Here are the total returns for calendar-year 2006 for selected Vanguard Funds:

• Prime Money Market Fund: 4.85%




• Short-Term Bond Index Fund: 4.06%
• Intermediate-Term Bond Index Fund: 3.88%
• Long-Term Bond Index Fund: 2.64%
• GNMA Fund: 4.30%
• High-Yield Corporate Fund: 8.19%
• Inflation-Protected Securities Fund: 0.43%
• Total Bond Market Index Fund: 4.24%




• 500 Index Fund: 15.64%
• Convertible Securities Fund: 12.94%
• Dividend Growth Fund: 19.58%
• Total Stock Market Index Fund: 15.51%




• Extended Market Index Fund: 14.27%
• Mid-Cap Index Fund: 13.60%
• Small-Cap Index Fund: 15.64%




• Energy Fund: 19.66%
• Health Care Fund: 10.86%
• Precious Metals and Mining Fund: 34.30%
• REIT Index Fund: 35.07%




• Emerging Markets Stock Index Fund: 29.39%
• European Stock Index Fund: 33.46%
• Pacific Stock Index Fund: 11.99%
• Total International Stock Index Fund: 26.64%

Total returns for calendar-year 2005 for selected Vanguard Funds

Total returns for calendar-year 2004 for selected Vanguard Funds

We will leave tomorrow to travel to the Pacific Northwest where we’ll spend our Christmas holiday. I’m not taking a computer with me so there won’t be any Notable New Highs or any other posts that rely on market data until we return early next year.

I may blog something from time to time from a coffee shop or library, but then again maybe I won’t. The best thing you can do is subscribe to my feed to know when I next post something.

Happy Holidays!

1. Distribution of Families in the US in 1840

Neat. Compiled from the 1840 US Federal Census records … you can also look at 1880 and 1920 to see how the distribution changed over time.

2. Great Photo of the Recent Space Shuttle Launch

Is there a Slip F-18 there?

3. Air Quality Daily Report for 84 Major Cities In China

An extremely depressing thing to review, especially if you live in Beijing.

4. Sky Diver Almost Gets Hit By A Plane (Video)

You can see the plane far below from the first moment, but I guess the sky diver didn’t, or didn’t realize the plane was climbing that fast.

5. Nissan Boob Commercial (Video)

Independent Front Suspension, indeed.

6. Financial Report of the United States Government

A comprehensive overview of the federal government’s finances. Makes for some terrifying reading, but I think measuring the asset side of the balance sheet is a tad flawed… intangibles, anyone?

7. Hong Kong’s Peninsula Hotel Orders 14 New Rolls-Royce Phantoms (Photo)

Not a bad way to get to Kowloon, but I prefer the Airport Express.

8. Letter from China: The sex industry is everywhere but nowhere

“A Chinese economist has estimated there are 20 million sex workers in the country, accounting for fully 6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.” My reaction is the same as Howard’s: only six percent?

9. Will It Blend?

Tom Dickson is my kind of nutter. Yes, it blends!

10. How We Did It: Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, Co-founders, Flickr

“We shouldn’t have sold when we did, but you don’t know that until after the fact.” And, more interestingly, “George Oates [a Flickr employee] and I would spend 24 hours, seven days a week, greeting every single person who came to the site. We introduced them to people, we chatted with them. This is a social product. People are putting things they love–photographs of their whole lives–into it. All of these people are your potential evangelists. You need to show those people love.”

I love all of you regular readers, yes, all 12 of you. ;-)

Buying all day long — a classic trend day.

A few observations: Xenonics (XNN) finally and predictably collapses; lots of Chinese companies on the new highs list and the FXI closes above the $100 mark; 116 of the 309 ETFs I follow are trading at new highs, including Singapore (EWS), MSCI EAFE (EFA), Diamonds (DIA), Energy SPDR (XLE), Consumer Discretionary (XLY), and the S&P 500 (SPY).

The best investment advice you’ll never get, by Mark Dowie

John Bogle is the living scourge of Wall Street. Though a self-described archcapitalist and lifelong Republican, on the subject of brokers and financial advisers he sounds more like a seasoned Marxist. “The modern American financial system,” Bogle says in his book The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, “is undermining our highest social ideals, damaging investors’ trust in the markets, and robbing them of trillions.” But most of his animus is reserved for mutual funds, his own field of business, which he describes as an industry organized around “salesmanship rather than stewardship,” which “places the interests of managers ahead of the interests of shareholders,” and is “the consummate example of capitalism gone awry.”

Bogle’s advice is simple and direct: those brokers and financial advisers hovering at the door are there for one reason and one reason only — to take your money through exorbitant fees and transaction costs, many of which will be hidden from your view. They are, as New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer described them, nothing more than “a giant fleecing machine.” Ignore them all and invest in an index fund.

Saint Jack is right, but we learn later on in the article that:

Only about 40 percent of institutional money and 15 percent of individuals’ money is invested in index funds.

It’s sad how badly most people manage their money.

Chop with a negative bias all day, funny blast of buying in the last 30 minutes.

A few observations: Progen (PGLA) the Crazy Play of the Day (690x average volume) — again, if your scanner is not picking these things up within 1 minute of blast-off, something is wrong; Ford (F) back below $7; optionsXpress (OXPS) takes a spill; darn hard to find a European market not trading at a new high: Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, UK, etc. ad nauseum.

Nowhere for the first hour or so and then selling kicked in and went on all day long — a trend day.

Good solid buying all day long then a crush of selling in the last 30 minutes.

Best bit from the interview with Martin Barnes in this week’s Barron’s:

As long as Asian central banks are prepared to buy the dollars, then [foreign investors not wanting to own dollars is] not going to be problem for some time to come. And they’ve got a huge incentive to keep buying dollars. The huge incentive is what some people have called the world’s biggest vendor-financing scheme. The rest of the world is lending America the money to buy their goods, keeping overseas factories running, keeping American consumption going, keeping interest rates down. It prevents currency instability from causing any problems in financial markets, and everybody seems to benefit. It is a complete win-win situation. But, of course, there is a big distortion of market forces to the extent that central banks are propping this up.

Win-win, right. We get DVD players and they get little pieces of funny-colored paper in return.

Chinese property company stocks mentioned in an article by Jon Ogden:

• AGILE PROPERTY (3383.HK)
• BAOYE GROUP (2355.HK)
• BJ CAPITAL LAND (2868.HK)
• CHINA OVERSEAS (0688.HK)
• CHINA RES LAND (1109.HK)
• GREENTOWN CHINA (3900.HK)
• HOPSON DEV HOLD (0754.HK)
• R&F PROPERTIES (2777.HK)

I’ve written about R&F Properties before:

“Correcting” Property Market “Distortions”, May 19, 2006
Guangzhou R&F Properties Co., Ltd., September 6, 2005

1. 10 most intelligent / least intelligent dogs

I could have told you that Shih Tzu, Pekingese, and Chow Chow are among the dumbest dogs — “number of repetitions required to understand a new command.” Number of kicks required?

2. WNCW’s Top 100 Albums List

WNCW out of Spindale, NC is the best radio station in the United States; I used to be an avid listener when I lived briefly in TN. (Find their 128Kbps Stereo Stream here) The Top 100 Album Lists are great.

3. Pete Goldlust’s Carved Crayons

Love them!

4. The US ZIPScribble Map

Neat data visualization of US Zip Codes — “density distribution” … check out Adirondack Park.

5. group hug // anonymous online confessions

Not as interesting as PostSecret, but a site any voyeur can appreciate.

6. James Kim’s Tragic Path

Excellent set of images from Google Earth of the area where the Kims got lost, including the tragic route James Kim took in an attempt to get help.

7. The Ultimate Rejection Letter

Amusing … “turning the tables.”

8. Interview with Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of reddit

Like Digg, reddit is something new I use every day.

9. 24 Screen Trading Turret (Photo)

That’s nuts. I made the most money trading while using a single cracked 14-inch laptop screen. ;-)

10. 77 Design Gifts Under $77

A lot of great ideas here, and just in time for your holiday shopping (I know you haven’t started yet).