Sunday, January 19

Finance

If you’ve ever wondered about the future of space travel and food, you’re not alone. Zero Gravity Corporation is a space entertainment and tourism company whose mission is to share the excitement and thrill of space travel with the curious public. This privately held company is the only one currently offering commercial opportunities to people interested in experiencing true “weightlessness” without going in to space.

Roughly 68% of Americans say they’re afraid of self-driving cars, according to a new poll by AAA, a huge jump from 2022 when 55% of Americans said they’re afraid of the nascent technology. Just 9% of Americans say they “trust” self-driving cars, while 23% of respondents to the poll said they were “unsure.”

When I first met John “Coz” Colgrove, founder of Pure Storage, nearly five years ago, he told me that Pure’s core mission was to “simplify storage.” Central to this mission is replacing every disk drive in the data center with flash storage. That seemed an audacious goal. After all, at the time, flash still had yet to completely take over performance-driven storage. Taking on near-line storage seemed unlikely. Bringing flash to data lakes and high-capacity storage? A pipedream.

In trading on Thursday, shares of AT&T were yielding above the 6% mark based on its quarterly dividend (annualized to $1.11), with the stock changing hands as low as $18.50 on the day. Dividends are particularly important for investors to consider, because historically speaking dividends have provided a considerable share of the stock market’s total return. To illustrate, suppose for example you purchased shares of the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) back on 12/31/1999 — you would have paid $146.88 per share. Fast forward to 12/31/2012 and each share was worth $142.41 on that date, a decrease of $4.67/share over all those years. But now consider that you collected a whopping $25.98 per share in dividends over the same period, for a positive total return of 23.36%. Even with dividends reinvested, that only amounts to an average annual total return of about 1.6%; so by comparison collecting a yield above 6% would appear considerably attractive if that yield is sustainable. AT&T is an S&P 500 company, giving it special status as one of the large-cap companies making up the S&P 500 Index.

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