3 Things: The Lost Decade, Amazon & the Traditional Supermarket, and Spam Is Taking Over Our Phones

Diversification is a strategy designed to help you avoid unnecessary mistakes

1.  The Easiest Decade for DIY Investors (The Belle Curve, 3/17/2019)

“Do you remember all the hoopla about “The Lost Decade” for US stocks? Over a ten-year period the S&P 500 had a negative return. That is a very long time to be down in stocks. But what rarely gets mentioned is that investing in different types of stocks provided positive returns. Value, small cap, international, and emerging markets all posted positive returns during ‘The Lost Decade’.”

“Their game is data and they need to have frequency.”

2.  Can Amazon Reinvent the Traditional Supermarket? (Wharton, 3/21/2019)

“What’s really attractive about grocery is not really the margin; it’s the traffic,” Kahn said. “When you go into an Amazon store, you have to log in with your app and everything you do in that store is then connected with everything online.”

Does anyone answer their phones anymore? 

3.  Spam has taken over our phones. Will we ever want to answer them again? (The Washington Post, 3/19/2019)

“The phones have turned on us. Our little pocket pals seduced us with cheap long distance, unlimited texts, endless apps. Now they beep and shudder and flash with strange numbers at all hours of the day. We answer, and our beloved iPhone (or Android, or bedside landline) impales our eardrum with a cruiseline ad. It tries to sell us a medical back brace. It threatens to jail us unless we wire our life savings to the IRS.”

SAGE Serendipity:  Video games are tackling mental health issues, everything from depression and anxiety to psychosis, self-identity, anger issues and post-traumatic stress disorder. Check this out from The New York Times Personal Tech column: Depressed and Anxious? These Video Games Want to Help