I had this fantasy that emerging markets might be emerging again. But then I looked at their charts over the past five years. And I thought, I need this much agita?
Then I looked at a couple of real estate ETFs over the same five years:
Then I looked at the S&P 500 over the same period:
Am I worried because the S&P 500 P/E is close to 18 — higher than its long-term historical average of 15.3%? Yes and No.
I own VFIAX which is Vanguard’s ultra-low cost (0.05%) fund that mirrors the S&P.
And I eye its attractive returns:
It’s hard to match these returns, unless you latch onto wonders like AF, CYBR, GPRO, ISIS, BABA, NFLX. But you have to stay on top of these — like manage them, dumping as they appear to blow up — or at least taking some of your gains and playing with the bank’s money. For now, VFIAX a nice comfortable place to park money. It’s paying a 2% dividend yield, which is better than a slap in the belly with a cold fish. And its expenses are an amazingly low 0.05%.
UPS is not cheap. FedEx and UPS have their nice big oligopoly going. They can jack prices to the ionosphere. And they do. Last night I tried to send some packages to California via UPS’ cheapest ground service. Their prices shocked me. It’ll be much cheaper (repeat much cheaper) to pay Virgin America $25 a box as checked luggage. Look at UPS:
Even at $106, you’re still getting a 2.52% dividend yield, though P/E is lofty at 26.4.
3D printing is changing medicine. The New Yorker has a totally wonderful piece called “Print Thyself — How 3D printing is revolutionizing medicine.” First know that Jennifer Lewis is a materials scientist at Harvard. Some excerpts:
For her part, Lewis is passionate about the changes that 3-D printing could bring to the pharmaceutical industry. Billions of dollars each year are spent on drug development that fails. If bioprinted tissues were readily available, experimental drugs could be tested on them to see how the drugs are metabolized and what side effects result. “We want to provide a fail-fast model,” Lewis said, “so that drugs can be assessed in 3-D human tissue and their toxic properties identified before spending money and effort in animal and human testing.”
But Lewis admits that she does think about the prospect of printing whole, functioning organs. “The grand challenge is to make a whole kidney—that is our moon shot,” she said. The first step would be to make a nephron, the fundamental filtering unit of a kidney. She noted that her team has already demonstrated the ability to print any pattern of vascular channels that it wants; the blood-vessel patterns of a nephron are just one more option. And recently the team found a way to line channels with epithelial cells taken from human kidneys. “We see this as a ladder, one step following the next,” she said. “Creating just a single nephron would be a great achievement. But there are a million in each kidney.”
Before I left the lab, Kolesky showed me the incubator, a white box near the printer that was about the size of a dorm-room refrigerator. He opened the door. On a shelf, on a glass slide, was a finished block of printed tissue. A fine plastic tube, the size of a strand of spaghetti, entered it at one end, delivering glucose, amino acids, and other critical nutrients. Another spaghetti-like tube emerged from the other end, carrying off carbon dioxide, broken-down proteins, and other cellular waste. The tissue had been alive for the past two weeks, Kolesky said. There wasn’t much to see, but the tissue was thriving, and it looked to me like the start of something very big. ♦
You can read the entire fascinating piece here.
Super great, latest New Yorker cartoons. They comment so wonderfully on our daily lives:
Harry Newton who lives in a fantasy world that he’s 18 again. Yesterday he played an 18-year old kid on her college’s tennis team. After an hour (which was all the time we had) the score was 5-5. I was impressed with myself. (I don’t think she was playing customer tennis.) This morning my back hurts. So does Federer’s. He pulled out of the Barclay’s Final with a bad back. I slept a lot last night. Today, I’ll play gentle and pray I don’t do something too stupid.
My Brazilian friend says “it will get much worse before it gets better. The country is on hold.” They just had an election and re-elected the nice lady who screwed up the country in her first four years. Remember BRIC? Brazil, Russia, India and China. They were hotter than cyber-security. For now, I’ll take cyber-security and 3D printing.
RE: 3-D Printing … check out Organovo. Ticker ONVO. Publicly traded co that just announced commercial launch of 3-D liver assay with capabilities alluded to by Lewis in your quoted piece above…. Looks like the leading publicly traded opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this emerging tech.
Re:UPS shipping costs. I recently ordered online from Newegg and two days later a “Newegg Express” delivery van delivered my order. Driver said Newegg has been making their own deliveries for several months.( btw It was also free shipping.)
I like the 110 as I do not have to walk across the room and return them to the charger base. I do not feel the real expensive ones do any better than the least expensive HDR 110s. I can walk to the other end of my house with mine, 3 walls.The key is are they analog or digital and will they work with your TV. I tried several and settled on these.You definitely want wireless. Check with your TV manufacture for their recommendation, then hope for the best. I did not like Sony Digital Wireless.
To Barry, Lucky and Harry ~
I find Sennheiser headphones on Amazon at prices from $80 to $380. Would you kindly direct me to whatever such model has worked for you. Thanks. Bill
I like the model HDR 110 as they are battery operated (2 AAA batteries last for many hours if you remember to shut them off). I bought 2 pair of factory reconditioned ones for a pretty low price on eBay. A word of caution…they are analog so if you have a new digital TV you will need a digital to analog converter. I went through several models before I found one that would work fully with my Ultra High Def Samsung TV. They work fine if plugged directly into your receiver on RCA jacks. However, many new digital TV sets do not have RCA jacks. I use my optical output into a Gefen TV Digital Audio Decoder 1119-ECO2…not cheap. However, in my case it is much cheaper than Digital Head Phones that also did not work even $300. ones. The key is to get them to work on both analog and digital. Previously I could get them to work on the analog side of the TV but not on the digital TV side…I now get both. Around $50. for the HDR 110s and about $100. for the Gefen Decoder. Good Luck…it took me about 2 months to get them to work through trial and error. You should be able to get the cables MyCableMan.com for the best price. Buy the Decoder, if you need one, directly from Gefen and make sure the guarantee it will work. Don’t believe anyone, even the TV manufacturer, that says all headphones work the same…they don’t!
Hi Bill-
I bought the model RS 180 digital headphones in September of 2010. The batteries are rechargeable and I just put the headset on the cradle when I’m done using it. It automatically turns itself off and charges. I got a good deal at the time and paid $200 on line. They sound great, the range is excellent and they’ve been trouble free for 4 years. I just checked and I see they are still available at the same price on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-RS-180-Wireless-Headphones/dp/B002TLT10S I highly recommend them. Best of luck with whatever you decide on!
And thanks also, Harry, for your knowledgeable recommendations on lots of good stuff over the years.
I agree the Sennheiser wireless headphones are fantastic. I got mine based on Harry’s recommendation and I love them! So I bought a pair of ear-buds to try using with my computer. I love those too……except for the wire. I’m ordering a pair of Bluetooth wireless ear-buds. The JayBird BlueBuds X Sport Bluetooth Headphones. They’re very small, very light, have a 7-8 hour battery life, and are reputed to have clear, white-noise-free sound comparable to wired audio performance. http://www.amazon.com/JayBird-BlueBuds-Sport-Bluetooth-Headphones/dp/B00AIRUOI8 If they’re as good as the Sennheiser’s I’m going to be happy, happy. They work with multiple Bluetooth devices, so I may use them with my iPhone too.
Harry, I was at our local grocery store and they had some fresh fish cheap, so I bought one, took it home, still cold, and slapped myself in the belly. My wife, of course, was confused, but the test results are in. A slap in the belly with a cold fish clearly beats the hell out of a lousy 2% interest rate. Just what I thought.
True…British TV shows and movies are hard to understand…solution…Sennheiser wireless, over the ear headphones. You catch nearly every word yet the TV volume is normal for my wife. I don’t consider myself hard of hearing so much as not being able to understand what is being said in movies.
Every TV I own had Sennheiser wireless headphones. They’re the only way to preserve a marriage.