Let’s begin with the future of money that no one foresaw.
In 2008, in a wonkish paper that bore no relation to any sci-fi, the enigmatic Satoshi Nakamoto launched Bitcoin, “a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash” that allows “online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” In essence, Bitcoin is a public ledger shared by an acephalous (leaderless) network of computers. To pay with bitcoins, you send a signed message transferring ownership to a receiver’s public key. Transactions are grouped together and added to the ledger in blocks, and every node in the network has an entire copy of this blockchain at all times. A node can add a block to the chain (and receive a bitcoin reward) only by solving a cryptographic puzzle chosen by the Bitcoin protocol, which consumes processing power.
Nodes that have solved the cryptographic puzzle — “miners” — are rewarded not only with transaction fees, but also with more bitcoins. This reward will get cut in half every four years until the total number of bitcoins reaches 21 million, after which no new Bitcoins will be created. As I argued here last November, there were good reasons why Bitcoin left gold for dead as the pandemic was wreaking havoc last year. Scarcely over a year ago, when just about every financial asset sold off as the full magnitude of the pandemic sank in, the dollar price of a Bitcoin fell to $3,858. As I write, the price is $58,746.

After the Strong Capital Management (and other related) scandals in the late 90s the SEC pressured fund houses to crack down on frequent trading abuses. These “skimming” operations were often orchestrated in concert by large groups (ie an employees’ investment plan). But smaller investors as well were impacted by generally more stringent curbs imposed on frequent buying and selling. I don’t find Price’s or others’ curbs particularly onerous; however, a way around the limitations would appear to exist in substituting ETFs for traditional funds.
While the fee advantages seem significant, I’m wondering if a retiree in his mid-seventies would find it worth the trouble in converting over t ETFs what has proven a prudent and profitable diversified approach - using roughly 12-15 long-held mutual funds from fiduciaries long acquainted with. Changing from one investment method to another would seem always to entail some risk of error.

Amazon Illegally Fired Activist Workers, Labor Board Finds
The two employees had publicly pushed the company to reduce its impact on climate change and address concerns about its warehouse workers.