Why You’re Going to Live Longer Than You Think

What’s behind the trend that’s allowing us to live longer and healthier lives

Ric Edelman: It's Monday, July 10th. Do you remember polio? Huge threat back in the 1950s. Thousands of people lived in iron lungs. If you've never even heard of an iron lung, go Google it. It's astonishing. Everybody thought that polio was going to bankrupt the nation because of the incredible cost of having people living in these iron lungs. But we, of course - Spoiler Alert - we cured polio.

When Jonas Salk created the vaccine in the 1980s, we thought AIDS was going to kill 20% of the population. And then we invented the AIDS cocktail. We turned HIV from a fatal disease into a chronic illness. And in 2020, we thought half of the population would end up in hospitals because of Covid. We often forget how far we've come with medical innovation and advancement. In the 1800s, there was no anesthesia. Doctors in the Civil War would put their hands into one body without any gloves and then stick their hands into the next body without even washing their hands.

Well, nowadays we have figured out how to identify and cure disease mechanisms at the genetic, the molecular and the cellular levels. Now we have antibiotics, vaccines, statins, genome sequencing immunotherapies, monoclonal antibodies, antiretroviral cocktails, robotic surgeries, advanced nutrition, diagnostic scans, focused ultrasound, artificial intelligence, Crispr gene editing, and mRNA vaccines.

We've cut heart disease in half. We're controlling AIDS. We've reduced cancer deaths. We're fixing hereditary defects. And we delivered the Covid vaccines in record time. And we're just getting started. New advancements are arriving at an exponential rate. 

Soon we're going to clean cancer from our bodies as easily as we clean our teeth. A single vaccine will give us immunity from dozens of viruses. We'll edit genes to eliminate birth defects while the baby is still in the womb. We'll grow organs from the patient's own cells. We'll even slow and maybe even reverse the aging process.

All of this is because of data. We can now produce, manipulate, store, retrieve and transmit data faster and cheaper than ever. Scientists don't have to work alone anymore. They're now teams collaborating across continents in real time. A single team might have a radiation oncologist, a biologist, an evolutionary ecologist, a biophysicist, a geo biologist, an evolutionary dynamics expert, even a game theorist. New drugs will target cancer more precisely in the right dosage at the right time, with fewer side effects. And with today's massive computational power, we can produce vaccines in days instead of years.

Yeah, we're in the midst of a medical revolution that's going to cause you to live longer and healthier. So the real question is, will your money last as long as you do? Well, it means we need to save and invest more and more often.

And it also means we need to save and invest in the technologies that are going to make the world everything it's going to be.

Let me just mention five of these ETFs that you really ought to consider, all within this theme of health and medical innovation, all from Global X ETFs. 

• The Global X Agricultural Technology and Food Innovation ETF, Symbol KROP.
• The Global X Genomics and Biotech ETF, Symbol GNOM.
• The Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health ETF, Symbol EDOC.
• The Global X Aging Population ETF, Symbol AGNG, and
• The Global X Health and Wellness ETF, Symbol BFIT.

Yeah. KROP, GNOM, EDOC, AGNG and BFIT. These are some of the ETFs you need to be considering for your long term diversified portfolio. Learn more about these at Global X ETFs.com. The link is in the show notes or talk about them with your financial advisor.

Coming up this Wednesday at 2 p.m. Eastern, I'm going to be hosting a one hour webinar on crypto SMAs. What's an SMA? A separately managed account. These are increasingly popular with financial advisors. They offer substantial benefits and advantages you don't get from ETFs, and you'll discover why a lot of financial advisors really like them. And now if you are a financial advisor, you'll discover that there's a crypto SMA. So come to this webinar, you'll discover how crypto SMAs work, how to gain access to them, and how you, as a financial advisor, can use them to serve your clients better. I'll be interviewing Matt Hogan, the Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise Asset Management and Chris King, the CEO of Eaglebrook Advisors. This webinar is designed for financial advisors, but everyone is allowed to attend you too. You can register for the webinar at DACFP.com.

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