.. from The Week, which just arrived at the house in old-fashioned hardcopy.
An item about a quintessentially American event: a church hosts an NRA firearms safety training class; the instructor shoots a student in the foot (more).
Quote from Calvin Coolidge: ““Nothing is easier than the expenditure of public money. It doesn’t appear to belong to anyone. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody.”
The French spent an average of 1 hour 38 minutes eating lunch in 1975; today the number is 31 minutes.
A Zebra ran loose in Atlanta for 40 minutes (excerpt from 911 call in this news article).
The Wall Street Journal reported on research that shows actively managed investments suffer more than you’d think because of excessive trading: “According to Morningstar, mutual funds with the highest portfolio turnover rates have underperformed the slowest-trading funds by an annual average of 1.8 percentage points over the past decade. A study of pension-fund stock portfolios found that, on average, the funds would have raised their annual returns by nearly a full percentage point if the managers had gone on a 12-month vacation and never made a single trade.” (source)
Harvard eggheads show that a developed country starts to suck wind economically when debt reaches 90 percent of GDP (full paper); the U.S. debt is now heading over 100 percent of GDP and soon we will be “giving 110 percent” (since the federal deficit is roughly 10 percent of GDP).
My favorite was about some guys who built a huge “treadmill” and use it to study elephant gaits in Thailand. When I found the original story, however, it turned out that the reporter was confused. The researchers built only a platform with strain gauges and elephants walked over the platform. It would have been fun to see video of an elephant using a treadmill desk…
One hears all kinds of “the average mutual fund…” stats all the time, but it’s important to not put much stock in them (excuse the pun) because it’s comparable to reporting stats about “the average book published this year”. Looking at the gamut of books from those about brain surgery to those about beer farts, and then trying to make a reasonable statement that covers them all, is challenging. You don’t read “the average book”, you pick and choose what to read. The same goes for investing… you choose to buy or choose to not by specific mutual funds, which are most often entirely unrelated to the mythical average.
(I too would have liked to see the elephant treadmill)
I had a friend that ran a publishing company here in the far east. One of his publications was an investment magazine. Being British, he could never resist taking the piss when he had the chance.
One of this monthly columns was to track the performance of a number of mutual funds. He slipped in a joker. He had his “Uncle Tom’s Tips” mutual fund which was supposed to be the tips from some old Asian fellow who cleaned out the stables in the local race track.
What it actually was was a buch of stocks tacked onto the the wall, and the staff would throw darts from across the room to “pick” this months recommendations.
After a year, they had to pull it from the magazine because a large number of investment companies threatened to pull their advertising revenues.
Why?
Uncle Tom’s Tips significantly outperformed all the “recommended” mutual funds that were sold by the investment companies.
is there a low cost (exp ratio, fees, etc) low tax way for a US citizen, non-millionaire, investing for retirement type investor to invest in
gov treasury bonds of countries, eg backed by “full faith & credit” of that Fed Gov
1 rich stable countries eg “developed world”
2 a significant trade surplus over the past decade
3 low Fed Gov debt-to-GDP ratio
Germany for example. USA fails 2 & 3, Japan fails 3.
IGOV covers rich countries, but has the bad Japan alongside the good Germany.
would be great if an index fund or ETF tracked say 10 rich countries which covered all afromentioned 3 pts
I know foreigners invest in US Treasuries. Can we USians directly invest in say Germany Treasury bonds?
Tufts Vet. School (Grafton, MA) has a “large animal” treadmill, used among other things, for examining gait issues with horses. I doubt it could handle an elephant, though 🙂 They train the horse to trot/pace on the treadmill.