“
But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells await them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten from top to bottom.
”
”
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
“
The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value.
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”
Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
“
The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago.
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”
Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
“
Nearly a Valediction"
You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I’ve ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that alone
again, inventing life left after you.
I don’t want to remember you as that
four o’clock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a foreign currency.
The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me.
You’ve grown into your skin since then; you’ve grown
into the space you measure with someone
you can love back without a caveat.
While I love somebody I learn to live
with through the downpulled winter days’ routine
wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine-
assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust-
balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust
that what comes next comes after what came first.
She’ll never be a story I make up.
You were the one I didn’t know where to stop.
If I had blamed you, now I could forgive
you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox-
imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind,
want where it no way ought to be, defined
by where it was, and was and was until
the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled
through one cheek’s nap, a syllable, a tear,
was never blame, whatever I wished it were.
You were the weather in my neighborhood.
You were the epic in the episode.
You were the year poised on the equinox.
”
”
Marilyn Hacker (Winter Numbers: Poems)
“
But you just watch, little girl. I'm goin' to show 'em. In five years they'll come crawlin' to me on their bellies. I don't know what it is, but I got a kind of feel for the big money.
”
”
John Dos Passos (The Big Money (U.S.A., #3))
“
Reg NMS was intended to create equality of opportunity in the U.S. stock market. Instead it institutionalized a more pernicious inequality. A small class of insiders with the resources to create speed were now allowed to preview the market and trade on what they had seen.
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”
Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
“
Morgan then formed the U.S. Steel Corporation, combining Carnegie’s corporation with others. He sold stocks and bonds for $1,300,000,000 (about 400 million more than the combined worth of the companies) and took a fee of 150 million for arranging the consolidation. How could dividends be paid to all those stockholders and bondholders? By making sure Congress passed tariffs keeping out foreign steel; by closing off competition and maintaining the price at $28 a ton; and by working 200,000 men twelve hours a day for wages that barely kept their families alive. And so it went, in industry after industry—shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries of the “welfare state.
”
”
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
“
35% Vanguard U.S. Bond Index (Symbol VBMFX) 35% Vanguard Total U.S. Stock Market Index (Symbol VTSMX) 30% Vanguard Total International Stock Market Index (Symbol VGTSX)
”
”
Andrew Hallam (Millionaire Teacher: The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School)
“
In 1950, individual investors held 92 percent of U.S. stocks and institutional investors held 8 percent. The roles have flipped, with institutions, now holding 70 percent, predominating, and individuals, now holding 30 percent, playing a secondary role. Simply put, these institutional agents now collectively hold firm voting control over Corporate America. (I
”
”
John C. Bogle (The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation)
“
But do you know what happened during this period? Where do we begin ... 1.3 million Americans died while fighting nine major wars. Roughly 99.9% of all companies that were created went out of business. Four U.S. presidents were assassinated. 675,000 Americans died in a single year from a flu pandemic. 30 separate natural disasters killed at least 400 Americans each. 33 recessions lasted a cumulative 48 years. The number of forecasters who predicted any of those recessions rounds to zero. The stock market fell more than 10% from a recent high at least 102 times. Stocks lost a third of their value at least 12 times. Annual inflation exceeded 7% in 20 separate years. The words “economic pessimism” appeared in newspapers at least 29,000 times, according to Google.
”
”
Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money)
“
To build wealth it didn’t matter when you bought U.S. stocks, just that you bought them and kept buying them. It didn’t matter if valuations were high or low. It didn’t matter if you were in a bull market or a bear market. All that mattered was that you kept buying.
”
”
Nick Maggiulli (Just Keep Buying: Proven ways to save money and build your wealth)
“
Printing dollars at home means higher inflation in China, higher food prices in Egypt and stock bubbles in Brazil. Printing money means that U.S. debt is devalued so foreign creditors get paid back in cheaper dollars. The devaluation means higher unemployment in developing economies as their exports become more expensive for Americans. The resulting inflation also means higher prices for inputs needed in developing economies like copper, corn, oil and wheat. Foreign countries have begun to fight back against U.S.-caused inflation through subsidies, tariffs and capital controls; the currency war is expanding fast.
”
”
James Rickards (Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis)
“
Would you believe me if I told you that there’s an investment strategy that a seven-year-old could understand, will take you fifteen minutes of work per year, outperform 90 percent of finance professionals in the long run, and make you a millionaire over time? Well, it is true, and here it is: Start by saving 15 percent of your salary at age 25 into a 401(k) plan, an IRA, or a taxable account (or all three). Put equal amounts of that 15 percent into just three different mutual funds: A U.S. total stock market index fund An international total stock market index fund A U.S. total bond market index fund. Over time, the three funds will grow at different rates, so once per year you’ll adjust their amounts so that they’re again equal. (That’s the fifteen minutes per year, assuming you’ve enrolled in an automatic savings plan.) That’s it; if you can follow this simple recipe throughout your working career, you will almost certainly beat out most professional investors. More importantly, you’ll likely accumulate enough savings to retire comfortably.
”
”
William J. Bernstein (If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly)
“
If the stock market continues to advance, we know that inequality will increase, for capital gains on equities accrue disproportionately to the top income brackets.
”
”
Robert J. Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World Book 70))
“
the yen upturn coincided exactly with the start of a topping process in global stocks. By first quarter 2008, the yen had risen to the highest level in three years against the U.S. dollar as global stocks tumbled.
”
”
John J. Murphy (The Visual Investor: How to Spot Market Trends (Wiley Trading Book 395))
“
People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything. And all this mental thrashing and tossing
”
”
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
“
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.
”
”
Taylor Larimore (The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing)
“
In early October 2008, after the U.S. government had stepped in to say it would, in effect, absorb all the losses in the financial system and prevent any big Wall Street firm from failing, Burry had started to buy stocks with enthusiasm, for the first time in years.
”
”
Michael Lewis (The Big Short)
“
People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were.
”
”
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
“
The Algo Wars were leaving a path of destruction in their wake. “HFT algos reduce the value of resting orders and increase the value of how fast orders can be placed and cancelled,” wrote Nanex researcher Eric Hunsader. “This results in the illusion of liquidity. We can’t understand why this is allowed to continue, because at the core, it is pure manipulation.
”
”
Scott Patterson (Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market)
“
As we’ll see, the 4% Roman rate of return is about the same as the aggregate return on capital (when stocks and bonds are considered together) in the U.S. in the twentieth century, and perhaps even a bit more than the aggregate return expected in the next century. (The 4% Roman rate was gold-based, so the return was a real, that is, after-inflation, return.) The
”
”
William J. Bernstein (The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio)
“
The morning of the offering, NYSE officials on the floor passed out silver bells emblazoned with NYX on the handle. Traders were told to ring them with abandon at the open. While they were billed as a shiny memento, their true purpose—to drown out the expected chorus of boos and catcalls from disaffected specialists—spoke volumes about the turmoil behind the scenes.
”
”
Scott Patterson (Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market)
“
Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were.
”
”
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
“
Unlike most other health-care systems in the world, health care in the United States is largely profit driven. The reconstruction of the U.S. medical system around managed care led to the closure of hundreds of hospitals across the country,697 leaving many cities with little surge capacity to deal with an abnormal influx of patients.698 HMO corporate stock profiles can ill afford to provide extra beds and ventilators for some indeterminate future surge of patients.
”
”
Michael Greger (How to Survive a Pandemic)
“
Alan and his wife had worked all their lives, and managed to sock away a million dollars for retirement. But four months earlier he’d gotten the idea that, despite having no experience in the markets, he should buy a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of GM stock, based on reports that the U.S. government might bail out the auto industry. He was convinced it was a no-lose investment. After his trade went through, the media reported that the bailout might not happen after all. The market sold off GM and the stock price fell. But Alan imagined the thrill of winning big. It felt so real he could taste it. He held firm. The stock fell again, and again, and kept dropping until finally Alan decided to sell, at a big loss. There was worse to come. When the next news cycle suggested that the bailout would happen after all, Alan got excited all over again and invested another hundred thousand dollars, buying more stock at the lower price. But the same thing happened: the bailout started looking uncertain.
”
”
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.
”
”
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
“
There was also a carton of paperbacks entitled America the TruthWay: The Communist-Jewish Conspiracy Against Our United States. Greg did better with this paperback, printed on cheap pulp stock, than with all the Bibles put together. It told all about how the Rothschilds and the Roosevelts and the Greenblatts were taking over the U.S. economy and the U.S. government. There were graphs showing how the Jews related directly to the Communist-Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyite axis, and from there to the Antichrist Itself.
”
”
Stephen King (The Dead Zone)
“
People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly
”
”
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
“
The orders resting on BATS were typically just the 100-share minimum required for an order to be at the front of any price queue, as their only purpose was to tease information out of investors. The HFT firms posted these tiny orders on BATS—orders to buy or sell 100 shares of basically every stock traded in the U.S. market—not because they actually wanted to buy and sell the stocks but because they wanted to find out what investors wanted to buy and sell before they did it. BATS, unsurprisingly, had been created by high-frequency traders.
”
”
Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
“
After lunch we went to have our feet nibbled by hundreds of tiny fish. Then, after that- just kidding, I'll explain. The onsen offers a skin treatment where you dip your feet into a shallow pool stocked with Garra rufa, also known as doctor fish, which perform primitive exfoliation by slurping dead skin off your feet with their tiny jaws. This is illegal in most U.S. states, where health authorities believe that sharing fish between customers is as sanitary as sharing unsterilized tattoo needles. I find this reasoning persuasive. Naturally, we all went and joined a random stranger at the fish pool.
I'd heard of this fish treatment before, probably from a "hey, you've got to see this" link passed around online, and somehow I had the idea that it involved the occasional wayward fish sidling up to your foot. Try dozens, hundreds, all gnawing simultaneously. You can feel the little bites. At first it provoked a deep-seated piranha fear which I quelled by sitting still, taking deep breaths, and telling myself I had nothing to worry about other than blood-borne diseases. After that, it proved quite relaxing, although I did give up before my allotted fifteen minutes and went back to the painful reflexology pool where you walk around barefoot on jagged rocks. My feet are still baby soft, but when I need my next treatment, I'll post to Craigslist. Need feet nibbled. Will pay.
”
”
Matthew Amster-Burton (Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo)
“
So Germany can’t pay France and Britain and France and Britain can’t pay America because the Gold Standard says money = gold and America already has all the gold. But America won’t forgive the loans so Germany starts printing dumpsters full of money just to keep up appearances until one U.S. dollar is worth six hundred and thirty BILLION marks. There’s so much cash, kids are building money forts it is tragic/pimp as hell. Britain does convince America to go easy and lower the interest rates on the loans but in order to do that America has to lower ALL THE INTEREST RATES so everybody back in the U.S. is like “SWEET FREE MONEY BETTER USE IT TO BUY STOCKS” and they just go nuts the whole stock market goes completely bonkers shoe-shine boys are giving out hot tips hobos have stock portfolios and the dudes in charge are TERRIFIED because they know that at this point the market is just running on bullshit and dreams and real soon it’s gonna get to that part in the dream where you’re naked at your tuba recital and you never learned to play the tuba. There are other people who are like “NAW THE MARKET WILL BE GREAT FOREVER PUT ALL YOUR MONEY IN IT” but you know what those people are? WRONG. WRONG LIKE A DOG EATING MAYONNAISE. The market goes down like a clown and a bunch of people lose a bunch of money. It happens on a Tuesday and everybody calls it Black Tuesday and then it happens again on Black Thursday also Black Monday. Everyone is so poor they have even pawned their creativity.
”
”
Cory O'Brien (George Washington Is Cash Money: A No-Bullshit Guide to the United Myths of America)
“
Hitler had studied America from afar, both envying and admiring it, and attributed its achievements to its Aryan stock. He praised the country’s near genocide of Native Americans and the exiling to reservations of those who had survived. He was pleased that the United States had “shot down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” He saw the U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 as “a model for his program of racial purification,” historian Jonathan Spiro wrote. The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.
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Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
“
The case for bitcoin as a cash item on a balance sheet is very compelling for anyone with a time horizon extending beyond four years. Whether or not fiat authorities like it, bitcoin is now in free-market competition with many other assets for the world’s cash balances. It is a competition bitcoin will win or lose in the market, not by the edicts of economists, politicians, or bureaucrats. If it continues to capture a growing share of the world’s cash balances, it continues to succeed. As it stands, bitcoin’s role as cash has a very large total addressable market. The world has around $90 trillion of broad fiat money supply, $90 trillion of sovereign bonds, $40 trillion of corporate bonds, and $10 trillion of gold. Bitcoin could replace all of these assets on balance sheets, which would be a total addressable market cap of $230 trillion. At the time of writing, bitcoin’s market capitalization is around $700 billion, or around 0.3% of its total addressable market. Bitcoin could also take a share of the market capitalization of other semihard assets which people have resorted to using as a form of saving for the future. These include stocks, which are valued at around $90 trillion; global real estate, valued at $280 trillion; and the art market, valued at several trillion dollars. Investors will continue to demand stocks, houses, and works of art, but the current valuations of these assets are likely highly inflated by the need of their holders to use them as stores of value on top of their value as capital or consumer goods. In other words, the flight from inflationary fiat has distorted the U.S. dollar valuations of these assets beyond any sane level. As more and more investors in search of a store of value discover bitcoin’s superior intertemporal salability, it will continue to acquire an increasing share of global cash balances.
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Saifedean Ammous (The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization)
“
Barrel shrouds were listed. Barrel shrouds are just pieces of metal that go over the barrel so you don’t accidentally touch the hot part. They became an instantaneous felony too. Collapsible stocks make it so you can adjust your rifle to different-size shooters, that way a tall guy and his short wife can shoot the same gun. Nope. EVIL FEATURE! Pistol grip sounds scary, but it’s just a handle. It’s simply how you hold it. Having your wrist straight or at an angle doesn’t make the weapon any more dangerous. This nonsense has been a running joke in the gun community ever since the ban passed. When U.S. Representative Carolyn McCarthy was asked by a reporter what a barrel shroud was, she replied, “I think, I believe it’s a shoulder thing that goes up.”5 Oh good. I’m glad that thousands of law-abiding Americans unwittingly committed felonies because they had a cosmetic piece of sheet metal on their barrel, which has no bearing whatsoever on crime,
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Larry Correia (In Defense of the Second Amendment)
“
While Lee believed in slavery, he also profited from it far more than other army colonels. At the age of twenty-four, two years after graduating from West Point, Lee married Mary Custis, the only child of George Washington Parke Custis, the adopted son of George Washington. Custis earned his money through inheritance, and that inherited wealth derived from the work of enslaved labor. Enslaved labor created much of his wealth including the prestigious, Doric-columned Arlington House with its commanding view of the capital. Custis owned two other enslaved labor farms—Romancoke and White House.
A year after marrying Mary Custis, Lee inherited enslaved workers from his mother’s estate. During his many years in the army, Lee hired out those enslaved workers and pocketed the profit, creating wealth. By the time he wrote his only will as a U.S. Army officer in 1846 as he headed to fight in Mexico, he estimated his net worth at $40,000 in stocks, bonds, and property, including enslaved workers, or more than $1.3 million today.
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Ty Seidule (Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause)
“
WHY DIVERSIFY? During the bull market of the 1990s, one of the most common criticisms of diversification was that it lowers your potential for high returns. After all, if you could identify the next Microsoft, wouldn’t it make sense for you to put all your eggs into that one basket? Well, sure. As the humorist Will Rogers once said, “Don’t gamble. Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.” However, as Rogers knew, 20/20 foresight is not a gift granted to most investors. No matter how confident we feel, there’s no way to find out whether a stock will go up until after we buy it. Therefore, the stock you think is “the next Microsoft” may well turn out to be the next MicroStrategy instead. (That former market star went from $3,130 per share in March 2000 to $15.10 at year-end 2002, an apocalyptic loss of 99.5%).1 Keeping your money spread across many stocks and industries is the only reliable insurance against the risk of being wrong. But diversification doesn’t just minimize your odds of being wrong. It also maximizes your chances of being right. Over long periods of time, a handful of stocks turn into “superstocks” that go up 10,000% or more. Money Magazine identified the 30 best-performing stocks over the 30 years ending in 2002—and, even with 20/20 hindsight, the list is startlingly unpredictable. Rather than lots of technology or health-care stocks, it includes Southwest Airlines, Worthington Steel, Dollar General discount stores, and snuff-tobacco maker UST Inc.2 If you think you would have been willing to bet big on any of those stocks back in 1972, you are kidding yourself. Think of it this way: In the huge market haystack, only a few needles ever go on to generate truly gigantic gains. The more of the haystack you own, the higher the odds go that you will end up finding at least one of those needles. By owning the entire haystack (ideally through an index fund that tracks the total U.S. stock market) you can be sure to find every needle, thus capturing the returns of all the superstocks. Especially if you are a defensive investor, why look for the needles when you can own the whole haystack?
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
“
Every day, the markets were driven less directly by human beings and more directly by machines. The machines were overseen by people, of course, but few of them knew how the machines worked. He knew that RBC’s machines—not the computers themselves, but the instructions to run them—were third-rate, but he had assumed it was because the company’s new electronic trading unit was bumbling and inept. As he interviewed people from the major banks on Wall Street, he came to realize that they had more in common with RBC than he had supposed. “I’d always been a trader,” he said. “And as a trader you’re kind of inside a bubble. You’re just watching your screens all day. Now I stepped back and for the first time started to watch other traders.” He had a good friend who traded stocks at a big-time hedge fund in Stamford, Connecticut, called SAC Capital. SAC Capital was famous (and soon to be infamous) for being one step ahead of the U.S. stock market. If anyone was going to know something about the market that Brad didn’t know, he figured, it would be them. One spring morning he took the train up to Stamford and spent the day watching his friend trade. Right away he saw that, even though his friend was using technology given to him by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other big firms, he was experiencing exactly the same problem as RBC: The market on his screens was no longer the market. His friend would hit a button to buy or sell a stock and the market would move away from him. “When I see this guy trading and he was getting screwed—I now see that it isn’t just me. My frustration is the market’s frustration. And I was like, Whoa, this is serious.” Brad’s problem wasn’t just Brad’s problem. What people saw when they looked at the U.S. stock market—the numbers on the screens of the professional traders, the ticker tape running across the bottom of the CNBC screen—was an illusion. “That’s when I realized the markets are rigged. And I knew it had to do with the technology. That the answer lay beneath the surface of the technology. I had absolutely no idea where. But that’s when the lightbulb went off that the only way I’m going to find out what’s going on is if I go beneath the surface.
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Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
“
But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.
”
”
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
“
I’m Sushi K and I’m here to say
I like to rap in a different way
Look out Number One in every city
Sushi K rap has all most pretty
My special talking of remarkable words
Is not the stereotyped bucktooth nerd
My hair is big as a galaxy
Cause I attain greater technology
[...]
I like to rap about sweetened romance
My fond ambition is of your pants
So here is of special remarkable way
Of this fellow raps named Sushi K
The Nipponese talking phenomenon
Like samurai sword his sharpened tongue
Who raps the East Asia and the Pacific
Prosperity Sphere, to be specific
[...]
Sarariman on subway listen
For Sushi K like nuclear fission
Fire-breathing lizard Gojiro
He my always big-time hero
His mutant rap burn down whole block
Start investing now Sushi K stock
It on Nikkei stock exchange
Waxes; other rappers wane
Best investment, make my day
Corporation Sushi K
[...]
Coming to America now
Rappers trying to start a row
Say “Stay in Japan, please, listen!
We can’t handle competition!”
U.S. rappers booing and hissin’
Ask for rap protectionism
They afraid of Sushi K
Cause their audience go away
He got chill financial backin’
Give those U.S. rappers a smackin’
Sushi K concert machine
Fast efficient super clean
Run like clockwork in a watch
Kick old rappers in the crotch
[...]
He learn English total immersion
English/Japanese be mergin’
Into super combination
So can have fans in every nation
Hong Kong they speak English, too
Yearn of rappers just like you
Anglophones who live down under
Sooner later start to wonder
When they get they own rap star
Tired of rappers from afar
[...]
So I will get big radio traffic
When you look at demographic
Sushi K research statistic
Make big future look ballistic
Speed of Sushi K growth stock
Put U.S. rappers into shock
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
As I saw it, there was a 75 percent chance the Fed’s efforts would fall short and the economy would move into failure; a 20 percent chance it would initially succeed at stimulating the economy but still ultimately fail; and a 5 percent chance it would provide enough stimulus to save the economy but trigger hyperinflation. To hedge against the worst possibilities, I bought gold and T-bill futures as a spread against eurodollars, which was a limited-risk way of betting on credit problems increasing. I was dead wrong. After a delay, the economy responded to the Fed’s efforts, rebounding in a noninflationary way. In other words, inflation fell while growth accelerated. The stock market began a big bull run, and over the next eighteen years the U.S. economy enjoyed the greatest noninflationary growth period in its history. How was that possible? Eventually, I figured it out. As money poured out of these borrower countries and into the U.S., it changed everything. It drove the dollar up, which produced deflationary pressures in the U.S., which allowed the Fed to ease interest rates without raising inflation. This fueled a boom. The banks were protected both because the Federal Reserve loaned them cash and the creditors’ committees and international financial restructuring organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements arranged things so that the debtor nations could pay their debt service from new loans. That way everyone could pretend everything was fine and write down those loans over many years. My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong—and especially so publicly wrong—was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view. So there I was after eight years in business, with nothing to show for it. Though I’d been right much more than I’d been wrong, I was all the way back to square one.
”
”
Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
“
But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything. And all this mental thrashing and tossing was mixed up with recurring images, or half-dreams, of Popchik lying weak and thin on one side with his ribs going up and down—I’d forgotten him somewhere, left him alone and forgotten to feed him, he was dying—over and over, even when he was in the room with me, head-snaps where I started up guiltily, where is Popchik; and this in turn was mixed up with head-snapping flashes of the bundled pillowcase, locked away in its steel coffin.
”
”
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
“
Leonard H. Stringfield 1)Retrievals of the Third Kind: A Case Study of Alleged UFOs and Occupants in Military Custody. The first formal research paper presented publicly on the subject of UFO crash/retrievals at the MUFON Symposium, Dayton, Ohio, July, 1978. Original edition, dated April, 1978, was published in MUFON Proceedings (1978). Address: MUFON, 103 Oldtowne Road, Seguin, Texas 78155. If available, price___________. 2)Retrievals of the Third Kind: A Case Study of Alleged UFOs and Occupants in Military Custody,Status Report I. Revised edition, July, 1978, word processed copy, 34 pages. Available at author's address. See below. Price, USA___________. 3)UFO Crash/Retrieval Syndrome, Status Report II. Published by MUFON. Flexible cover, typeset, illustrations, 37 pages. Available only at MUFON address: 103 Oldtowne Road, Seguin, Texas 78155. Price, USA___________. 4)UFO Crash/Retrievals: Amassing the Evidence, Status Report III, June 1982; flexible cover, typeset, illustrations, 53 pages. Available from author's address. See below. Price, USA___________. 5)The Fatal Encounter at Ft. Dix -- McGuire: A Case Study, Status Report IV, June, 1985. Paper presented at MUFON Symposium, St. Louis, Missouri, 1985. Xeroxed copy, 26 pages. Available at author's address. See below. Price, USA___________. 6)UFO Crash/Retrievals: Is the Coverup Lid Lifting? Status Report V. Published in MUFON UFO Journal, January, 1989, with updated addendum. Xeroxed copy, 23 pages. Available at author's address. See below. Price, USA___________. 7)Inside Saucer Post, 3-0 Blue. Book privately published, 1957. Review of author's early research and cooperative association with the Air Defense Command Filter Center, using code name, FOX TROT KILO 3-0 BLUE. Flexible cover, typeset, illustrations, 94 pages. Available from author's address. See below. Price, USA___________. 8)Situation Red: The UFO Siege. Hardcover book published by Doubleday & Co., 1977. Paperback edition published by Fawcett Crest Books, 1977. Also foreign publishers. Out of print, not available. 9)Orbit Newsletter, published monthly, 1954-1957, by author for international sale and distribution. Set of 36 issues. Some issues out of stock, duplicated by xerox. Available at author's address -- see below. Price of set, USA___________. 10)UFO Crash/Retrievals: The Inner Sanctum, Status Report VI, July, 1991; flexible cover, book length, 81.000 words, 142 (8-1/2 X 11) pages, illustrated. Privately published. Available from author's address. See below. Price, USA___________. Prices include postage and handling. Mailings to Canada, add 500 for each item ordered. All foreign orders, payable U.S. funds, International money order or draft on U.S. Bank. Recommend Air Mail outside U.S. territories. Check on price. Leonard H. Stringfield 4412 Grove Avenue Cincinnati, Ohio 45227 USA Telephone: (513) 271-4248
”
”
Leonard H. Stringfield (UFO Crash Retrievals: The Inner Sanctum - Status Report VI)
“
At the G-20 meeting in Paris in 2011, finance ministers expressed fears that U.S.-driven global inflation was threatening global stability. George Melloan was among those who made the connection between this unrest and QE. He acknowledged in the Wall Street Journal: “Probably few of the protesters in the streets connect their economic travail to Washington. But central bankers do.” To appreciate the depth of political upheaval created by the 2008 financial crisis, just tally the power shifts that occurred in its wake. In addition to the turmoil in the Middle East, 13 out of 17 European governments changed over as a result of the initial financial crisis. In the United States, the stock market panic in September 2008 reversed the slight lead of John McCain and helped sweep the far-left Barack Obama into office.
”
”
Steve Forbes (Money: How the Destruction of the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy – and What We Can Do About It)
“
This fall, Alibaba Group Holdings will go public on the New York Stock Exchange, and it could raise $20 billion, according to Bloomberg News, making it the largest stock offering in U.S.
”
”
Anonymous
“
From 2006 to 2008, high-frequency traders’ share of total U.S. stock market trading doubled, from 26 percent to 52 percent—and it has never fallen below 50 percent since then.
”
”
Anonymous
“
Foreign stocks have historically offered several benefits for U.S. investors. First, foreign stocks do not always move in correlation with the U.S. equity markets, which creates a diversification opportunity. Second, international stocks trade in foreign currencies. This offers investors a hedge against a decline in the U.S. dollar. Both are important reasons to have some foreign stock exposure in a portfolio.
”
”
Richard A. Ferri (All About Asset Allocation)
“
What does this mean in practical terms? Let’s keep things simple, ignore private equity and commercial real estate, and focus just on the broad stock and bond market. You might buy three funds: an index fund offering exposure to the entire U.S. stock market, an index fund that will give you exposure to both developed foreign stock markets and emerging stock markets, and an index fund that owns the broad U.S. bond market. Suppose we were aiming to build a classic balanced portfolio, with 60 percent in stocks and 40 percent in bonds. Here are some possible investment mixes using index funds offered by major financial firms: 40 percent Fidelity Spartan Total Market Index Fund, 20 percent Fidelity Spartan Global ex U.S. Index Fund and 40 percent Fidelity Spartan U.S. Bond Index Fund. You can purchase these mutual funds directly from Fidelity Investments (Fidelity.com). 40 percent Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, 20 percent Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Index Fund and 40 percent Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund. You can buy these mutual funds directly from Vanguard Group (Vanguard.com). 40 percent Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF, 20 percent Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US ETF and 40 percent Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF. You can purchase these ETFs, or exchange-traded funds, through a discount or full-service brokerage firm. You can learn more about each of the funds at Vanguard.com. 40 percent iShares Core S&P Total U.S. Stock Market ETF, 20 percent iShares Core MSCI Total International Stock ETF and 40 percent iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF. You can buy these ETFs through a brokerage account and find fund details at iShares.com. 40 percent SPDR Russell 3000 ETF, 20 percent SPDR MSCI ACWI ex-US ETF and 40 percent SPDR Barclays Aggregate Bond ETF. You can invest in these ETFs through a brokerage account and learn more at SPDRs.com. 40 percent Schwab Total Stock Market Index Fund, 20 percent Schwab International Index Fund and 40 percent Schwab Total Bond Market Fund. You can buy these mutual funds directly from Charles Schwab (Schwab.com). The good news: Schwab’s funds have a minimum initial investment of just $100. The bad news: Unlike the other foreign stock funds listed here, Schwab’s international index fund focuses solely on developed foreign markets. Those who want exposure to emerging markets might take a fifth of the money allocated to the international fund—equal to 4 percent of the entire portfolio—and invest it in an emerging markets stock index fund. One option: Schwab has an ETF that focuses on emerging markets.
”
”
Jonathan Clements (How to Think About Money)
“
True, there's an aisle devoted to foreign foods, and then there are familiar foods that have been through the Japanese filter and emerged a little bit mutated. Take breakfast cereal. You'll find familiar American brands such as Kellogg's, but often without English words anywhere on the box. One of the most popular Kellogg's cereals in Japan is Brown Rice Flakes. They're quite good, and the back-of-the-box recipes include cold tofu salad and the savory pancake okonomiyaki, each topped with a flurry of crispy rice flakes. Iris and I got mildly addicted to a Japanese brand of dark chocolate cornflakes, the only chocolate cereal I've ever eaten that actually tastes like chocolate. (Believe me, I've tried them all.)
Stocking my pantry at Life Supermarket was fantastically simple and inexpensive. I bought soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, rice, salt, and sugar. (I was standing right in front of the salt when I asked where to find it This happens to me every time I ask for help finding any item in any store.) Total outlay: about $15, and most of that was for the rice. Japan is an unabashed rice protectionist, levying prohibitive tariffs on imported rice. As a result, supermarket rice is domestic, high quality, and very expensive. There were many brands of white rice to choose from, the sacks advertising different growing regions and rice varieties. (I did the restaurant wine list thing and chose the second least expensive.) Japanese consumers love to hear about the regional origins of their foods. I almost never saw ingredients advertised as coming from a particular farm, like you'd see in a farm-to-table restaurant in the U.S., but if the milk is from Hokkaido, the rice from Niigata, and the tea from Uji, all is well. I suppose this is not so different from Idaho potatoes and Florida orange juice.
When I got home, I opened the salt and sugar and spooned some into small bowls near the stove. The next day I learned that Japanese salt and sugar are hygroscopic: their crystalline structure draws in water from the air (and Tokyo, in summer, has enough water in the air to supply the world's car washes). I figured this was harmless and went on licking slightly moist salt and sugar off my fingers every time I cooked.
”
”
Matthew Amster-Burton (Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo)
“
It costs more to transact abroad, and many foreign governments tax stock dividends; although you can recover this cost in a taxable account through the foreign tax credit on your U.S. tax return, you cannot do so in a retirement account.
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William J. Bernstein (The Investor's Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between)
“
Stock investors should expect periods of time when equities do not make money after inflation. It is the nature of investment risk. This is also why time in the market is critical to stock investors. In the long run, equities have outpaced inflation by a wide margin, and they are expected to remain one of the best real return investments in the future. You have to stay invested during all market conditions to benefit from the gains. U.S.
”
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Richard A. Ferri (All About Asset Allocation)
“
I believe that the Total Stock Market Index Fund should be the investment of choice for most investors, covering as it does the entire U.S. stock market, and
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John C. Bogle (John Bogle on Investing: The First 50 Years (Wiley Investment Classics))
“
I’m speaking here about the classic index fund, one that is broadly diversified, holding all (or almost all) of its share of the $15 trillion capitalization of the U.S. stock market, operating with minimal expenses and without advisory fees, with tiny portfolio turnover, and with high tax efficiency. The index fund simply owns corporate America, buying an interest in each stock in the stock market in proportion to its market capitalization and then holding it forever.
”
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John C. Bogle (The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns (Little Books. Big Profits 21))
“
At one time or another, most of us have seen a plot of capital wealth looking something like Figure 1-1, demonstrating that $1 invested in the U.S. stock market in 1790 would have grown to more than $23 million by the year 2000. Unfortunately,
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William J. Bernstein (The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio)
“
At the end of World War II, the average holding period for a stock was four years. By 2000, it was eight months. By 2008, it was two months. And by 2011 it was twenty-two seconds,
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Scott Patterson (Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market)
“
TEN WAYS A PARTNER CAN HELP Before the baby’s born, help stock the freezer with meals that can be eaten with one hand. Find a good phone number for help and call it as needed. (La Leche League’s website, llli.org, and U.S.-based phone line, 877–4-LA LECHE (877–452–5324), can both lead you to your closest local group, and that’s a fast route to anything else you might need.) Buy the grocery basics, and keep easy, healthy snacks on hand. Get dinner—any dinner! Nights can be tough at first. Be flexible about where and when everyone sleeps. Going to bed early helps! Do more than your share. You may be what keeps the household running for a while. Everything won’t get done. Talk about what’s most important to her—a clean kitchen? a cleared desk?—and do that first. Get home on time. You’re like a breath of fresh air for mother and baby both. Helping out means helping emotionally, too. Remind her how much you love her, how wonderful she looks, and what a great job she’s doing. There she is, holding your child. She really is beautiful, isn’t she? Remind her that this part is temporary. Most women feel it takes at least six weeks to start to have a handle on this motherhood thing. Life will settle down. But it takes a while.
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La Leche League International (The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding)
“
It turns out that the portfolio with the least risk had 18 percent foreign securities and 82 percent U.S. securities. Moreover, adding 18 percent EAFE stocks to a domestic portfolio also tended to increase the portfolio return.
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Burton G. Malkiel (A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing)
“
THE FOLLOWING DAY, the Apple share price fell 10 percent and the company lost $75 billion in value. The single-day decline was Apple’s biggest in six years and sank its valuation to a level it had not seen since February 2017. It shook the U.S. economy. The company had become one of the most widely held institutional stocks, included in mutual funds, index funds, and 401(k)s. Thanks in part to Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway, everyone from grandmothers in Florida to autoworkers in the Midwest had an interest in Apple’s business. They all suffered.
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Tripp Mickle (After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul)
“
Europe’s total banking and trading revenues, $98 billion in 2005, have nearly pulled equal to U.S. revenues of $109 billion. In 2001, 57 percent of high-value IPOs occurred on American stock exchanges; in 2005, just 16 percent did. In 2006, the United States hosted barely a third of the number of total IPOs it did in 2001, while European exchanges expanded their IPO volume by 30 percent, and in Asia (minus Japan) volume doubled. IPOs are important because they generate “substantial recurring revenues for the host market” and contribute to perceptions of market vibrancy.
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Fareed Zakaria (The Post-American World)
“
An even earlier example was the rise of dark pool stock trading. In 1979, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) instituted Rule 19c3, which allowed stocks listed on one exchange, such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), to be traded off-exchange. Many large institutions moved their trading large blocks to these dark pools, where they traded peer to peer with far lower costs than traditional exchange-based trading.
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Campbell R. Harvey (DeFi and the Future of Finance)
“
Everything that mattered in Hank Reed’s life, outside of his family, revolved around horses. Starting with his days as a cadet, he had lived in a world that could measure everything—honor, kindliness, discipline, sporting spirit, diligence, and, most of all, courage—in equestrian terms. His brain was crammed with the nomenclature of horses: cantle, withers, curb chain, bran mash, fetlock, stock tie, near side, picket line. He knew the aids for a flying lead change, the correct attire for a foxhunt, the thunder of charging by platoon, and the serenity of riding alone on a quiet path, with only his mount’s breaths and cadenced footsteps for company. The rhythm of a horse’s strides was like music to him—the walk a ballad in four/four time, the trot a rousing two-beat march, the canter a smooth three-beat waltz. Reed knew the scent of fresh straw in the stable, the tickle of a horse’s whiskers as it nuzzled up a carrot. He knew that endless moment when a fall was inevitable and then the sudden breathless smack of landing hard on packed dirt. He knew what the end of a day on horseback felt like, salty with sweat, dirt under his fingernails, and a mind whitewashed from all worry. More than anything, Hank Reed understood what was unspoken among all of these horse soldiers. Sunburned, brusque, tough, accustomed to giving and taking orders, they knew that if you live, eat, sleep, and breathe horses for long enough, they become part of you, and your soul is forever altered.
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Elizabeth Letts (The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis)
“
American Express (AXP) Apple (AAPL) Bank of America (BAC) Bank of New York Mellon (BK) Charter Communications (CHTR) The Coca-Cola Company (KO) Delta Air Lines (DAL) Goldman Sachs (GS) JPMorgan Chase (JPM) Moody's (MCO) Southwest Airlines (LUV) United Continental Holdings (UAL) U.S. Bancorp (USB) USG Corporation (USG) Wells Fargo (WFC)
”
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Matthew R. Kratter (A Beginner's Guide to the Stock Market)
“
The lack of much outside investment allowed Gates and Allen to hold the vast majority of their company’s stock through the mideighties. Jobs, while his net worth had climbed into a significant fortune with Apple’s rise, didn’t own enough to control his destiny and was fired. It was a cruel irony: For all his counterculture spirit and brilliance, he suffered the mercenary’s fate, left with money but no kingdom. Gates, however, remained reluctant to go public even ten years after Microsoft’s founding. Eventually, due to the number of Microsoft employees who owned shares, and U.S. securities laws obligating any company with more than 500 shareholders to be registered, which Microsoft expected to soon pass, Gates agreed to list his shares. But as a final symbol of resistance, he did try to fly coach during the IPO roadshow—one last ode to parsimony—until his underwriters insisted otherwise.
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Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
“
Equally confounding, in 1968, a year marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and the peak of American casualties in Vietnam, with over ten thousand deaths that year—“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?” was a chant making the rounds at rallies—the U.S. stock market seemed an untroubled oasis, climbing to new highs.
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Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
“
In December 1972, Polaroid was selling for 96 times its 1972 earnings, McDonald’s was selling for 80 times, and IFF was selling for 73 times; the Standard & Poor’s Index of 500 stocks was selling at an average of 19 times. The dividend yields on the Nifty-Fifty averaged less than half the average yield on the 500 stocks in the S&P Index. The proof of this particular pudding was surely in the eating, and a bitter mouthful it was. The dazzling prospect of earnings rising up to the sky turned out to be worth a lot less than an infinite amount. By 1976, the price of IFF had fallen 40% but the price of U.S. Steel had more than doubled. Figuring dividends plus price change, the S&P 500 had surpassed its previous peak by the end of 1976, but the Nifty-Fifty did not surpass their 1972 bull-market peak until July 1980. Even worse, an equally weighted portfolio of the Nifty-Fifty lagged the performance of the S&P 500 from 1976 to 1990.
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Peter L. Bernstein (Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk)
“
On Monday, Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy, and Merrill Lynch, having announced $55.2 billion in losses on subprime bond–backed CDOs, had sold itself to Bank of America. The U.S. stock market had fallen by more than it had since the first day of trading after the attack on the World Trade Center. On Tuesday the U.S. Federal Reserve announced that it had lent $85 billion to the insurance company AIG, to pay off the losses on the subprime credit default swaps AIG had sold to Wall Street banks—the biggest of which was the $13.9 billion AIG owed to Goldman Sachs. When you added in the $8.4 billion in cash AIG had already forked over to Goldman in collateral, you saw that Goldman had transferred more than $20 billion in subprime mortgage bond risk into the insurance company, which was in one way or another being covered by the U.S. taxpayer.
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Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
“
It was the combination of the drying up of foreign credit due to high interest rates induced by the U.S. stock bubble and
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Liaquat Ahamed (Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World)
“
In 2020, 68.1% of U.S. mortgage loans were originated by non-banks; they were instead initiated by mortgage loan companies. What do you need a bank for? Remember in the movie,[4] “If I write a loan on a Friday afternoon, it’s sold to a big [investment] bank by Monday lunch.” The financial system changed very little from 1914 to 1980, but think about how much it changed from 1980 to today. The Federal Reserve was originally designed to provide liquidity to banks. That’s it. Back then, a financial institution could be a bank, trust company, credit union, or Savings and Loan. I can’t even list all of the different types of financial institutions there are today. Back then, the financial instruments were mortgage loans, corporate loans, stocks, bonds, and commercial paper. Did I miss anything? Once again, I can’t even list all of the different types of financial instruments today.
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”
Scott E.D. Skyrm (The Repo Market, Shorts, Shortages, and Squeezes)
“
the end of 1939, Japan’s oil stocks had stood at fifty-five million barrels, enough to fight for eighteen months. Sixty percent of oil imports came from the United States. Japan’s islands produced only twelve percent of the iron ore needed; the rest came from Manchuria with its hostile Russian neighbor. But the Japanese military remained split between those favoring a strike north against the hated Communist Soviet Union or south to grab the resources of Southeast Asia. The United States fleet remained an obstacle to both strategies. The navy stuck to its war plan of an ambush of the U.S. fleet in home waters. That way Japanese gunships could carry more guns and less fuel. But carrier admirals such as Yamamoto would need more oil to fuel far-striking carriers and their planes. The hawks itched for action in either direction. Admiral Chuichi Nagumo disclosed his strategy to a dovish colleague, Admiral Shigeyoshi Inouye, who believed Japan should adhere to its Naval Treaty obligations. “You’re a fool,” chided Nagumo. “I thrust with a dagger up under the ribs, and that would be it. . . .” Germany’s surprise invasion of the Soviet Union June 22, 1941, put blood in the water. Yosuke Matsuoka, now foreign minister, counseled: “When Germany wipes out the Soviet Union, we can’t simply share in the spoils of victory unless we have done something. We must either shed our blood or embark on diplomacy. It’s better to shed blood.
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Associated Press (Pearl Harbor)
“
One enterprising U.S. brokerage firm, Interactive Brokers, announced that, unlike its competitors, it did not sell retail stock market orders to high-frequency traders, and even installed a button that enabled investors to route their orders directly to IEX, the stock market created by Brad Katsuyama and his team, who would protect them.
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Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
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In 1997, money manager David Leinweber wondered which statistics would have best predicted the performance of the U.S. stock market from 1981 through 1993. He sifted through thousands of publicly available numbers until he found one that had forecast U.S. stock returns with 75% accuracy: the total volume of butter produced each year in Bangladesh. Leinweber was able to improve the accuracy of his forecasting “model” by adding a couple of other variables, including the number of sheep in the United States. Abracadabra! He could now predict past stock returns with 99% accuracy. Leinweber meant his exercise as satire, but his point was serious: Financial marketers have such an immense volume of data to slice and dice that they can “prove” anything.
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Jason Zweig (Your Money and Your Brain)
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The economy was in a state of collapse that winter, with banks failing and the stock market crashing deeper each day. But even that broad chaos was just a distraction from deeper problems that had all but crippled Donnie Smith’s business over the last couple of years. The cost of feed grains like corn had reached the highest levels in history due to new ethanol subsidies that President George Bush signed into law in late 2005. The ethanol mandate worked at direct cross-purposes with the USDA’s multibillion-dollar crop subsidies, which had delivered cheap corn and soybeans to Tyson Foods since 1996. Newly built ethanol plants were consuming more than a third of the entire U.S. corn harvest, wiping out grain supplies, boosting prices, and taking away the cushion of cheap grain that had helped keep Tyson profitable for more than a decade. At the same time, consumer demand had fallen through the floor. Americans weren’t eating at restaurants or buying Tyson’s chicken nuggets at the grocery store. For the first time since World War II, per capita chicken consumption wasn’t growing on a year-over-year basis. For fifty years, the economic underpinnings of the U.S. economy had been breaking in Tyson’s favor. But now that Donnie was almost in charge, the tide of history was going the other way.
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Christopher Leonard (The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business)
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Buffett had a strong view of how employees should be accountable to the business’s owners, and Marshall-Wells’ leadership did not seem to fit the bill. Management’s lackadaisical approach towards shareholders likely turned the young investor off. And he simply found other investments. At the end of 1950, Buffett owned stocks such as Parkersburg Rig & Reel and two closed-end funds: Selected Industries and U.S. & International Securities.40
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Brett Gardner (Buffett's Early Investments: A new investigation into the decades when Warren Buffett earned his best returns)
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because there is no such thing on Wall Street as too many acronyms, became known as the SIP. The thirteen stock markets piped their prices into the SIP, and the SIP calculated the NBBO. The SIP was the picture of the U.S. stock market most investors saw. Like a lot of regulations, Reg NMS was well-meaning and sensible. If everyone on Wall Street abided by the rule’s spirit, the rule would have established a new
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Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
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The Securities and Exchange Commission was created in 1934, and, together with other checks and balances (including class-action suits), it helped build a sense of professional ethics among managers, auditors, and other market participants, leading to the creation of a securities market of unprecedented size, with unprecedented participation. At the peak of the market in March 2000, the market capitalization of U.S. stocks (as measured by the Wilshire index) was $17 trillion, or 1.7 times the value of American GDP. Half of all U.S. households owned equities. The world has changed a great deal, however, over the past sixty years. New forms of deception have been developed. In the go-go environment of the nineties while market values soared, human values eroded, and the playing field became terribly unlevel once again, contributing to the bubble that burst soon after the beginning of the new millennium. The
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Joseph E. Stiglitz (The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World's Most Prosperous Decade)
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Only four companies—Proctor & Gamble, General Electric, AT&T, and DuPont—have survived on the Dow Jones index of the top-thirty U.S. industrial stocks since the 1960s.
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Ruchir Sharma (Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles)
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The 2012 Ibbotson® Stocks, Bonds, Bills, and Inflation® Classic Yearbook, published by Morningstar, Inc., is one of the best sources of up-to-date information regarding the performance of various U.S. capital market investment alternatives. The data cover the period from 1926 to the present.
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Roger C. Gibson (Asset Allocation: Balancing Financial Risk)
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The top 1 percent of all U.S. households
owns 38.3 percent of all stocks. The top 10 percent owns roughly 81 percent. The
bottom 90 percent owns just over 18 percent of the stocks held by households
in the United States (Table 11.5). Fully 50 percent of U.S. households own no
stocks. Even among those who do hold stocks, most own them through pension and retirement funds, where they are not accessible for general use.
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Kenneth J. Guest (Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age)
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Eighteen months after Netscape was created, and before it had made a dime, Netscape sold shares in itself to the public. On the first day of trading the price of those shares rose from $12 apiece to $48. Three months later it was at $140. It was one of the most successful share offerings in the history of the U.S. stock markets, and possibly the most famous.
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Michael Lewis (The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story)
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He didn’t buy U.S. Treasury bonds, or stock in companies outside of Silicon Valley, or for that matter stock in anything outside the outrageously volatile Internet sector.
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Michael Lewis (The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story)
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Government inflation-protected securities (in the United States, these are Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, or TIPS) A low-cost total U.S. domestic equity (stock) index fund, either a mutual fund or an exchange-traded fund (ETF—i.e., a sort of mutual fund that can be traded like stocks on an exchange) A low-cost total international equity index fund, either a mutual fund or an ETF Single-premium income annuities Low-cost term life insurance
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Michael Edesess (The 3 Simple Rules of Investing: Why Everything You've Heard About Investing Is Wrong—and What to Do Instead)
Scott Patterson (Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market)
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As companies get larger, with a broader following of investors, it becomes awfully tempting to get into that jet and go up to Detroit or Chicago or New York and speak to the bankers and the people who own your stock. But since we got our stock jump-started in the beginning, I feel like our time is better spent with our own people in the stores, rather than off selling the company to outsiders. I don’t think any amount of public relations experts or speeches in New York or Boston means a darn thing to the value of the stock over the long haul. I think you get what you’re worth. Not that we don’t go out of our way to keep Wall Street up to date on what’s going on with the company. For the last few years, in fact, a group called the United Shareholders Association has voted us the number-one company in the U.S. based on our responsiveness to shareholders. What
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Sam Walton (Sam Walton: Made In America)
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Owning the U.S. “market” means the whole shooting match—the Wilshire 5000. The granddaddy of all “total-market” funds is the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund. With rock-bottom expenses of 0.20%, it is a superb choice. Since its inception in 1992, it has done an excellent job of tracking the Wilshire 5000,
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William J. Bernstein (The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio)
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The best choice for your equity investments is a fund indexed to the total world stock market. If you are truly uncomfortable investing in “foreign” stocks, you could choose a domestic total stock market fund. We recommend that you be diversified internationally because the United States represents less than half of the world’s economic activity and stock market capitalization. For your bonds, choose a total U.S. bond market index fund.
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
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The Vanguard Total International Stock exchange-traded fund—to cite one low-cost example—owns more than 5,000 non-U.S. stocks, has a dividend yield of 3.2% and charges an annual fee of 0.14%. Another
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Anonymous
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If your 401(k) is lucky enough to have Vanguard funds, look for, respectively, the (U.S.) Total Stock Market Index Fund, Total International Stock Index Fund, and either the Short-Term Bond Index or Total Bond Market Index Fund. As already mentioned, the Fidelity Spartan series is also excellent: the Total Market Index, International Index, and U.S. Bond Index (or Short-Term Treasury Bond Index) funds.
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Anonymous
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At the end of World War II, the average holding period for a stock was four years. By 2000, it was eight months. By 2008, it was two months. And by 2011 it was twenty-two seconds, at least according to one professor’s estimates. One founder of a prominent high-frequency trading outfit once claimed his firm’s average holding period was a mere eleven seconds.
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Scott Patterson (Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market)
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The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago. What goes on inside those black boxes is hard to say—the ticker tape that runs across the bottom of cable TV screens captures only the tiniest fraction of what occurs in the stock markets. The public reports of what happens inside the black boxes are fuzzy and unreliable—even an expert cannot say what exactly happens inside them, or when it happens, or why.
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Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
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the economy of China will become twice the size of the U.S. economy in 2025 if both countries’ per capita income continues to grow at recent rates.
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Jeremy J. Siegel (Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies)
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As we explore later in this chapter, virtually no asset, except for long-term U.S. Treasury bonds, served as an effective hedge against the sudden and sharp decline in asset values that took place during the financial crisis.
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Jeremy J. Siegel (Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies)
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This kind of growth is already having a beneficial impact on numerous industries associated with energy...U.S. Steel, for instance, has struggled in recent decades, undercut by Asian producers and unable to respond creatively, and saw its stock price drop nearly 90 percent. But today it is in the midst of a Phoenix-like resurrection.(58)
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Alex Prud'Homme (Hydrofracking: What Everyone Needs to Know®)
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would take only $1.33 million invested in the stock market in 1802 to grow, with dividends reinvested, to about $18 trillion, the total value of U.S. stocks, by the end of 2012. The sum of $1.33 million in 1802 is equivalent to roughly $25 million in today’s purchasing power, an amount far less than the value of the stock market at that time.
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Jeremy J. Siegel (Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies)
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The first actively traded U.S. stocks, floated in 1791, were issued by two banks: the Bank of New York and the Bank of the United States.
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Jeremy J. Siegel (Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies)
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The new structure of the U.S. stock market had removed the big Wall Street banks from their historic, lucrative role as intermediary. At the same time it created, for any big bank, some unpleasant risks: that the customer would somehow figure out what was happening to his stock market orders. And that the technology might somehow go wrong. If the markets collapsed, or if another flash crash occurred, the high-frequency traders would not take 85 percent of the blame, or bear 85 percent of the costs of the inevitable lawsuits. The banks would bear the lion’s share of the blame and the costs. The relationship of the big Wall Street banks to the high-frequency traders, when you thought about it, was a bit like the relationship of the entire society to the big Wall
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Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
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Imagine, for instance, that someone passed a rule, in the U.S. stock market as it is currently configured, that required every stock market trade to be front-run by a firm called Scalpers Inc. Under this rule, each time you went to buy 1,000 shares of Microsoft, Scalpers Inc. would be informed, whereupon it would set off to buy 1,000 shares of Microsoft offered in the market and, without taking the risk of owning the stock for even an instant, sell it to you at a higher price. Scalpers Inc. is prohibited from taking the slightest market risk; when it buys, it has the seller firmly in hand; when it sells, it has the buyer in hand; and at the end of every trading day, it will have no position at all in the stock market. Scalpers Inc. trades for the sole purpose of interfering with trading that would have happened without it. In buying from every seller and selling to every buyer, it winds up: a) doubling the trades in the marketplace and b) being exactly 50 percent of that booming volume. It adds nothing to the market but at the same time might be mistaken for the central player in that market. This state of affairs, as it happens, resembles the United States stock market after the passage of Reg NMS. From 2006 to 2008, high-frequency traders’ share of total U.S. stock market trading doubled, from 26 percent to 52 percent—and it has never fallen below 50 percent since then. The total number of trades made in the stock market also spiked dramatically, from roughly 10 million per day in 2006 to just over 20 million per day in 2009.
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Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
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The price volatility within each trading day in the U.S. stock market between 2010 and 2013 was nearly 40 percent higher than the volatility between 2004 and 2006, for instance. There were days in 2011 in which volatility was higher than in the most volatile days of the dot-com bubble.
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Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
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The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that nanoseconds had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all.
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Michael Lewis (Flash Boys)
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In 1857, to encourage continued settlement of the West, Congress passed the Pacific Wagon Road Act, which among other improvements to the trail called for the surveying of a shorter route to Idaho across the bottom of the Wind Rivers and the forested Bridger-Teton wilderness to the west. Frederick W. Lander, a hotheaded but experienced explorer and engineer, was assigned the job. He made Burnt Ranch the trailhead and main supply depot for the trail-building job, which became one of the largest government-financed projects of the nineteenth century. Lander hired hundreds of workers from the new Mormon settlement at Salt Lake and supplied the enterprise with large mule-team caravans that ferried provisions and equipment from U.S. Army depots in Nebraska and eastern Wyoming. “With crowds of laborers hauling wood, erecting buildings and tending stock,” writes historian Todd Guenther, “the area was a beehive of activity.” The engineers, logging crews, and workers quickly hacked out what became known as the Lander Cutoff, which saved more than sixty miles, almost a week’s travel, across the mountains. In places, the Lander Cutoff was a steep up-and-down ride, but the route offered cooler, high terrain and plentiful water, an advantage over the scorching desert of the main ruts to the south. Eventually an estimated 100,000 pioneers took this route, and the 230-mile Lander Cutoff was considered an engineering marvel of its time. This
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Rinker Buck (The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey)
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Unlike common stocks, whose dividends and earnings fluctuate with the ups and downs of the company’s business, bonds pay a fixed dollar amount of interest. If the U.S. Treasury offers a $1,000 20-year, 5 percent bond, that bond will pay $50 per year until it matures, when the principal will be repaid. Corporate bonds are less safe, but widely diversified bond portfolios have provided reasonably stable interest returns over time.
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
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What an expensive and needless mess. You could probably find a cure for cancer in a year if you just reassigned all the smart people who are now working on this artificially created and otherwise useless problem.
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Scott Patterson (Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market)