “normal”—either up more than 30% or down more than 10%—more than one-quarter of the time: 13 out of the last 47 years. So one thing that can be said with total conviction about stock market performance is that the average certainly isn’t the norm. Market fluctuations of this magnitude aren’t nearly fully explained by the changing fortunes of companies, industries or economies. They’re largely attributable to the mood swings of investors. Lastly, the times when return is at the extremes aren’t randomly distributed over the years. Rather they’re clustered, due to the fact that investors’ psychological swings tend to persist for a while—to paraphrase Herb Stein, they tend to continue until they stop. Most of those 13 extreme up or down years were within a year or two of another year of similarly extreme performance in the same direction.

The economic pie of 2014 is far larger than the pie of 1500, but it is distributed so unevenly that many African peasants and Indonesian labourers return home after a hard day's work with less food than did their ancestors 500 years ago. Much like the Agricultural Revolution, so too the growth of the modern economy might turn out to be a colossal fraud. The human species and the global economy may well keep growing, but many more individuals may live in hunger and want. (p. 372)

What else has changes since 1984? Oil's running our, I say Earth's population is eight billion, mass extinction of flora and fauna are commonplace, climate change is foreclosing the Holocene Era. Aparteid's dead, as are the Castros in Cuba as is privacy. The USSR went bankrupt; the Eastern bloc collapsed; Germany reunified; the EU has gone federal; China's a powerhouse- though their air is industrial effluence in a gaseous state - and North Korea is still a gulag run by a coiffed cannibal. p 500

Shareholders have a residual claim on a firm’s assets and earnings, meaning they get what’s left after all other claimants—employees and their pension funds, suppliers, tax-collecting governments, debt holders, and preferred shareholders (if any exist)—are paid. The value of their shares, therefore, is the discounted value of all future cash flows minus those payments. Since the future is unknowable, potential shareholders must estimate what that cash flow will be; their collective expectations about the future determine the stock price. Any shareholders who expect that the discounted value of future equity earnings of the company will be less than the current price will sell their stock. Any potential shareholders who expect that the discounted future value will exceed the current price will buy stock. This means that shareholder value has almost nothing to do with the present. Indeed, present earnings tend to be a small fraction of the value of common shares. Over the past decade, the average yearly price-earnings multiple for the S&P 500 has been 22x, meaning that current earnings represent less than 5 percent of stock prices.

The last 500 years have witnessed a phenomenal and unprecedented growth in human power. In the year 1500, there were about 500 million Homo sapiens in the entire world. Today, there are 7 billion. The total value of goods and services produced by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at $250 billion, in today's dollars. Nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to $60 trillion. In 1500, humanity consumed about 13 trillion calories of energy per day. Today, we consume 1,500 trillion calories a day. (Take a second look at those figures - human population has increased fourteenfold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.) (p.275)

Sample House-training Schedule for a Young Puppy 6:30 a.m. Rise. Walk pup briefly. 7:00 a.m. Feed pup and offer a drink of water. Walk puppy. Return home and play briefly with pup. Pup stays in crate. Midmorning Walk pup. After walk, pup stays with owner fifteen minutes. Pup returns to crate. Noon–1:00 p.m Feed pup second meal and offer water. Walk puppy. Return home and play with pup. Pup returns to crate. Midafternoon Offer pup water. Walk puppy. Pup returns to crate. 5:00 p.m. Feed pup third meal and offer water. Walk puppy. Allow pup to play in kitchen while dinner is being prepared. 7:00 p.m. Walk pup briefly. Return home and play with puppy. Pup returns to create Before bed Walk pup. Puppy sleeps in crate or on a tether (preferably with metal chain) in your bedroom.

Look here, this is a book he had when he was a boy. It just shows you.” He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see. On the last flyleaf was printed the word schedule, and the date September 12, 1906. And underneath: Rise from bed 6:00 a.m. Dumbell exercise and wall-scaling 6:15⁠–⁠6:30 “ Study electricity, etc. 7:15⁠–⁠8:15 “ Work 8:30⁠–⁠4:30 p.m. Baseball and sports 4:30⁠–⁠5:00 “ Practise elocution, poise and how to attain it 5:00⁠–⁠6:00 “ Study needed inventions 7:00⁠–⁠9:00 “ General Resolves No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable] No more smokeing or chewing. Bath every other day Read one improving book or magazine per week Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week Be better to parents “I came across this book by accident,” said the old man. “It just shows you, don’t it?

Socrates chose to drink hemlock rather than to follow morality in contravention of Athen's laws. As depicted in Plato's Crito dialogue, Socrates had been convicted by a jury of 500 Athenians of impiety and of corrupting the young. He was sentenced to die by drinking hemlock. His friend Crito tried to convince him to escape rather than to accept the immoral judgement of the Athenian state (Socrates had not corrupted the young but educated them.) Socrates responded by pointing out that he had lived in Athens as an Athenian citizen, accepting all of the benefits of its government and laws. On this basis, he had a type of "Social Contract" obligation to continue to accept the Athen's laws and legal judgement. He saw this as a moral obligation, even if the judgment at hand was itself immoral. Thus, for Socrates, and Plato, the law has its own morality, even when its results are immoral.

At the beginning of June 1944 electronics came to Bletchley. I was totally out of my depth there, but with various discreet questions from my esoteric sources, I gathered that our present Bombes were electromagnetic and that Professor Alan Turing, along with the electronic wizard T. E. Flowers of the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, were working together desperately anxious to speed up the process of decipherment. Tommy Flowers decided to employ 1,500 thermionic valves instead of the electromagnetic relays. These apparently propelled the undertaking into the world of electronics and thus Colossus was born. The speed of decryption of this machine was remarkable and Colossus began operating at B.P. in February 1944, followed by Mark II using 2,400 valves. By the end of the war ten Colossi were in service at Bletchley. I am still bemused and confounded but thank God for Tommy Flowers and Alan Turing.

Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees: Jews were required to wear a yellow star; Jews were required to turn in their bicycles; Jews were forbidden to use street-cars; Jews were forbidden to ride in cars, even their own; Jews were required to do their shopping between 3:00 P.M. and 5:00 P.M.; Jews were required to frequent only Jewish-owned barbershops and beauty parlors; Jews were forbidden to be out on the streets between 8:00 P.M. and 6:00 A.M.; Jews were forbidden to attend theaters, movies or any other forms of entertainment; Jews were forbidden to use swimming pools, tennis courts, hockey fields or any other athletic fields; Jews were forbidden to go rowing; Jews were forbidden to take part in any athletic activity in public; Jews were forbidden to sit in their gardens or those of their friends after 8:00 P.M.; Jews were forbidden to visit Christians in their homes; Jews were required to attend Jewish schools, etc. You couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do that, but life went on.

Quand la sexologue Shere Hite a récolté les témoignages de quelque 4 500 Américaines sur leur vie amoureuse et sexuelle, dans les années 1970, nombre d'entre elles ont déclaré que leur mari ou compagnon avait une attitude condescendante, arrogante ou carrément insultante. Il les rabaissait ou les disqualifiait, tournait en dérision leurs opinions ou leurs centres d'intérêt. « Il me parle sur un ton qui me fait me sentir inepte et stupide » ; « Il se comporte comme s'il savait tout » ; « Il a des attitudes paternalistes, comme son père. Sauf qu'il le voit chez son père, mais pas chez lui » ; « Il estime que sa parole a force de loi » ; « À une époque, il me faisait la leçon comme à une gamine. Mais je ne l'ai pas lâché avec ça et il a fini par arrêter »… Aux antipodes de cette assurance masculine, les femmes intègrent très tôt une tendance non seulement à pratiquer l'introspection et à se remettre en question (ce qui est plutôt positifs), mais aussi à douter d'elles-mêmes, à se culpabiliser sans cesse, à penser que tout est de leur faute ou de leur responsabilité, à s'excuser d'exister (ce qui est nettement moins bien). Cette tendance nous affaiblit considérablement dans un rapport amoureux, surtout quand il se révèle abusif. (p. 102)

Claims were made decades after the campaign by Jérôme and Larrey that Napoleon’s lethargy was the result of his suffering from haemorrhoids which incapacitated him after Ligny.74 ‘My brother, I hear that you suffer from piles,’ Napoleon had written to Jérôme in May 1807. ‘The simplest way to get rid of them is to apply three or four leeches. Since I used this remedy ten years ago, I haven’t been tormented again.’75 But was he in fact tormented? This might be the reason why he spent hardly any time on horseback during the battle of Waterloo – visiting the Grand Battery once at 3 p.m. and riding along the battlefront at 6 p.m. – and why he twice retired to a farmhouse at Rossomme about 1,500 yards behind the lines for short periods.76 He swore at his page, Gudin, for swinging him on to his saddle too violently at Le Caillou in the morning, later apologizing, saying: ‘When you help a man to mount, it’s best done gently.’77 General Auguste Pétiet, who was on Soult’s staff at Waterloo, recalled that His pot-belly was unusually pronounced for a man of forty-five. Furthermore, it was noticeable during this campaign that he remained on horseback much less than in the past. When he dismounted, either to study maps or else to send messages and receive reports, members of his staff would set before him a small deal table and a rough chair made of the same wood, and on this he would remain seated for long periods at a time.78

Your story isn’t powerful enough if all it does is lead the horse to water; it has to inspire the horse to drink, too. On social media, the only story that can achieve that goal is one told with native content. Native content amps up your story’s power. It is crafted to mimic everything that makes a platform attractive and valuable to a consumer—the aesthetics, the design, and the tone. It also offers the same value as the other content that people come to the platform to consume. Email marketing was a form of native content. It worked well during the 1990s because people were already on email; if you told your story natively and provided consumers with something they valued on that platform, you got their attention. And if you jabbed enough to put them in a purchasing mind-set, you converted. The rules are the same now that people spend their time on social media. It can’t tell you what story to tell, but it can inform you how your consumer wants to hear it, when he wants to hear it, and what will most make him want to buy from you. For example, supermarkets or fast-casual restaurants know from radio data that one of the ideal times to run an ad on the radio is around 5:00 P.M., when moms are picking up the kids and deciding what to make for dinner, and even whether they have the energy to cook. Social gives you the same kind of insight. Maybe the data tells you that you should post on Facebook early in the morning before people settle

Here are some of the handicaps mutual-fund managers and other professional investors are saddled with: With billions of dollars under management, they must gravitate toward the biggest stocks—the only ones they can buy in the multimillion-dollar quantities they need to fill their portfolios. Thus many funds end up owning the same few overpriced giants. Investors tend to pour more money into funds as the market rises. The managers use that new cash to buy more of the stocks they already own, driving prices to even more dangerous heights. If fund investors ask for their money back when the market drops, the managers may need to sell stocks to cash them out. Just as the funds are forced to buy stocks at inflated prices in a rising market, they become forced sellers as stocks get cheap again. Many portfolio managers get bonuses for beating the market, so they obsessively measure their returns against benchmarks like the S & P 500 index. If a company gets added to an index, hundreds of funds compulsively buy it. (If they don’t, and that stock then does well, the managers look foolish; on the other hand, if they buy it and it does poorly, no one will blame them.) Increasingly, fund managers are expected to specialize. Just as in medicine the general practitioner has given way to the pediatric allergist and the geriatric otolaryngologist, fund managers must buy only “small growth” stocks, or only “mid-sized value” stocks, or nothing but “large blend” stocks.6 If a company gets too big, or too small, or too cheap, or an itty bit too expensive, the fund has to sell it—even if the manager loves the stock. So

La plupart du temps, d'ailleurs, les femmes qui ont un compagnon fermé sur le plan émotionnel expriment un profond désespoir. Quand Shere Hite a mené son enquête auprès de 4 500 femmes dans les années 1970, 98 % de celles qui étaient dans une relation avec un homme auraient souhait un « dialogue plus intime » avec lui ; elles auraient voulu qu'il leur parle davantage « de ses pensées, sentiments, projets, préoccupations, et qu'il les interroge sur les leurs ». Certaines disaient ne s'être jamais senties aussi seules qu'au cours de leur mariage ; d'autres en pleuraient, la nuit, aux côtés de leur époux endormi. Il n'est pas certain que les choses aient radicalement changé en cinquante ans (ni qu'elles soient très différentes de ce côté-ci de l'Atlantique). En février 2021, dans le courrier du cœur du site américain The Cut, baptisté « Ask Polly », une trentenaire britannique partageait les dispositions dans lesquelles elle se sentait après une rupture. Dans leur entourage, disait-elle, tout le monde les considérés, son ex-compagnon et elle, comme le couple idéal. Et pourtant, son désir d'intimité avait toujours été frustré. « Je pense qu'entretenir une relation profonde, intensément nourrie, avec une autre personne fait partie des plus grandes joies que l'existence puisse vous apporter », écrivait-elle. Elle estimait aussi que faire son propre « travail de l'ombre », essayer de se comprendre soi-même, était un des aspects « les plus fascinants et les plus urgents » du fait d'être en vie. Lui, en revanche ne comprenait pas ce qu'elle voulait de lui et trouvait qu'elle compliquait les choses inutilement. Autour d'elle, elle voyait un grand nombre d'autres couples dans lesquels la femme espérait elle aussi de son partenaire le même investissement émotionnel et réflexif que le sien - en vain. Elle en venait à ne plus jamais vouloir être en couple avec un homme « qui n'aurait pas suivi une thérapie », clamait-elle. (p. 204-205)

First, he said, we need 30% in stocks (for instance, the S&P 500 or other indexes for further diversification in this basket). Initially that sounded low to me, but remember, stocks are three times more risky than bonds. And who am I to second-guess the Yoda of asset allocation!? “Then you need long-term government bonds. Fifteen percent in intermediate term [seven- to ten-year Treasuries] and forty percent in long-term bonds [20- to 25-year Treasuries].” “Why such a large percentage?” I asked. “Because this counters the volatility of the stocks.” I remembered quickly it’s about balancing risk, not the dollar amounts. And by going out to longer-term (duration) bonds, this allocation will bring a potential for higher returns. He rounded out the portfolio with 7.5% in gold and 7.5% in commodities. “You need to have a piece of that portfolio that will do well with accelerated inflation, so you would want a percentage in gold and commodities. These have high volatility. Because there are environments where rapid inflation can hurt both stocks and bonds.” Lastly, the portfolio must be rebalanced. Meaning, when one segment does well, you must sell a portion and reallocate back to the original allocation. This should be done at least annually, and, if done properly, it can actually increase the tax efficiency. This is part of the reason why I recommend having a fiduciary implement and manage this crucial, ongoing process.

The U.S. government’s Thrift Savings Plan, developed for the country’s civilian and military employees, serves as a possible model. At the end of 2003, the plan contained $128.8 billion in assets distributed across five funds. Four of the funds track well-known indices, namely the large-capitalization-stock S&P 500 Index, the small-capitalization-stock Wilshire 4500 Index, the developed-foreign-stock MSCI EAFE Index and the broadly inclusive domestic bond Lehman Brothers U.S. Aggregate Index. From a security selection perspective, the U.S. government protects its employees from playing the negative-sum game of active management.

Labor also dominates stories of elite income at the next rung down. Although only three hedge fund managers took home over $1 billion in 2017, more than twenty-five took home $100 million or more, and $10 million incomes are so common that they do not make the papers. Even only modestly elite finance workers now receive huge paydays. According to one survey, a portfolio manager at a midsized hedge fund makes on average $2.4 million, and average Wall Street bonuses exploded from roughly $14,000 in 1985 to more than $180,000 in 2017, a year in which the average total salary for New York City’s 175,000 securities industry workers reached over $420,000. These sums reflect the fact that a typical investment bank disburses roughly half of its revenues after interest paid to its professional workers (making it a better three decades to be an elite banker than to be an owner of bank stocks). Elite managers in the real economy also do well. CEO incomes—the wages paid to top managerial labor—regularly reach seven figures; indeed, the average 2017 income of the CEO of an S&P 500 company was nearly $14 million. In a typical recent year the total compensation paid to the five highest-paid employees of each S&P 1500 firm (7,500 workers overall) might amount to 10 percent of S&P 1500 firms’ collective profits. These workers do not own the assets—the portfolios or the companies—that they manage. Their incomes constitute wages paid for managerial labor rather than a return on invested capital. The enormous paydays reflect what prominent business analysts recently called a war between talent and capital—a war that talent is winning.

My model here projects an 83 percent crash in late 2022. That’s perfectly in line with my Generational Spending Wave turning up again longer-term in 2023. But most of the damage should be seen by early 2020, when my four fundamental cycles still point down together. I would expect the S&P 500 (and the Dow) to be down around 75 percent by then and down 83 percent by late 2022. To go back to the original bubble origin in late 1994, the S&P would have to fall to 450 and the Dow to 3,800 . . . Do you want to sit through that scenario?

When playing a bear market, the same rules hold: You want to diversify your risks, especially knowing that collapses move even faster than rallies. You need to decide how much safe cash or near cash you want to hold to sleep at night and to handle financial emergencies, like the loss of your job or your house. Then decide how much to put into longer-term high-quality bonds, like those 30-year Treasuries and AAA corporates, but I think it’s still premature to make this move at the time of this writing, in August 2017. Then decide how much you want to put into a dollar bull fund or the ETF UUP, which tracks the U.S. dollar versus its six major trading partners. If you’re willing to risk part of your wealth, you can also bet on financial assets going down—from stocks to gold. Stocks are the one type of financial asset that goes down in either a deflationary crisis, like the 1930s, or an inflationary one, like the 1970s. So shorting stocks is the best way to prosper in the downturn, either way. But don’t leverage this bet. The markets are simply too volatile. You can short the stock market with no leverage by simply buying an ETF (exchange-traded fund) like the ProShares Short S&P 500 (NYSEArca: SH). It’s an inverse fund on the S&P 500, so if the index goes down 50 percent, you make 50 percent. The ProShares Ultrashort (NYSEArca: QID) is double short the NASDAQ 100, which is likely to get hit the worst. If you make this play, just do a half share, to avoid that two-times leverage (hold the other half in cash or short-term bonds). Direxion Daily Small Cap Bear 3X ETF (NYSEArca: TZA) is triple short the Russell 2000, which is also likely to lead on the way down. So buy only a one-third share of this one, to remain without leverage. (That means the money you allocate here should be one-third in TZA and two-thirds in cash, to offset the leverage.) And unlike the gold bugs, I see gold collapsing. It’s an inflation hedge, not a deflation hedge. If gold rallies back as high as $1,425—on my predicted bear-market rally—then it could easily drop to around $700 within a year. Your last decision is whether to risk some of your funds betting on gold’s downside, for the greatest potential returns. You can buy DB Gold Double Short ETN (NYSEArca: DZZ)—double short gold—at a half share, to offset the leverage, or just simply short GLD, the ETF that follows gold. There you have it. How to handle the coming crash.

在美股最簡單的方法就是買DIA（Dow Jones Index）、QQQ（Nasdaq Index）或是SPY（S＆P 500 Index），因為美股長期平均有每年7％到10％的回報

That being said, a great time to invest in an index like the S&P 500 is during a bear market. If stock prices have been falling for 6 months or more, and there is a lot of pessimism in the air, it might be a good time to invest some extra money into index funds.

Each ETF represents a certain index. So the ETF for the S&P 500 trades under the ticker SPY. The ETF for the DJIA trades under the ticker DIA. And the ETF for the Nasdaq 100 trades under the ticker QQQ. 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.

Today indexing is widely considered the safest and best way for most people to invest in the stock market. If you own the S&P 500 index, you are basically guaranteed to get the same long-term return of the U.S. large-cap stock market, less investment expenses.

Buying a stock index like the S&P 500 is a great way to get started investing. If you can, you should just buy some SPY and not look at it for the next 30 years. When you are indexing, it doesn't make any sense to check daily stock or index prices.

That being said, a great time to invest in an index like the S&P 500 is during a bear market.

First, he said, we need 30% in stocks (for instance, the S&P 500 or other indexes for further diversification in this basket).

If you’d invested in Icahn Enterprises from January 1, 2000, to July 31, 2014, you would have made a total return of 1,622%, compared with 73% on the S&P 500 index!

Between 2003 and 2012, S&P 500 companies spent 91 percent of their earnings on buybacks and dividends for shareholders. That leaves 9 percent to invest across the entire company, in everything from research and development to worker wages.

There's an easy way to own a piece of every Dividend Aristocrat: just buy some shares of NOBL. It is the ProShares S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats ETF. It trades just like a stock, and you can purchase it using any brokerage account.

John Allen Paulos, in his book, A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, reveals the highest correlation ever found to the S&P 500: It was the amount of butter produced in the country of Bangladesh. Apparently, between 1983 and 1993, when butter production was up 1 percent, the S&P 500 was up 2 percent the next year. Conversely, if butter production was down 10 percent, you could predict the S&P 500 would be down 20 percent.

Almost 500 billion Oreo cookies have been consumed since they were introduced in 1912.

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.

stubborn as our identity is, the concept of a single person extending from birth to death was always just a useful approximation. The person you are right now is not exactly the same as the person you were a year ago, or even a second ago. Your atoms are in slightly different locations, and some of your atoms might have been exchanged for new ones. (If you’re eating while reading, you might have more atoms now than you had a moment ago.) If we wanted to be more precise than usual, rather than talking about “you,” we should talk about “you at 5:00 p.m.,” “you at 5:01 p.m.,” and so on.

How many times have you started your workday with a schedule and by 10:00 A.M. you were already completely off track or behind? Or how many times have you written a “to do” list in the morning but then found that by 5:00 P.M. the list was even longer? How many times have you looked forward to a quiet weekend at home with the family then found that by Saturday morning you were inundated with errands and play dates and unforeseen calamities? But here’s the good news: there is a way out.

During the 1960s, senior executives in America typically made around twenty dollars for every dollar earned by a rank-and-file worker. Since then, that figure has climbed to 300-to-1 among S&P 500 companies, and in some cases it goes far higher than that. The US Chamber of Commerce managed to block all attempts to force disclosure of corporate pay ratios until 2015, when a weakened version of the rule was finally passed by the SEC in a strict party-line vote of three Democrats in favor and two Republicans opposed. In hunter-gatherer terms, these senior executives are claiming a disproportionate amount of food simply because they have the power to do so. A tribe like the !Kung would not permit that because it would represent a serious threat to group cohesion and survival, but that is not true for a wealthy country like the United States.

When the unemployment rate has been below average, the S&P 500 is up 6 percent annually, much lower than the long-term average of almost 10 percent per year in that time. When the unemployment rate has been above average, the annual performance of stocks jumps to over 16 percent per year. An unfortunate truth of the stock market is that the best time to buy is when conditions are at their worst.

A steady upward trajectory is the only logical path for the stock market because shares are proportionate ownerships in profit-making businesses, and over time profit accumulates.

Mount Elgin students had less than one hour for recreation in a day that stretched from 5:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m.

Some smart people came up with the idea of the ETF ("exchange-traded fund"). An ETF trades just like a stock. You can buy or sell it all day long in your brokerage account. Each ETF represents a certain index. So the ETF for the S&P 500 trades under the ticker SPY. The ETF for the DJIA trades under the ticker DIA. And the ETF for the Nasdaq 100 trades under the ticker QQQ.

Only 11 percent of the companies that made up the Fortune 500 in 1955 are on the list today The average age of a company on the S&P 500 Index has fallen from sixty years in the 1950s to less than twenty years currently

Coke is a special kind of dividend stock. It is a Dividend Aristocrat, one of an elite group of companies that have raised their dividends every year for the past 25 years. Other Dividend Aristocrats include the Colgate-Palmolive Company, Johnson & Johnson, and McDonald's. There's an easy way to own a piece of every Dividend Aristocrat: just buy some shares of NOBL. It is the ProShares S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats ETF. It trades just like a stock, and you can purchase it using any brokerage account.

Types of Funds MUTUAL FUNDS. A group of stocks tracking a particular part of the stock market that can be traded only when the stock market is open. They are actively managed, meaning that you’ll pay an extra fee for an “expert” to pick stocks for you. EXCHANGE-TRADED FUNDS (ETFs). A group of stocks tracking a particular part of the stock market that can be traded at any time, even when the stock market is closed. Typically, ETFs are cheaper than a mutual fund, because they are passively managed (no manager to pay). INDEX FUNDS. One of the most popular choices in the personal finance community, an index fund is a mutual fund or an ETF that’s designed to track a particular part of the stock market, such as the S&P 500. I’m index funds’ biggest fan: they are diversified, extremely low in fees, and more stable than individual stocks.

. The Itinerary Friday 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.: Arrivals 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.: Cocktail hour/hors d’oeuvres 7:00 p.m.: Dinner on the deck Saturday 8:00 a.m.: Yoga by the pool/continental breakfast 10:00 a.m. to noon: Shopping in town Noon to 5:00 p.m.: Beach, lunch, pool 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.: Get ready for dinner; cocktails and snacks 7:30 p.m.: Dinner at Nautilus (suggested colors: black and/or white) 10:00 p.m.: Maxxtone at the Chicken Box! Sunday Free morning, continental breakfast Noon: Lunch at Galley Beach (suggested colors: hot pink or orange) 2:00 p.m.: Sail aboard Endeavor 7:00 p.m.: Pizza party 8:30 p.m.: Ice cream truck and fireworks on the beach Monday Departures

Inspired by Newton, I took a similar, if perhaps less extreme, approach to writing this book. I blocked off eight hours a day to write: from 5:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M., five days a week. The basic rule was no e-mail, no calls, no appointments, and no interruptions until after 1:00 P.M. I didn’t always achieve it, but the discipline made a big difference. I set my e-mail bounceback to explain that I was in “monk mode” until after the book was complete. It is difficult to overstate how much freedom I found in this approach. By creating space to explore, think, and write, I not only got my book done faster but gained control over how I spent the rest of my time.

But as he approached fifty, Kenny yearned to do something different. Someone told him that More Than Money—the same inheritors group Jeff Weissglass got involved with—was hiring an executive director. He landed the position and, in short order, discovered that his pregnant teens had at least one thing in common with these young heirs and heiresses: Society defined and stereotyped both groups by how much money they did or didn’t have. The foundations that funded adolescent pregnancy care assumed the girls were getting knocked up because they were poor, “which was not necessarily true,” Kenny says, whereas the inheritors were pegged as “entitled and spoiled and lazy—and there’s no basis for that.” The anti-inheritor bias proved so toxic that some of Kenny’s former colleagues shunned him after he took the new job. “They’re like, ‘What a sellout! What a cop-out! Why would you do that?’ ” he recalls. “What does it say about our culture that everyone wants to win the lottery in some way, shape, or form, and there’s a whole segment of our culture that hates people who win the big payout.” This is indeed a paradox. Oscar Mayer heir Chuck Collins gave away his $500,000 inheritance in 1986, when he was a young man. (Invested in the S&P 500, it would be worth about $14 million today.) He has since dedicated himself, through the Institute for Policy Studies, to educating the American public about inequality. His memoir, Born on Third Base, includes the following scene: Speaking to a crowd of about 350 people, he asks who among them feels rage toward the wealthiest 1 percent. Almost everyone raises a hand. He then asks, “How many of you wish you were in the wealthiest 1 percent?” They laugh, but again, almost everyone. “People are envious,” Kenny says. “And what you end up doing with envy is demeaning whoever it is that you envy, because they have what we think we deserve.” During his time at More Than Money, Kenny grew friendly with Paul Schervish, then the director of the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy, and when Schervish offered him the associate director job, Kenny jumped. He’d seen how inheritors grappled with their unearned fortunes. Now he wanted to better understand their parents. Havens was the numbers guy “and I was in charge of: ‘I’d like to know what these people are thinking, and nobody ever asks them.’ 

Foster and Kaplan’s somewhat paradoxical finding that as a group, the long-term survivors in the S&P 500 underperformed the average. It is the constant entry of newcomers that keeps the average up.

your brain has around 100 billion neurons, averaging around 5’000 connections each, which is similar to having 500 trillion microprocessors wired up together in a single network. The potential combinations of these neurons firing or not, is at least 10 to the millionth power – more than all the atoms in the known universe.

You can just buy the ProShares S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats ETF. The ticker is NOBL, and this ETF (exchange-traded fund) trades just like a stock. You can purchase it using any brokerage account. Today NOBL trades at $62.65 per share. So if you have $1,000, you can buy 15.96 shares of NOBL (1000 divided by 62.65). You’ll pay an expense ratio of 0.35% to own this ETF. What this means is that if you invest $1,000 in this ETF, you will pay them $3.50 every year for the privilege of owning their ETF.

One of his first steps was to invite Fredric Wertham to his office for an interview that lasted from 5:00 p.m. until midnight. It wasn’t long before Leibowitz—imagining himself as a jury member listening to “the erudite doctor”—concluded that twelve ordinary men would be utterly “bewildered by the technical terminology of the psychiatrist” and view the concept of “catathymic crisis” as “nothing but psychiatric double talk.” Indeed, just a few years earlier, Wertham’s testimony as an expert witness had failed to save the life of Albert Fish, a man so extravagantly deranged that even some jurors who voted for his conviction believed he was insane. By the time their lengthy conference was over, Leibowitz, despite his high regard for “the sincere and capable doctor,” had eliminated him as a possible defense witness.2

Investors tend to pour more money into funds as the market rises. The managers use that new cash to buy more of the stocks they already own, driving prices to even more dangerous heights. If fund investors ask for their money back when the market drops, the managers may need to sell stocks to cash them out. Just as the funds are forced to buy stocks at inflated prices in a rising market, they become forced sellers as stocks get cheap again. Many portfolio managers get bonuses for beating the market, so they obsessively measure their returns against benchmarks like the S & P 500 index. If a company gets added to an index, hundreds of funds compulsively buy it. (If they don’t, and that stock then does well, the managers look foolish; on the other hand, if they buy it and it does poorly, no one will blame them.) Increasingly, fund managers are expected to specialize. Just as in medicine the general practitioner has given way to the pediatric allergist and the geriatric otolaryngologist, fund managers must buy only “small growth” stocks, or only “mid-sized value” stocks, or nothing but “large blend” stocks.6 If a company gets too big, or too small, or too cheap, or an itty bit too expensive, the fund has to sell it—even if the manager loves the stock. So there’s no reason you can’t

Matins (which Adso sometimes refers to by the older expression “Vigiliae”) Between 2:30 and 3:00 in the morning. Lauds (which in the most ancient tradition were called “Matutini” or “Matins”) Between 5:00 and 6:00 in the morning, in order to end at dawn. Prime Around 7:30, shortly before daybreak. Terce Around 9:00. Sext Noon (in a monastery where the monks did not work in the fields, it was also the hour of the midday meal in winter). Nones Between 2:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon. Vespers Around 4:30, at sunset (the Rule prescribes eating supper before dark). Compline Around 6:00 (before 7:00, the monks go to bed). The calculation is based on the fact that in northern Italy at the end of November, the sun rises around 7:30 A.M. and sets around 4:40 P.M. Prologue

As a wholesale bank, J. P. Morgan and Company would take deposits only from important clients—large corporations, other banks, foreign governments. Like other private New York banks, it rejected deposits from the general public and accepted money only from wealthy people with proper introductions. It paid no interest on deposits of less than $7,500 and held no deposit of less than $1,000.

Consider a conversation I had with a white friend. She was telling me about a "white) couple she knew who had just moved to New Orleans and bought a house for a mere twenty-five thousand dollars. "Of course," she immediately added, "they also had to buy a gun, and Joan is afraid to leave the house." I immediately knew they had bought a home in a black neighborhood. This was a moment of white racial bonding between this couple who shared the story of racial danger and my friend, and then between my friend and me, as she repeated the story. Through this tale, the four of us fortified familiar images of the horror of black space and drew boundaries between "us" and "them" without ever having to directly name race or openly express our disdain for black space. Notice that the need for a gun is a key part of this story--it would not have the degree of social capital it holds if the emphasis were on the price of the house alone. Rather, the story’s emotional power rests on why a house would be that cheap--because it is in a black neighborhood where white people literally might not get out alive. Yet while very negative and stereotypical representations of blacks were reinforced in that exchange, not naming race provided plausible deniability. In fact, in preparing to share this incident, I texted my friend and asked her the name of the city her friends had moved to. I also wanted to confirm my assumption that she was talking about a black neighborhood. I share the text exchange here: "Hey, what city did you say your friends had bought a house in for $25,000?" "New Orleans. They said they live in a very bad neighborhood and they each have to have a gun to protect themselves. I wouldn’t pay 5 cents for that neighborhood." "I assume it’s a black neighborhood?" "Yes. You get what you pay for. I’d rather pay $500,00 and live somewhere where I wasn’t afraid." "I wasn’t asking because I want to live there. I’m writing about this in my book, the way that white people talk about race without ever coming out and talking about race." "I wouldn’t want you to live there it’s too far away from me!" Notice that when I simply ask what city the house is in, she repeats the story about the neighborhood being so bad that her friends need guns. When I ask if the neighborhood is black, she is comfortable confirming that it is. But when I tell her that I am interested in how whites talks about race without talking about race, she switches the narrative. Now her concern is about not wanting me to live so far away. This is a classic example of aversive racism: holding deep racial disdain that surfaces in daily discourse but not being able to admit it because the disdain conflicts with our self-image and professed beliefs. Readers may be asking themselves, "But if the neighborhood is really dangerous, why is acknowledging this danger a sign of racism?" Research in implicit bias has shown that perceptions of criminal activity are influenced by race. White people will perceive danger simply by the presence of black people; we cannot trust our perceptions when it comes to race and crimes. But regardless of whether the neighborhood is actually more or less dangerous than other neighborhoods, what is salient about this exchange is how it functions racially and what that means for the white people engaged in it. For my friend and me, this conversation did not increase our awareness of the danger of some specific neighborhood. Rather, the exchange reinforced our fundamental beliefs about black people. (p. 44-45)

As it happened, Ramsey Elston had returned home two nights before. He told his wife that he didn’t know any Jebediah Dickinson, and if a Jebediah Dickinson didn’t exist for him, then surely a $500 debt couldn’t exist. Fern knew he was not telling her the truth.

FINALLY—YOU ARE A SWEEPSTAKES WINNER! I don’t know about you, but I enter all those darned magazine company sweepstakes. I go for the Reader’s Digest sweepstakes and I buy my weekly lottery tickets—after all, as a character in the movie Let It Ride said, “You could be walking around lucky and not know it.” In a lot of years, though, I have gone winless. The guys with the balloons and the giant-sized check have not shown up at my door. So the headline FINALLY—YOU ARE A SWEEPSTAKES WINNER! got me. I read that letter. And if you send a letter to every one of your customers with that headline on it, every one of them will read it. What should the letter say? Here’s an example, courtesy of the late, great copywriter, my friend Gary Halbert: Dear Valued Customer:    I am writing to tell you that your name was entered into a drawing here at my store and you have won a valuable prize.    As you know, my store, ABC Jewelry, specializes in low-cost, top-quality diamond rings and diamond earrings. Well, guess what? The other day we got in a small shipment of fake diamonds that are made with a new process that makes them look so real they almost fooled me!    Anyway, I don’t want to sell these fakes because they could cause a lot of trouble for the pawnbrokers around town. So I’ve decided to give them away to some of my good customers whose names were selected at random by having my wife, Janet, put all the names in a jar and pull out the winners.    So, you’re one of the winners—and all you’ve got to do is drop in sometime before 5:00 P.M. Friday and you’ll have a 1-karat “diamond” that looks so good it’ll knock your eyes out! Sincerely, John Jones P.S.: After 5:00 P.M. Friday, I reserve the right to give your prize to someone else. Thank you.

and even Saturn can not impress the S & P500 index.

This may seem shrill, but in the United States, the birthplace of index investing, the trend is now stark, entrenched, and accelerating. Over the past decade, about 80 cents of every dollar that has gone into the US investment industry has ended up at Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock. As a result, the combined stake in S&P 500 companies held by the Big Three has quadrupled over the past two decades, from about 5 percent in in 1998 to north of 20 percent today.

Meet one of the leading creative directors Roger Hooks, Jr. He is a renowned “S&P 500 Creative Executive”, who has successfully established his name in the creative industry. He possesses a boasted portfolio in package design of Pacific-Rim makers of entertainment PC peripherals and add-on cards with category best sellers up in down the aisles of Fry's Electronics, Micro Center, Ritz Camera, Best Buy, and Good Guys in their brick-and Mortar Hey-Day. Also, he is a Platinum Award winner in copywriting, a Gold Award winner in advertising campaigns, and a Gold Award winner in special events. So, if you are searching for a professional creative strategist, you must contact Roger Hooks, Jr. Feel free to reach out.

Inspired by Sharpe’s work, Fouse in 1969 recommended that Mellon launch a passive fund that would try to replicate only one of the big stock market indices, like the S&P 500 of America’s biggest companies. It got nixed by Mellon’s management. In the spring of 1970, he then proposed a fund that would systematically invest according to a dividend-based model devised by John Burr Williams—who had nearly two decades earlier inspired Markowitz’s work—but that too was summarily squashed. “Goddammit Fouse, you’re trying to turn my business into a science,” his boss told him.14

However, inspired by the fund, WFIA in November 1973 launched a simpler fund open to all the bank’s institutional clients—seeded with $5 million from Wells Fargo’s own pension fund and an equal amount from Illinois Bell’s retirement system—that would simply seek to mimic the performance of the S&P 500.* At the time, this accounted for about two-thirds of the entire US stock market anyway,20 and the index was “capitalization-weighted”—in other words, the weighting of each company was according to its overall stock market value, and the fund would just have to buy an equal number of shares in each company. By 1976, Samsonite folded the money in its original vehicle into WFIA’s S&P 500 index fund.

The three pioneering efforts weren’t perfect index funds, in that they didn’t buy every single stock in the S&P 500. Doing so would be too costly at a time when Wall Street firms still charged fixed commissions, and the tradability of smaller stocks in the blue-chip index was still poor. They were also simply too small to be able to buy all the stocks. To varying degrees, they replicated the benchmark through a process known as sampling—picking a broad but smaller subset of stocks that would best match the overall index.

My hair stylist, Jackie, had wanted for a long time to give me shoulder-length Fulani braids with beads. You have got a beautiful brow, she always said. I always said no. It felt too bold. It was easier just to flat iron my hair and keep things low key. But this time I called up the salon and said to Tamara, who answered the phone, “Tell Jackie I surrender.” Tamara passed on the message right away. I heard Jackie whoop in the background. We made an appointment for the following Thursday, at 10:00 a.m. The Action Committee would meet on the same day, at 5:00 p.m. I booked the appointment with Jackie because I did not want to spend the day at my desk, in suspense. I wanted Edil to be the one in a state of suspense, wondering about where I might be.

Whatever the reason, the existence of some persistent investment factors is today accepted by almost every (if not all) financial economist and investor. In an ingenious bit of marketing, factors are often called “smart beta.” Sharpe himself grew to hate the term, as it implies that all other forms of beta are dumb.10 Most financial academics prefer the term “risk premia,” to more accurately reflect the fact that they think these factors primarily yield an investment premium from taking some kind of risk—even if they cannot always agree what the precise risk is. An important milestone was when Fama and his frequent collaborator Ken French—another Chicago finance professor who would later also join DFA—in 1992 published a paper with the oblique title “The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns.”11 It was a bombshell. In what would become known as the three-factor model, Fama and French used data on companies listed on the NYSE, the American Stock Exchange, and the Nasdaq from 1963 to 1990 and showed that both value (the tendency of cheap stocks to outperform expensive ones) and size (the tendency of smaller stocks to outperform bigger ones) were distinct factors from the broader market factor—the beta. Although Fama and French’s paper termed these factors as rewards for taking extra risks, coming from the father of the efficient-markets hypothesis, it was a signal event in the history of financial economics.12 Since then academics have identified a panoply of factors, with varying degrees of durability, strength, and acceptance. Of course, factors do not always work. They can go through long fallow stretches where they underperform the market. Value stocks, for example, suffered a miserable bout of performance in the dotcom bubble, when investors wanted to buy only trendy technology stocks. And to DFA’s chagrin, after small caps enjoyed a robust year in DFA’s first year of existence, they would then undergo a long, painful seven-year period of trailing dramatically behind the S&P 500.13 DFA managed to keep growing, losing very few clients, partly because it had always stressed to them that stretches like this could happen. But it was an uncomfortable period that led to many awkward conversations with clients.

Most’s eclectic background also provided the spark behind the invention of what would become known as the ETF. During his travels around the Pacific, he had appreciated the efficiency of how traders would buy and sell warehouse receipts of commodities, rather than the more cumbersome physical vats of coconut oil, barrels of crude, or ingots of gold. This opened up a panoply of opportunities for creative financial engineers. “You store a commodity and you get a warehouse receipt and you can finance on that warehouse receipt. You can sell it, do a lot of things with it. Because you don’t want to be moving the merchandise back and forth all the time, so you keep it in place and you simply transfer the warehouse receipt,” he later recalled.19 Most’s ingenious idea was to, after a fashion, mimic this basic structure. The Amex could create a kind of legal warehouse where it could place the S&P 500 stocks, and then create and list shares in the warehouse itself for people to trade. The new warehouse-cum-fund would take advantage of the growth and electronic evolution in portfolio trading—the simultaneous buying and selling of big baskets of stocks first pioneered by Wells Fargo two decades earlier—and a little-known aspect of mutual funds: They can do “in kind” transactions, exchanging shares in a fund for a proportional amount of the stocks it contains, rather than cash. Or an investor can gather the correct proportion of the underlying stocks and exchange them for shares in the fund. Stock exchange “specialists”—the trading firms on the floor of the exchange that match buyers and sellers—would be authorized to be able to create or redeem these shares according to demand. They could take advantage of any differences that might open up between the price of the “warehouse” and the stock it contained, an arbitrage opportunity that should help keep it trading in line with its assets. This elegant creation/redemption process would also get around the logistical challenges of money coming in and out continuously throughout the day—one of Bogle’s main practical concerns. In basic terms, investors can either trade shares of the warehouse between themselves, or go to the warehouse and exchange their shares in it for a slice of the stocks it holds. Or they can turn up at the warehouse with a suitable bundle of stocks and exchange them for shares in the warehouse. Moreover, because no money changes hands when shares in the warehouse are created or redeemed, capital gains tax can be delayed until the investor actually sells their shares—a side effect that has proven vital to the growth of ETFs in the United States. Only when an ETF is actually sold will investors have to pay any capital gains taxes due.

The S&P 500 index rose to almost 30 times earnings; tech stocks went wild.

Churchill is a creature of habit, rising each morning at 7:30 in his official residence at 10 Downing Street, just a half mile up the road from the Houses of Parliament. He works in bed until 11:00, whereupon he bathes, pours a weak Johnnie Walker Red scotch and water, and then works some more.3 He sips Pol Roger champagne with lunch at 1:00 p.m. Whenever possible, this is followed by a game of backgammon with Clementine at 3:30. He takes a ninety-minute nap at 5:00 p.m. Arising, Churchill bathes a second time, works for an hour, eats a sumptuous dinner at 8:00 p.m., and smokes a post-dinner cigar with a vintage Hine brandy. After that, he goes back to his study for more work until well past midnight. Unless

The superior performance of the original S&P 500 firms surprises most investors. But value investors (as described in Chapter 12) know that growth stocks often are priced too high, and excitement over their prospects often induces investors to pay too high a price. Profitable firms that do not catch investors’ eyes are often underpriced. If investors reinvest the dividends of such firms, they are buying undervalued shares that will add significantly to their return.

Lion Daily Schedule 5:30 a.m.: Wake up, no snooze. 5:45 a.m.: Breakfast: high-protein, low-carb. 6:15 a.m. to 7:00 a.m.: Big-picture conceptualizing and organizing. Morning meditation. 7:00 a.m. to 7:30 a.m.: Sex. If you have kids who need help getting ready for school, make it a quickie. 7:30 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.: Cool shower, get dressed, interact with friends or family before heading to work. 9:00 a.m.: Small snack: 250 calories, 25 percent protein, 75 percent carbs. Ideally, have it at a breakfast meeting. 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.: Personal interactions, morning meetings, phone calls, emails, strategic problem solving. 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.: Balanced lunch. Go outside for sunlight exposure, if possible. 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.: Creative thinking time. Listen to music, catch up on reading and journaling. In a workplace setting, lead or attend brainstorming meetings. 5:00 to 6:00 p.m.: Exercise, preferably outdoors, followed by a cool shower. 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.: Dinner. Keep it balanced—equal parts protein, carbs, and healthy fats. A carb-heavy meal like pasta might make you crash. 7:30 p.m.: Last call for alcohol. A drink after this hour will knock you out. 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.: Socialize on the town, or connect with loved ones online while relaxing at home. You bought yourself an extra hour, so make the most of it! 10:00 p.m.: Be in your home environment by now. Turn off all screens to begin the downshift before bed. 10:30 p.m.: Go to sleep.

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.

All the innovation workshops in the world would not have transformed P&G if A. G. Lafley had not designated a chief innovation officer, increased the number of design managers by more than 500 percent, built the P&G Innovation Gym, created a new approach to partnering with the outside world (“Connect and Develop”), and elevated innovation and design to core strategies of the company.

Many legacy institutions (like Kodak) once were able to make a great living resting on their laurels. According to Yale professor Richard Foster, in the 1920s the average life span of an S&P 500 company was sixty-seven years.14 Not anymore. Today the final three Ds in our chain reaction can disassemble companies and disrupt industries almost overnight, reducing the average life span of a twenty-first-century S&P 500 company to only fifteen years. Ten years from now, according to research done at the Babson School of Business, more than 40 percent of today’s top companies will no longer exist.15 “By 2020,” comments Foster, “more than three quarters of the S&P 500 will be companies that we have not heard of yet.

sixty-seven years.14 Not anymore. Today the final three Ds in our chain reaction can disassemble companies and disrupt industries almost overnight, reducing the average life span of a twenty-first-century S&P 500 company to only fifteen years. Ten years from now, according to research done at the Babson School of Business, more than 40 percent of today’s top companies will no longer