buy and hold
if you caught the trough this afternoon, you could have earned big money buying into the rebound. of course, if you stumbled over the precipice first, you might have already lost your shirt. me, i still own the same boring number of boring shares in boring companies as i did this morning.
people are always looking to earn something for nothing. they'll tell you about every hot stock they've ever bought, and every lucky lottery ticket they've ever scratched. (they'll leave out the stories of the losers, unless they're playing the "my misfortune is greater than your misfortune" game). me, i'm teaching my kids how to balance a checkbook, and how to understand and respect the ultimate supremacy of compound interest, and how "buy and hold" is the only sane investment strategy for someone trying to save for retirement.
if we're smart, along the way, we'll put some of the crooks in jail who have been screwing with our global economic system. if we're not, we can continue to play D vs R games and let our corrupt legislators leave them off scot-free. either way, a lot of people are going to suffer through a very rough last few years of their lives, whining all the way down about how they "worked their whole life and now they deserve to be taken care of". (if i only had a nickel for every "i got mine so everybody else can go pound sand" american who hates illegal immigration and foreign aid and blames both for all our troubles, while looking forward to their social-security and medicare-enabled retirement).
some pretty ugly shit is going to be hitting the fan over the next little bit, and it's going to make the water in the gulf of mexico look crystal blue by comparison. i'm looking forward to all my little shares in all my little companies to still be in business on the other side, and i'm hopeful i'll do ok, but who knows. in the case that they're not, i'm going to face the hard reality of perhaps always having to work in order to eat without complaining that anybody else owes me my living. all those protesters in greece are doing the same thing i expect a bunch of people here to be doing sooner or later, and it's going to be as ugly then as it is now. except all my fat american countrymen and women aren't going to see it that way. they'll be blaming all this on somebody else, like all those greeks in the street you see on tv, because it's become the american way, too.
"we have met the enemy, and he is us".
walt kelly said that.
people are always looking to earn something for nothing. they'll tell you about every hot stock they've ever bought, and every lucky lottery ticket they've ever scratched. (they'll leave out the stories of the losers, unless they're playing the "my misfortune is greater than your misfortune" game). me, i'm teaching my kids how to balance a checkbook, and how to understand and respect the ultimate supremacy of compound interest, and how "buy and hold" is the only sane investment strategy for someone trying to save for retirement.
if we're smart, along the way, we'll put some of the crooks in jail who have been screwing with our global economic system. if we're not, we can continue to play D vs R games and let our corrupt legislators leave them off scot-free. either way, a lot of people are going to suffer through a very rough last few years of their lives, whining all the way down about how they "worked their whole life and now they deserve to be taken care of". (if i only had a nickel for every "i got mine so everybody else can go pound sand" american who hates illegal immigration and foreign aid and blames both for all our troubles, while looking forward to their social-security and medicare-enabled retirement).
some pretty ugly shit is going to be hitting the fan over the next little bit, and it's going to make the water in the gulf of mexico look crystal blue by comparison. i'm looking forward to all my little shares in all my little companies to still be in business on the other side, and i'm hopeful i'll do ok, but who knows. in the case that they're not, i'm going to face the hard reality of perhaps always having to work in order to eat without complaining that anybody else owes me my living. all those protesters in greece are doing the same thing i expect a bunch of people here to be doing sooner or later, and it's going to be as ugly then as it is now. except all my fat american countrymen and women aren't going to see it that way. they'll be blaming all this on somebody else, like all those greeks in the street you see on tv, because it's become the american way, too.
"we have met the enemy, and he is us".
walt kelly said that.
posted by kad barma at 4:37 PM
2 Comments:
As to the "deserve to be taken care of" mentality (and bear in mind my bias, 'deserve' is my least-favorite word in the English language, coming in well-ahead of second-place 'sorry')
A few weeks ago I was with a buddy collecting signatures in front of a Market Basket in Billerica. A shopper started talking about how messed up America is, so of course I stopped to ask him why.
"Over the course of my lifetime, if you add it up, I've paid more than half a million dollars in taxes. So why is it that I should still have to pay for prescription drugs?"
HUH!?!?!? I could tell this guy was more interested in ranting about than in having an earnest back-and-forth, so I just sort of bit my tongue and carried on.
But the fact that someone is making that logical leap should frighten just about any taxpayer.
There is a huge difference between some kind of heartless, thoughtless conservatism (everyone should just fend for themselves) and some kind of brainless, defeatist liberalism (everyone should just have everything they want, when they want, for free)...somewhere in that middle ground, we have to get people weaned from the idea that we should just have an unlimited supply of [insert product] on demand, at someone else's expense.
That is really dangerous.
My other pet peeve is people figuring that they're more entitled by accident of birth (e.g. US citizenship) or any other equally random means. The most recent heyday here in Lowell was in large part due to the success of a business started by a non-citizen immigrant. (An Wang didn't become a citizen until years after Wang Laboratories was formed). It's ironic, but the people who will fund the retirement of this generation of "I'm entitled" Americans will be, in large part, the very immigrants about whom they loudly complain. Otherwise, just look at the Federal budget--we're all busted.
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