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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (51565)	4/16/2000 1:00:00 AM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116767

Sorry Ron: I got compared to Hitler last week for being bearish on net stocks for the past two years -- maybe I am getting touchy. But here is the deal -- stocks give a claim on "maybe". If "maybe" does not work out, you get nothing. Usually you get something. But you could get nothing. That is why people focus on earnings -- it gives them the feeling they are going to get "something" -- but it is still "maybe", and that is the risk they take. But then a couple of years ago some aggressive investment people said -- I would rather have a long shot at a really big "something" some time in the distant future than "something" smaller and more certain now (like GM or some other highly profitable but slow growing company) -- this is the origins of the "AMZN investment proposition". But they forgot one thing - that they might wind up with nothing. All along they argued with me that they were "saving" money. And I said, if you wind up with nothing, how do you call that saving? And they said -- we can't end up with nothing -- stocks always go up, don't you know that? Not true -- saving something is different -- it is something you have -- could be gold, could be cash or nearly cash -- a promise to pay cash. The extreme example of a lottery ticket is Greenspan's analogy for net stocks -- simply a more extreme example that he also used to make the point -- saving and investing are not the same thing.