Instead, pay attention to what the markets are actually telling you and invest accordingly.
Examples:
* SCHD: I liked it for years, then it struggled for about three years (2023–2025), which I posted about at the time. Year-to-date, it’s been performing very well again.

Ah, wow, who has ever thought of paying attention like that.
JQUA has pounded SCHD for 7y or so except the last couple weeks. (And there are others similar.) Perhaps they are 'investing accordingly'?

@msf said,
On a personal note, I've been dealing with a mild bout of RSV over the past week. Except for one day, I've been pretty functional. My PCP attributes that to my having gotten an RSV vaccine. Like Covid vaccines, it may not give complete protection but does make the illness much less severe.

Prices will continue to rise through the end of the decade, as data centers make up 40% of electricity demand growth, the analysts said. This will lower disposable income, drag down consumer spending and slightly slow economic growth in the coming years, they said.
Households will see electricity prices rise an additional 6% through 2027, the analysts said. Price inflation will then slow to 3% in 2028 on lower natural gas prices, they said. Consumer spending growth will fall 0.2% through 2027 and economic growth will slow 0.1% as a result, according to Goldman.
The trajectory of electricity prices, however, will vary widely across the U.S. based on different regional market structures and what regulatory choices are made, the bank said.

The Trump administration intends to terminate the United States’ financial support for Gavi, the organization that has helped purchase critical vaccines for children in developing countries, saving millions of lives over the past quarter century, and to significantly scale back support for efforts to combat malaria, one of the biggest killers globally.
...
Gavi is estimated to have saved the lives of 19 million children since it was set up 25 years ago. The United States contributes 13 percent of its budget.

US has wasted hundreds of thousands of vaccines meant for Africa, health officials there say
The U.S. has sent 91,000 out of the more than 1 million the Biden administration pledged, and 220,000 mpox vaccine doses have enough shelf life to ship if the Trump administration signs off, according to an Africa CDC spokesperson.
The loss of the mpox shots comes after President Donald Trump cut back foreign aid programs and closed the U.S. Agency for International Development, which administered most of them.
Congress this week passed a bill requested by Trump rescinding hundreds of millions of dollars in global health funding.

the actual decline in China’s holdings may be smaller than official figures suggest.
Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, estimates that China’s “true” holdings of US Treasuries exceed $1 trillion, far above the $683 billion reported by the US Treasury.
That’s because Beijing may have obscured its footprint by shifting assets to custodians in Europe. Belgium — whose holdings are considered to include some of those Chinese accounts — has seen its Treasury ownership quadruple since the end of 2017 to $481 billion.

From Petrodollars to De-Dollarization
...
Seen as an alternative to heavily indebted fiat currencies, especially the U.S. dollar, the share of gold in central bank reserves has increased most among emerging market economies. China, Russia, and Türkiye have been the largest official buyers over the past decade.

According to the IMF, gold’s share of global reserves climbed to about 18% in 2024, up sharply from mid-2010s levels, reflecting a structural reweighting toward tangible assets.

Are there even other brands than Heinz ketchup or Skippy Super Chunk peanut butter?   :)

Mr. Cahillane said that over the last few years, the industry, responding to commodity inflation, “busted through four or five levels of price points in a very accelerated fashion.” He added: “The consumer was left very disappointed in that, and that’s been very well understood and obvious.”

In the summer of 2022, Democrats in Congress were racing to pass the biggest climate law in the country’s history. But behind the scenes, four Trump administration veterans were plotting to obliterate federal climate efforts once Republicans regained control in Washington, according to more than a dozen people familiar with the matter.
Two of them, Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, drafted executive orders for the next Republican president to dismantle climate initiatives. The other two collected an “arsenal of information” to chip away at the scientific consensus that the planet is warming.
The overwhelming majority of scientists around the world agree that carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are dangerously heating the planet and supercharging storms, droughts, heat waves and sea level rise, directly contradicting the four conservatives.
Their efforts are now paying off: the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to revoke a determination that has underpinned the federal government’s ability to fight global warming since 2009. That scientific conclusion, known as the endangerment finding, determined that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. It required the federal government to regulate these gases, which result from the burning of oil, gas and coal.
In revoking that determination, the Trump administration would erase limits on greenhouse gases from cars, power plants and industries that generate the planet-warming pollution. “We are pretty close to total victory,” said Myron Ebell, who helped the first Trump administration set up its operations at the E.P.A. and has been attacking climate science and policies for nearly three decades.
“No amount of outside public support would have done anything if there hadn’t been those four people: Russ and Jeff and John and Mandy,” he said.
Still, some conservative activists who insisted that the threat of climate change was overblown kept up the fight during the Biden years. One of them was Ms. Gunasekara, who served as E.P.A. chief of staff during Mr. Trump’s first term and wrote the E.P.A. chapter in Project 2025.
The Heritage Foundation eventually agreed to fund some of this work, although it is unclear whether the group provided the full $2 million, according to two people familiar with the matter. Ms. Gunasekara said in a text message that she was “extremely proud of the work I and others produced at the Heritage Foundation to rebut junk science and expose the Green New Scam.”
In 2022, under Mr. Vought’s supervision, Mr. Clark drafted executive orders that a future president could use to swiftly scrap Mr. Biden’s climate policies, according to two people familiar with the matter. He also brainstormed legal arguments that the future administration could use to repeal the endangerment finding.
Mr. Clark has called climate initiatives part of a plot to “control” Americans” and to undermine the U.S. economy. He has called environmentalists a “crazy climate cult. He is “an ideologue with very, very strong views that E.P.A. shouldn’t regulate greenhouse gases,” said a professor of environmental law at Harvard Law School.
At the time that he was hired by Mr. Vought, Mr. Clark was facing a criminal investigation in connection with Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. President Trump preemptively pardoned Mr. Clark in November and the Georgia case was dismissed. With Mr. Trump’s return to the White House last year, Mr. Clark became the government’s top regulatory official as the acting head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Mr. Vought is once again the White House budget director and Mr. Clark’s boss.
A spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget declined to make Mr. Clark available for an interview or respond to questions about his work. She said in a statement that Trump administration officials were “working in lock step to execute on the president’s deregulation agenda.”
Neil Chatterjee, a Republican who led the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the first Trump administration, said conservative activists had helped sustain the fight against the endangerment finding even after businesses backed out. “It’s not the corporate interests,” Mr. Chatterjee said, adding, “It’s the pure ideological activists who believe that climate change is a hoax, who believe that this was about transferring wealth and driving socialism and destroying renewable energy and promoting left-wing ideology.”
“This is their moment,” Mr. Chatterjee said.

Strong monthly jobs growth and easing unemployment have pushed back expectations about when the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates again, suggesting the central bank is poised for an extended pause. Data released on Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed monthly jobs growth of 130,000 positions, almost double what economists had forecast, and the unemployment rate ticking down to 4.3 percent. That is down from a recent peak of 4.5 percent in January and slightly lower than December’s level.
The unemployment rate has become a focal point for the Fed, as President Trump's immigration restrictions have decreased the supply of new workers available for hire, and the number of new jobs the economy needs to keep the unemployment rate stable has dropped as a result, with research suggesting it could turn negative by this year.
Price pressures have mounted as Mr. Trump’s tariffs have taken effect, and officials at the Fed broadly expect the peak impact from those levies to hit in the first quarter of this year. January’s Consumer Price Index report will give policymakers insight into whether that forecast is bearing out. Economists expect annual inflation to tick down to 2.5 percent after a 0.3 percent increase in monthly prices. “Core” inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy items, is expected to stay sticky at 2.5 percent, only slightly lower than the previous 2.6 percent annual pace.
But in a sign that labor-related price pressures remain muted, the employment cost index, a quarterly measure from the Labor Department that tracks changes in wages and benefits, unexpectedly slowed in the final three months of 2025. Economists at Evercore ISI said that data confirmed their view that the “economy is cooling under the hood.”
Stephen I. Miran, who has dissented at every meeting since he joined the Fed in September, voted in favor of a quarter-point cut. He was joined by Christopher J. Waller, who, In explaining his dissent, said that revisions to the jobs data would likely show no growth in employment last year: “Zero. Zip. Nada,” Mr. Waller said- “this does not remotely look like a healthy labor market.”

Further cuts appear to hinge on the labor market breaking out of its current “low hire, low fire” state and layoffs beginning to pick up in a more broad-based way, or inflation significantly slowing. Mr. Powell last month downplayed the possibility of a rate increase this year.
In a social media post on Wednesday after January’s report was released, the president again called for the country to be paying the lowest interest rate in the world and said it would lead to cost savings of at least $1 trillion a year related to payments to service the national debt. But the Fed does not take into consideration interest payments on the debt when setting policy. It is congressionally mandated to pursue low, stable inflation and a healthy labor market.