This past Monday, my wife and I took our kids to Silver Dollar City for the evening. Silver Dollar City is a 61-acre amusement park in Branson, Mo., themed around the 1880s.
During Christmas, the theme park displays more than 6.5 million lights. My daughter, now 11, wanted to ride every roller coaster she could as soon as she was tall enough to do so.
My son, who is now 9, not so much. Well, this trip to the park was different. My son evaluated the "risks and rewards" of riding the rides and decided the rewards were worth the risks .
..even though part of the risk was riding the rollercoasters at night.
As the end of the year draws near, the market is behaving unpredictably, offering a confusing mix of signals as investors try to close out what has been a strong year overall. In 2024, the extremes in market performance became more pronounced. Between 2000 and 2023, U.
S. stocks already outpaced foreign stocks by more than double. Now, based on MSCI indexes, they've continued to surge ahead, posting a 29% gain compared with less than 9% outside the U.
S. This continued lead is partly due to the U.S.
dollar's ongoing strength and the rising influence of the Magnificent Seven — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Tesla and Nvidia — whose combined weight in the S&P 500 has grown from about a quarter at the end of 2023 to roughly a third today. Their massive gains have been so dominant that, despite benefiting from the "Trump trade," small U.S.
companies in the S&.
