Paul's Market Insights
Paul's Market Insights is our bi-weekly communique to provide clients with current insights on financial markets.
Written by Paul Siluch
July 10th, 2024
Despite 2024 seeming like a brand-new year, the reality is we are already halfway through it. And when we hit 2025, it will be the halfway point of the 2020s. Today is the “Halfway to Halfway” point of the decade.
Halfway is relative, of course:
- Halfway for a mayfly is 12 hours - they live only for a day.
- Halfway for a weasel is 6 months – they live about a year.
- Human ‘halfway’ is 36 years – mankind’s worldwide average is 72 years.
- Halfway for a bowhead whale is 100 years – they can live up to 200 years.
Time doesn’t accelerate, of course, but it sure seems like it. Unless you are a bowhead whale.
Written by Paul Siluch
June 19th, 2024
People today use the word ‘like’ a lot. Like, really a lot. Embraced by the youth, the word ‘like’ has now spread worldwide.
The word comes from ancient Norse and was used to describe something similar. “He’s a country fellow, like” for example. It then broadened to a wider variety of uses.
Shakespeare is blamed by some for using the more formal ‘liken’ and ‘belike’ and then substituting them with the shorter ‘like’ to echo what people were already saying.
Which means he may have just been riding a rising wave.
In a study done in the UAE with 17- to 24-year-old students at the American University of Sharjah, the word was used almost 20 times for every 1,000 words. That is 2% of all words used in everyday conversation. One student used ‘like’ for a full 5% of their verbal output.
The word ‘like’ was just an average word used the same amount of time for over a century. That is, until Valley Girl speech became popularized in movies starting in the 1980s. Some purists complain that its use made girls sound less intelligent (we do pick on girls’ speech more) even though boys may actually use it more today.
Written by Paul Siluch
May 23rd, 2024
My wife and I just returned from Spain and Portugal where we walked the final 100km of the Portuguese Camino trail. This is one of the historic pilgrim routes to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostella in Spain, a church built to honour the apostle St. James. Approximately 440,000 pilgrims walked all or part of one of the 13 Camino routes in 2023, which is 1,200 pilgrims per day entering the city.
The final point, the cathedral square, is a very busy place.
Most people participate to enjoy the walk, although surveys say 45% of walkers are there for religious, spiritual, or health reasons. As hikes go, it was relatively easy, although consecutive days of 20+ kilometres do take their toll.
Two observations about the walk.