It does this by default without a subscription service in the event of a detected fall if you do not respond to an alert within a certain amount of time.
Hope nobody falls on their watch and are uninjured but break the touch sensor, preventing them from being able to cancel the 911 call…
It only calls 911 if it detects no movement after a fall, so it would have to be the motion sensors in the device that completely fail, not a touch sensor.
Investing in total market index funds is literally investing in the economy as a whole. (Or as much of a whole as the index represents.) So while yes, they will crash with future market crashes, of which there will be many in each of our lifetimes, historically in the U.S. so far the market has always recovered.
"historically in the U.S. so far the market has always recovered."
This is sorta enshrining survivorship bias in your premises - take the largest economy around today and point out that every time it's crashed, it's recovered. Well, if it hadn't, there wouldn't be anything to point at.
There are actually plenty of examples - even among European settlers of the Americas - where the economy did not recover. The Continental Congress and the monetary system setup under it failed through hyperinflation, leading to the expression "not worth a Continental", and then the country had to be rebooted under the U.S. Constitution. Similarly, plantation owners in the Confederate States of America were totally wiped out - not only was the currency debased, the infrastructure destroyed, and the plantations burned, but the whole legal framework under which the plantation system operated was rewritten.
But you are comparing with fledgling/emerging markets. Samples of failures at this point to scare people should be declines of economies established for more than a hundred years. The falls of empires, etc. Those are what are relevant to the current US investor.
According to this article [1], public firms account for about 80% of the pre-tax profit in the private sector. That's probably enough, given that public and private company returns are probably at least somewhat correlated.
Right. But I'd wager that index fund investors are more interested in profits than GDP, at least as it relates to their investments and the proposition at the top of this thread that index funds will be "ripped" (presumably disproportionately) in the next downturn.
Right. If you have a wide market downturn, all of the "active investors" are going to take their money out as cash and wait to buy and the "passive investors "are going to take a bath.
The mistake that index fund adherents make is that there is no such thing as passive investing.
Certain market participants have been screaming about this fact to anyone who will listen for 2+ years now.
> Certain market participants have been screaming about this fact to anyone who will listen for 2+ years now.
There's an alarming amount of overlap between the groups: "claim that passive investing will underperform," and "make money when people actively invest."
First, it's literally impossible for all of the "active investors" to take their money out as cash; some active investors can cash out by selling all their stock to other active investors who think that this is a good time to buy more stock; passive investors would/could only absorb that amount of stock at the speed of new passive capital coming in, which is gradual, not that large (compared to the flows of active investors) and would likely slow down somewhat in a market downturn.
Furthermore, how exactly are "passive investors" going to take a bath? They're simply making a very long term bull market bet; if DJI drops 50%, it's the active investors that might sell at this price, but the index funds will just keep their position until (and after) it recovers, the only case where they'll lose in the long run is if the DJI drops permanently and that doesn't seem plausible outside of ww3 scenarios.
I mean, there's some causality there; when the active investors try to take their money out as cash all at once, it does tend to have negative effects on the market. but... I think that, generally speaking, the goal of your active investors is to buy during the downturn, and sell into the upturn.
Buy low, sell high; not the other way around.
I mean, that's the goal. Of course, it doesn't always work out that way, but you don't plan on selling at the bottom and buying as it recovers.
One of those is based in fact and reality, the other is not. The reason you're having a hard time finding "neutral" news is because reality is not inherently neutral.
What is? I don't think I gave any specific examples or are you implying that other side political propaganda is completely based of "facts and reality"?
By neutrality I mean the facts and reality. Reality is inherently real and not up for negotiation. I just want to know what has happened in the world without any additional comments/thoughts/propaganda etc. by the journalist.
"AFAIUI" is nowhere even close to as common as your other examples. I have never encountered it before, and Google Trends doesn't even register it in a comparison between the others.
Trends isn't the best for this as it's search results not occurrences so really all this will show is the number of people confused by the term for weird contractions like this. "AFAIUI" could theoretically just be completely understood by the community using it.
Oh, I understood what you meant, I was just providing an additional data point for this particular conversation in response to what you were saying re: search queries vs. results.
Getting freelance web development work. Maybe the markets are just changing, but in the past couple years my opportunities for new clients and projects have dropped off significantly and it's become very hard to sustain myself anymore.
And those people are the reason everyone else says not to do that, not to time the market, and to invest for the long term. If you stick to an established plan, adjust your allocation according to that plan, and don't panic sell, historically you will have always come out ahead.
The important thing the linked article shows is that even if you're always investing right before crashes the market still trends upwards and you still come out ahead — as long as you don't panic sell.
Correct, but I think this is easier said than done sometimes - especially if you've only been investing during a huge bull market. As Mike Tyson once said, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face."
All the more reason to constantly tell people the right thing to do and why and strategies to avoid letting fear and other emotions get the better of them in those situations. We can all be susceptible to such things, but with a little education and discipline can avoid making terrible mistakes like that.
The assets in your 401k (if invested in the market, especially if invested in broad market index funds to be highly diversified) actually have value beyond simply being a speculative asset. They're shares in businesses with a lot of motivations to make a profit, and they're going to continue doing their best to do so, and you benefit from that as a shareholder.
Cryptocurrency is largely a bubble of speculation and get-rich-quick hype with not much actual utility for most people beyond a lot of claims that don't ever really pan out.
Russian interference and manipulation went far beyond that. They've been buying election machine companies, sending spies to funnel money and influence to U.S. politicians, hacking and offering stolen information on opponents (which they've done for decades, but this is the first known time someone accepted rather than reporting it to the FBI immediately, and in fact ignored the FBI's warnings that it might happen), not to mention the years of deliberate manipulation and radicalization of people online through advertising and sockpuppet accounts.
The crudeness of the accusations has raised the Russians to some kind of James Bond villain organization status...
NATO has been suffocating their borders, steadily advancing, bombing around, creating proxy states (Kossovo), influencing "orange revolutions", and operating tons of political groups and NGOs in Russia and tons of army bases around Russia. Including tons of sponsored reporting on all mainstream media (not just an obvious state outlet like RT which the Russian government has).
And it is Russia that's made into the "villain du jour" based on BS like "hacking the democratic emails" etc, as an excuse for the democrats that have made a mess for themselves by cutting off their better candidate, and offering a Wall Street pawn nobody really likes in his place...
The same old hypocrisy of colonialism and Cold War. Which never ended, apparently. Even back in 1996:
"The outcome was by no means inevitable. Last winter Yeltsin's approval ratings were in the single digits. There are many reasons for his change in fortune, but a crucial one has remained a secret. For four months, a group of American political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin's campaign. Here is the inside story of how these advisers helped Yeltsin achieve the victory that will keep reform in Russia alive."
No one should browse the web without an ad/script blocker enabled all the time at this point. Exposing your computer to the web without one is like unprotected sex given how malicious advertising has become between tracking behavior data and hosting actual malware.
I live 30 miles from the Mexico border along multiple heavily used smuggling routes. I hike and backpack frequently in mountains used by those smugglers and have encountered groups of smugglers many times over the last 7+ years. I have never seen them armed, nor have I ever felt threatened by them. In almost every encounter, they get off the trail and move away before we get close, or if they get startled and there's no time to really do that, they just sort of keep their heads down and pass quickly. Everyone I know who hikes in the region, including a former Border Patrol agent who worked this area for 6+ years (and never saw an armed smuggler), has had a similar experience.
Edit: There are some areas along the border where smugglers are reported to be armed more frequently, but this is almost exclusively in areas where two cartels compete for smuggling routes and their weapons are carried to defend against the other cartels, not to use against civilians or law enforcement. They don't want to get caught with weapons in the U.S., as that significantly increases their legal exposure vs. just bales of marijuana.
Yeah, it's like Phoenix "the kidnapping capital". Mostly just cartel members kidnapping other cartel members until they give up the drugs where your common citizen doesn't ever have to worry about it.
There was a story a while back where a girl got snatched (for leverage to get the drugs her father was sitting on) and when the kidnappers figured out they got the intended victim's friend instead they just let her go with a "umm, yeah, our bad".
Not to discount the issue, though. There are cases where the human smugglers keep people hostage until the families come up with extra money and/or sell them into slavery which is definitely no bueno.
Hope nobody falls on their watch and are uninjured but break the touch sensor, preventing them from being able to cancel the 911 call…