Teen vaping has hit a 10-year low. In an annual survey conducted from January through May in schools across the nation, fewer than 8 percent of high school students reported using e-cigarettes in the past month, the lowest level in a decade. That’s far lower than the apex, in 2019, when more than 27 percent of high school students who took the survey reported that they vaped.
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The dating apps are under a lot of pressure. Falling revenues, people not wanting to pay, and Gen Z seemingly uninterested have led to collapsing stocks and circling activist investors. Their only path forward is monetization – but what does that mean for the demographic crisis?
American homes have been going up in price since early 2012. That’s part of the reason why it’s been American’s favorite investment for 12 year running. The other reason is leverage. If you put down 20% (or less) and the home price goes up 20%, you’ve made 100% on your investment. Of course, most American’s have done much better than that since 2020.
Based on the way we are wired as humans; our memories are constantly changing over time. Remembering is dominated by the perspective we have in the current moment. We have an ‘experiencing self’ and a ‘remembering self.’ Your experiences of things are continuous in real time and associated with all sorts of feelings and thoughts and sensations. And then in the cold light of reason you have this remembering self in a completely different context, trying to make sense of yourself, a person with a very narrow window of experience.
A look at why young adults are the ones most in crisis with mental health. A recent study found that 36 percent of participants ages 18 to 25 reported experiencing anxiety and 29 percent reported experiencing depression—about double the proportion of 14-to-17-year-olds on each measure. Older adults, often depicted in popular culture and news commentary as isolated and unhappy report the lowest levels of anxiety and depression.
The following graphs show the dividend yields for the S&P 500, MSCI World (all developed stock markets including the U.S.), MSCI EM (emerging markets) and MSCI EAFE (developed markets excluding the U.S.).
Here is the MSCI EAFE forward P/E ratio (stock prices relative to their projected earnings over the next 12 months). The higher the number, the more expensive the market. The S&P 500 is currently at 23. It would be close to being off the chart it is so expensive relative to the rest of the developed world.
They identified 8,577 who were in the study from the early 1990s until 2017 and who met a variety of other criteria for inclusion. This gave them 25 years of follow up, long enough to ask the question: how does participation in sports affect life expectancy? The results? Playing tennis was the clear winner: extending one’s life expectancy by 9.7 years. The other sports all provided benefits too:
Tennis: 9.7 years gain in life expectancy
Badminton: 6.2 years
Soccer: 4.7 years
Cycling: 3.7 years
Swimming: 3.4 years
Jogging: 3.2 years
Calisthenics: 3.1 years
Health club activities: 1.5 years
One possible reason for tennis, badminton, and soccer doing so well is that out of the 8 sports studied, these are the ones that require 2 or more people and involve social interaction. As the authors explain, “Belonging to a group that meets regularly promotes a sense of support, trust, and commonality, which has been shown to contribute to a sense of well-being and improved long-term health.”
Or it might be that the type of exercise you get in tennis – short bursts of activity rather than slow, steady plodding exercise – might be better for you. The authors noted that “short repeated intervals of higher intensity exercise appear to be superior to continuous moderate intensity physical activity for improving health outcomes.”
Constantly being presented with the idea that their friendships should mirror the deep, intimate, dyadic friendships of women alters men’s expectations in a potentially unhelpful way. Guys see memes about how it’s dysfunctional to spend hours with their buddies without discussing personal issues, or read a reddit post about how sad it is that men don’t have friends they can completely open up to, or listen to a podcast about how they need to be vulnerable with other men if they want to be happy and healthy, and start wondering if their social life is subpar and they’re missing out. “Man, maybe I don’t have good friends after all.”
Irving Fisher has one of the most famous quotes in financial history (for being very wrong at the worst possible time), but his full story is even more tragic. Another great lesson on the danger of leverage and overconfidence.
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Why you don’t need to separate your clothes anymore. There’s no actual threat to your clothes or machines by washing everything together—the life of your clothes may be shortened slightly, but that’s all. Since most of the clothes we wear are now a byproduct of fast fashion, there’s less investment into each piece, and they’re not really built for the long haul the way clothes once were, anyways. Also, the natural fibers and dyes that used to be mainstream have been long replaced by synthetic fibers and better dye processes, which result in much more colorfast garments. These garments also generally stand up to wash processes better. Advancements in detergents also focused on using less of it, stopping colors from fading, keeping whites bright, and washing everything in cold water to save on energy. As a result, laundry in general is a much gentler on clothes.
While the U.S. has never experienced a 20-year period of negative real returns, it has gotten close a few times. From February 1966 through December 1982, U.S. stocks lost 0.16% on an annualized basis, when including dividends and adjusting for inflation. That’s a 16-year period of negative real returns. Additionally, from September 1929 through December 1944, U.S. stocks experienced a 15-year period of negative real returns. This coincided with the beginning of the Great Depression through WWII.
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This article goes through just about any statistic you can think regarding divorce. What about the famous statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce? That’s a bit of an exaggeration when it comes to first marriages, only 43% of which are dissolved. Second and third marriages actually fail at a far higher rate, though, with 60% of second marriages and 73% of third marriages ending in divorce.
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People around the world are spending billions of dollars talking to who they think are OnlyFans models online. Many times, they are actually talking to a fake “chatter” which can even be another guy (if they think they’re talking to a girl). The word is out and now lawsuits are starting.
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This paper discusses how less people are moving south due the rising heat: Snow Belt to Sun Belt Migration: End Of An Era? Internal migration has been cited as a key channel by which societies will adapt to climate change. We show in this paper that this process has already been happening in the United States. Over the course of the past 50 years, the tendency of Americans to move from the coldest places (“Snow Belt”), which have become warmer, to the hottest places (“Sun Belt”), which have become hotter, has steadily declined. Given climate change projections for coming decades of increasing extreme heat in the hottest U.S. counties and decreasing extreme cold in the coldest counties, our findings suggest the “pivoting” in the U.S. climate-migration correlation over the past 50 years is likely to continue, leading to a reversal of the 20th century Snow Belt to Sun Belt migration pattern.
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More and more home buyers are discovering cheap financing through a once-obscure workaround — assumable mortgages. The first question to ask is whether the seller has an FHA or VA loan. These actually make up a significant share of the market: About 13 percent of all mortgages are FHA loans, while about 11 percent are VA loans. The property must be the seller’s primary residence and the buyer must meet the qualifications set by the FHA and the lender. For VA loans, a regional VA loan office has to approve the transaction, but the borrower doesn’t have to be a veteran, she added. In addition, the seller has to sign off on the buyer assuming the loan and provide authorization to the lender. Once the loan is approved and the sale goes through closing, the loan servicer replaces the original borrower with the new owner on the loan documents.
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Research by David Autor from MIT shows that 60% of today’s workers are employed in occupations that didn’t exist in 1940, see chart below. This is important when discussing what impact AI may have on the labor market.
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Japan’s three-day stock market crash this week was their greatest in history. It topped the Fukushima disaster in 2011, the 1987 global crash (when U.S. stocks fell 22% in a single day), the Covid declines, and the massive 2008 drawdowns:
The graphs below show the price-to-book ratio on the y-axis and the Shiller Price to Earnings CAPE ratio on the x-axis. The higher the numbers (moving the plot point up and to the right), the more expensive/overvalued the country’s stock market.
Today most of the world stock markets are relatively inexpensive or fairly valued, especially compared to the United States and India which have moved off the chart toward outer space overvaluation levels.
The US market is currently trading 31% higher than in the period 1995-2024. In contrast, Emerging America, Developed Asia and Emerging Asia are attractive, trading 29%, 21% and 7% below their historical valuation averages.
China and India have been oppositive stories since 2020 in terms of their stock prices (dark lines) and their net income (dotted lines):
New studies are showing that more money provides higher levels of happiness, even for the ultra-wealthy. A famous 2010 paper by Kahneman and economist Angus Deaton that said happiness tends to go up with incomes until about $60,000 to $90,000 a year, at which point it flattens. Kahneman and Killingworth reanalyzed that work and found the correlation between money and happiness extended to people with salaries up to at least $500,000 a year. The new research, which is being self-published by Killingsworth, found people with a net worth in the millions or billions reported an average life satisfaction rating between 5.5 and 6 out of 7, compared to a rating of about 4.6 for those earning around $100,000 a year and just above 4 for those earning about $15,000 to $30,000 a year. That makes the difference in happiness between the richest and middle-income groups almost three times larger than the difference between middle- and low-income groups.
The life secret Jerry Seinfeld learned decades ago: “The only thing in life that’s really worth having is good skill. Pursue mastery that will fulfill your life.” This thought stemmed from an edition of Esquire magazine in the late 1980’s that was so popular it inspired books to be written about it. These are the key takeaways from that article.
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Habits determine a future more than goals. If a child comes to class every day properly prepared, asks questions or attends extra help, does their homework, and refrains from most distractions regarding discovering the opposite sex, the grades will take care of themselves.
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Lyn Alden discusses how Fed interest rate cuts may impact the economy and financial markets moving forward: The fact that the U.S. was 1) running larger fiscal deficits than its peer countries and 2) had a private sector with more locked-in fixed rates than its peer countries, made it more de-sensitized to this global cycle of rising interest rates than its peer countries. In the downcycle, we could see exactly the reverse. As multiple countries cut interest rates, the countries that have private sectors with more variable-rate debt can get a consumer and corporate stimulus more readily from those lower rates, while the U.S. economy already has most of its private debt fixed at lower rates and wouldn’t get much of a stimulus from a moderate cut in interest rates. Emerging markets could benefit the most, from the starting position of significant weakness.
A higher price to earnings ratio means a country’s stock market is more expensive. A lower number is less expensive. It’s the price you are paying for the earnings of the companies.
Average of Foreign Developed Stock Markets: 20 Average of Foreign Emerging Stock Markets: 15
We are being A/B tested into a world of commoditized content. Things look the same and sound the same because they basically are the same. It’s digital déjà vu on a massive scale and it’s only going to get worse. I promise you that all those stories about young millionaires and overnight crypto fortunes are not meant to make you feel good. They are meant to create anxiety. It’s no wonder why we’ve seen a rise in financial nihilism among young people. When the mainstream media convinces you that you are doing badly financially, you may come to believe it. Of course, there are some people that are truly struggling, but there are far more who are influenced to think they are.
Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind.There is never enough life, enough love, enough knowledge, enough money, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. That’s the leper’s bell of a second-rate intellect approaching. Don’t ever let anyone tell you should be satisfied with what you have, at any age or stage of your life. If you’re not going forward, if you’re not constantly challenging yourself, you’re going backwards. Never get comfortable. Never get complacent. And the most important decision you will ever make in your life is what to do with the next 24 hours.
U.S. stocks have destroyed foreign market over the last 16 years and that trend has continued in 2024. If you look at 1900 through 2010, the U.S. and the rest of the world were essentially equal in percentage returns (with rotating cycles where one would outperform the other). Is it time for the rest of the world to catch up?
The Shiller price to earnings ratio has crossed back above 36 for U.S. stocks. Stocks are considered more expensive when this number moves higher (you are paying a higher price for company’s earnings). The market is closing in on the 2021 bubble peak of 38 and the all-time bubble peak of 44 back in March of 2000.
Tuna Thoughts 