Why are some people wealthier or more successful than others? The default explanation has always been that the wealthier among us are more diligent and/or smarter or more talented than the less wealthy so that the cream eventually rises to the top.

Technology for health is finally moving beyond the Fitbit and counting your steps, to more complicated and useful feedback like improving your posture and correcting your running stride.

Return – we chase it, we measure it – daily, monthly, quarterly. We compare investments and investment managers based upon it. Newspapers, radio, television, and now Internet media focus upon it. Like "plastics" in the 1960s movie The Graduate, it is the ONE WORD upon which everyone clings.

The bond market thinks the new administration in Washington will boost economic activity, and that the Federal Reserve will begin a program of raising interest rates. They may be right. Of course, higher interest rates have been predicted for years and kept falling. We’ll see.

We tend to pay an awful lot of attention to investment returns. Mostly, I suppose, because they are in our faces all the time. Turn on the television, listen to the radio, pick-up the newspaper, even our smart phones have applications to keep us continuously abreast of the latest valuation placed by Wall Street traders on a basket of thirty stocks we know as the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). But what does today's valuation have to do with our lives, and should it make or break our day? 

Be wary of applications on the Internet and elsewhere that purport to calculate how you can maximize your lifetime Social Security benefits. They can do no such thing, and are apt to lead you in a dangerously wrong direction.

Broadly diversified portfolios structured within prudent risk parameters just do not seem to be making any money these days. The stock market has been seesawing up and down wildly all year long, but finishing right where it starts. Currency fluctuations are wiping out otherwise positive international investment returns, and bonds, if anything, are showing negative total returns due to concerns about the Federal Reserve raising interest rates.