It’s one of the hardest jobs you will ever do, and you may never actually get any true credit for it: single parenting. Since the 1960s, there has been a clear jump in the number of children living in a single-parent home. According to the United States Census Bureau, between 1960 and 2016, the amount of children living in with two parents decreased from 88% to 69%. It is reported that this was caused by an increase of births to unmarried women and an increase in divorces among couples. In 2010 alone, 40.7% of all births in the U.S. were to unmarried women. The latest Census data shows that approximately 26% of children live in single-parent households today.

If you want to see global economic history in a single colorful graph, keep reading. The following was produced by The Atlantic magazine and it shows the share of global GDP for various countries from the year 1 AD to 2008 AD.

When people want to protect important papers like their wills and trust documents, or valuables like rare coins or precious jewelry, they understand that it’s not generally wise to keep them laying around the house. Much better—so goes the conventional wisdom—to put those items in one of the 25 million safe deposit boxes at local bank branch offices around the U.S. There, they’ll be protected by a foot-thick steel door and a system with two keys, one kept by the customer, one by the bank.

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.

It’s a little-know fact that the SEC allows mutual funds to spend a portion of investor assets on marketing and distribution. Wall Street’s self-regulator, FINRA, limits that spending to a whopping 0.75% of a fund’s average net assets a year.

Patience, the act of resisting compulsive reaction to emotion-provoking stimuli, is what separates serious investors from capricious speculators.  – Jay Hutchins, 2015

 In the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart plays a famous photographer laid up with a broken leg, aided by a visiting nurse named Stella, played by Thelma Ritter.  In a scene apropos of what we'll be hearing from a few stock market mavens in the coming weeks, Stella boasts to Stewart’s character, “You heard of that market crash in ’29?  I predicted that.”  To which Stewart’s character inquires curtly, “Oh, just how did you do that, Stella?”  “Oh, simple, explains Stella, “I was nursing a director of General Motors.  Kidney ailment, they said.  Nerves, I says. And I asked myself, “What’s General Motors got to be nervous about?”  Overproduction, I says; collapse.  When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go.”