Hmmmm. More food for thought. For a start, on reflection I'm more the wild and crazy guy than you.
<Pezz trades on the expectation of 20% gains in days or weeks.
You wait on the hope of 2,000% gains in a lifetime.
I wander in and out of positions on wish for 100% gains in 5 years. >
I think that's true. Except I prefer to have a more steady increase than a once in a lifetime speculative boom like the Aztec's gold rush of 1979. I need a dose about once every 5 or 10 years. Which should still leave me a few doses in a lifetime.
My diverse, risk-averse portfolio has 3 legs [House, US$, QCOM - with RoamAD for fun]. The US$ have been increasingly risky feeling and as you say, < I do believe in regularly reviewing actions, do-nothings, current results and latent risks.> Do-nothing is giving me the heebie jeebies. I have NOT wanted to be holding money but find myself still there a year later. I suppose that's better than QCOM so I won't gripe too much. But it's feeling vulnerable.
Uncle Al has been ensuring people understand that holding money is NOT an option. He has been increasing the pressure. People are getting the message. So how come I'm standing there exposed to the wildest and craziest risk? I've noticed it's a personality trait - buying a house at the top of a bank [which had had a collapse] and then another on an earthquake fault line despite knowing they were risky [ex civil engineer]. I figured that I could stabilize the cliff and make a good profit. In the other there was a big shear wall running parallel to the fault line and I took the chimney down so it couldn't fall through the roof. Both were successful ventures. Brinkmanship is always fun!
I am nervous at the prospect of a landslide/earthquake/tsunami/volcano in the US$ while I'm not ready for it. I might have to panic soon. But also, there might NOT be a panic and the easy trade which EVERYONE now knows - that the US$ is overpriced and there's going to be a huge housing bubble burst, might not be what actually happens. Any fool can make the easy trades. The no-brainers are the easy trades. As you say, it's disconcerting when the trades are too easy and it's unsettling when amidst a crowd of no-brainers doing the easy trade.
You peer behind and don't see me, but that doesn't mean you are alone. I see a crowd, which is know-it-all smug, <I look behind me and do not see any maurice coming my way yet. Thus assured, I stay the lonely course>
On Zombies, <a world of still-entranced maurices, oops, I meant to say zombies, >, the essential aspect of Zombies is that they are mindless and blame OTHERS for their situation. They claim to not be in charge of their decisions - they claim Uncle Al KBE made them do it. They claim the British and German governments made them bid $100 billion. They blame anyone but themselves for the things they choose to do themselves.
<My score is precisely 7.43% year-to-time net asset gain> How sensible and domesticated. Not wild and crazy. My score is a sensible gain during the 1990s to whoooppeeee wild and crazy during 1999, to white knuckle stuff by June Y2K, to relief by beginning of 2001, to double white knuckle plus bonus white face and nausea and hair on end by 911, to much relief by the end of 2001. Smooth sailing during 2002 with a few judder bars. What a LOT of fun it's been.
Smoothed over a decade, I'd be very disappointed with CAGR of 20% per year compared with how it's ended up [so far - subject to change without notice].
<on the matter of zero-sums games, the world economy grows at 2-3% per annum, therefore, in my view, when we gain more than that, we took something from somebody somewhere, most likely against their expectation, and definitely against their wish. > No, I think not. Nobody took anything away from me with Globalstar. I destroyed it. I created financial entropy by a stupid decision to give them capital to destroy. Entropy is bad. Without it, growth would be much higher. If everything was a QUALCOMM, growth would be much greater. My doing well with QUALCOMM didn't take anything away from anyone. QCOM created increased consumer surpluses and more financial turnover and therefore global growth.
It's not a zero sum game. We can actually all be richer - except that lots of people insist on self-destruction with the likes of Globalstar, booze, laziness, or they get bad luck in the DNA lottery, or they suffer malevolence by Osama.
Of course most transactions are zero sum trades, which don't affect anything other than the identity of the person holding the bag [and the profits of the go between]. So in that sense I agree with you.
Well, that's the theorizing. Now, what the heck to do with my Tonka Truck-load of US$? Uncle Al KBE is messing with it and I'm getting nervous. The obvious trade to NZ$ and high interest payments is tempting. But somehow, I still have more confidence in King George II, Uncle Sam and Uncle Al than Helen of Helengrad, despite the no-brainer grand-slam prize offering, which EVERYONE knows is just waiting to be paid out to the crowd when the housing bubble bursts and debt-ed USA goes belly up.
The slam-dunk, unified field theory trophy of Aztec gold, which is a double no-brainer zombie trade which hordes of people are waiting to collect on, looks a bit dodgy to me. Too crowded for a start. I think it might have reached critical mass and the crowds are large enough to form a black hole. Keep in mind that unified field theories end in black holes, or perhaps they start there by running in reverse, with anti-matter and negative spin gravitons busting loose and filling the cosmos.
EVERYONE knows that gold is going to $2000 an ounce. I'd feel as though I was buying Internut stocks in 1999 = maybe before the last of the mobs, but I'm not keen on greater fool bets.
But I've gotta do something!
Mqurice |
