Word: indexers
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...from nothing. There's no question that people are getting bigger. Even the most strident obesity skeptics concede that across Western populations, adults are on average 7 kg heavier than they were 25 years ago. Nor does anyone dispute that, according to the standard measuring tool of body mass index, or BMI (which is calculated by dividing body weight in kilograms by height in meters squared), the majority of Australian and New Zealand adults are either overweight or obese. Based on its National Health Survey 2004-05, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that...
...made no references to the 2005 divestment campaign that led Harvard to sell its shares of a Chinese oil company, Sinopec, with ties to the Sudanese government. Instead, he mentioned issues like pressure for fund managers to avoid investments in tobacco companies, and suggested that countries could invest in index funds to avoid political problems...
America could really use a civics lesson. And it's about to get one. The National Conference on Citizenship, a federally chartered nonprofit founded in 1946 to strengthen civic ties, will release the first Civic Health Index next week, tracking changes in the awareness and engagement of the citizenry over the past three decades. It presents a bleak picture--steep declines in most of the 40 measures that were analyzed, including how much people trust one another and major institutions, and their connections to their communities. The index offers a couple of bright spots: more citizens, especially young ones, vote...
...what's to be done? First, get a sharper picture of where we stand. The U.S. routinely collects minutely detailed information to gauge the vitality of its economy. This new index is the beginning of an effort to do the same for its civic life. With this data, we can begin to seriously debate and ultimately fashion robust policies to fix our communal machinery. Local groups can tap it to build awareness, and national service programs, such as AmeriCorps, can use it to hone recruiting. With just a little focus and effort, our civic health can change course...
...performance isn't what quant shops are about--at all. Quants are coolly confident that managers who hit it big one year are likely to stumble the next, so their goal is simply to beat a benchmark index (say, the S&P 500 or the Russell 1000) by a few percentage points a year. "We're about hitting lots of singles," says Ronald Kahn, who runs advanced equity strategies at Barclays Global Investors. The Casey, Quirk survey found that quants take about half as much risk as nonquants. Over time, that habit of not losing as much money in down...