Stock Market Sale Bin: Which Investments are Discounted Right Now?

What's cheap right now?  Some Apple alternatives...
(see my previous post on why now's not the time to buy Apple Company stock)


A strong blue-chip stock that's on sale right now is the 3M Company (MMM).  A nice dip in recent months in the price of this strong dividend-paying stock has made this a good time to buy MMM.

10-year performance of the 3M Company's stock

Some strong and varied mutual funds are on sale right now...here are some Fidelity funds since they're the ones I know the best.  You can probably find similar funds by your favorite brokerage.


Fidelity Value (FDVLX) -includes energy, banking, insurance, and--fittingly--some of Buffet's own company, Berkshire Hathaway.  This fund has come back in a strong way since the recession three years ago.  Priced around $60 after recently being at $75 earlier this year and beating $90 before the recession.  This is a nice discount.

10-year performance of the Fidelity Value mutual fund

And I'll mention two strong international funds for some diversity:


Fidelity Nordic (FNORX) --invests in companies linked to Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.  It has a strong growth history, has bounced back well from the recession and is at a nice discount now (though the way it's bouncing back, it may not be on sale for long.)

and Fidelity Canada (FICDX)

10-year performance of Fidelity Canada mutual fund

The performance records of the Canada and Nordic funds speak for themselves.  But if you happen to be investing for the long term (>10 years), also keep in mind what areas of the world might be doing pretty well, comparatively speaking, as global climate keep changing.  Higher latitudes might just be a good bet.

Be a Buffeteer: Is Now a Good Time to Buy Apple Stock?

Just like with any any purchase you make, a good time to buy stocks, mutual funds, and other investments is when they're generously discounted.

That's Warren Buffet main investing principle, and he's the most successful investor that ever was.  But also follow Thomas Jefferson's advice never to buy something just because it's on sale. Combine the guiding principles of these two greats, and you have yourself a solid investing mantra:

Buy Quality Investments When They're Super Cheap.

So is it the time to buy stock in Apple (APPL)?  I would definitely call Apple a quality investment, but take a look at its stock price these last 10 years and it's not exactly what I would call discounted.  If you want to be a Buffeteer, now's not the time to buy Apple, especially when there are other great deals on the market.

The Anti-Fountain of Youth Protein: Methionine

Tuna is still one of the most healthful sources of protein, but...

Bottom line: a 40% decrease in calorie consumption over the adult life of an animal has been confirmed for decades to dramatically increase the healthy lifespan of the animal.  And now, researchers are finding that animals eating a normal amount of calories each day but decreasing protein (or, specifically, methionine) intake by 40% over the animal's life has similarly dramatic anti-aging effects.

There's one specific building block of protein that's the main culprit in causing cell damage and aging: methionine.  It's in all the most common protein-laden foods we like to eat, from eggs to beef or chicken to vegan options like tofu and algae.  (But keep in mind some foods have proteins with more of the methionine building block than other foods.)

Here's a useful, extensive listing of all the most common...and not so common (it might not be such a struggle to decrease your Beluga whale or free-range elk consumption!) foods with the highest amount of the methionine protein per serving.

Even the healthy egg should be eaten in moderation.

Ummm yeah, so the amino acid methionine seems to be completely unavoidable!  So we all need protein to live, and no matter which food our protein source is, it seems we're going to end up eating methionine in the food.  So, why would I even bother to tell you this?

Well, luckily scientists found in their studies that there were huge reductions in the amount of aging-type cellular damage found in the animals with just a 40% decrease in methionine intake.  That's great news!  Forty percent is a completely reasonable decrease that still lets us get our basic protein needs met.

Replace a few meaty dishes each week with a hearty veggie alternative and you're well on your way to drastically decreasing how much methionine you eat.

By the way, this research is an exciting extension on the decades of laboratory research on "dietary restriction" (DR) or "caloric restriction" (CR) in creatures varying in complexity from yeast to mice to monkeys.  Piles of research agreed that these DR or CR diets in which the number of calories was decreased by some signification portion (often around 40%) succeeded in increasing high-quality lifespan dramatically in all these creatures.  This result has been one of the best and most universally supported research findings in medicine.

Only recently have the researchers been studying each part of the diet one at a time...and that's when they found this gold mine result that the protein intake--specifically, the methionine intake--was the main factor that caused this increase in lifespan.

Why Deer Flies Don't Like Yellow Lab Ears

German Shepherd puppy

Horse

Yellow lab puppy

Which one doesn't belong?

Deer Fly photo Copyright Biology Dept. of Randall & Schietzelt & Harper College

My mom and I were walking the German Shepherd puppy (above) and a yellow lab puppy (above) this morning in rural NY.  A nasty deer fly (huge bloodsucking crazed insect) was hovering over the Shepherd puppy bugging the poor guy to death.  The yellow lab, only feet away, never got bugged at all!

So I got a theory about how this devil's fly finds its target.  I remember reading that bees find the entrance to their hive by depending a lot on the shapes of the area near the hive, like what pattern the trees are in and other big shapes like rocks as orientation landmarks.  If the landmarks are moved, the bees have trouble finding the hive.

So, I thought, maybe deer flies use certain shapes as their guides.  The horse and Shepherd ears have a distinctive M shape and maybe the flies learned to go there since the skin is soft and vulnerable there.
 
If the deer flies depended on the shapes (vs. smell or just randomly landing on any spot on the animal) then that would help explain why the lucky yellow lab with droopy ears had no problems at all.

Immune Conditioning: How to Get a Drug Response Without Taking the Drug

Sherbert instead of pills?  Count me in!

I learned about immune conditioning today and boy did it blow me away!  I was reading The Healing Mind that the body is physically able to have a drug response without actually getting the drug.  Immune conditioning research was motivated by patients taking drugs to suppress their immune systems, usually for when patients have an autoimmune disorders or when the patient is getting an organ transplant.  In both cases, the immune system starts attacking good tissues, so a major treatment is to mute the immune system to stop the attacks.

Researchers wanted to know if they could somehow use less of the immune-suppressing drug and still get a good result.  Turns out you can, you just need to do some Pavlov-type conditioning like Pavlov did with his drooling dogs.

All you need to do is pair taking the drug with some combination of stimulus like a taste, sound, or sight.  After consistent repetition, research shows that you can stop taking the drug and keep giving the taste, sound, or sight cue.  The body will still act as if it's getting the drug. 

This has even worked for humans when researchers paired a drug with white noise and sherbert.  Yummm. 

Caveat: the body's response without the drug is usually not as strong as with the original drug.  But even so, immune conditioning is used widely in the medical world to slow down how fast the body rejects a transplanted organ or to help decrease the drug dose needed by patients who need immune-suppressant drugs.

(This also explains the curious allergic response some people get to pictures of something they're allergic to.  The person's immune system is conditioned to have an allergic reaction when it sees the allergen, even when the allergen isn't even there.)