Change Your Hopes
The Dow is bellyflopping again. Is this going to be the week when liberals say, “Hey, we put an undistinguished junior Senator in the White House, and he turned out not to be God”?
I wish I had had the guts to day-trade over the last year. I’d be retiring to the Caymans. But a little voice inside me kept saying, “Al Qaeda could bomb the NYSE tomorrow morning.” Then, I thought, I’d be retiring to an appliance box next to the landfill.
Of course, that wouldn’t affect day traders, because they sell out every afternoon.
So maybe I’m just stupid.
No, now that I think about it, a bomb during the trading day would wipe out a trader, even if he sold out every afternoon.
Funny story. I used to day-trade. One day I bought a huge amount of Cascade Communications. It went up. My policy was to sell out at the end of the day, but I thought Cascade looked really good, so I changed my mind. This is something you never do, if you’re a day-trader. Then I changed my mind again, and I sold, and the sale went through about a minute and a half after the closing bell. That happens. Cascade was at about 64 dollars per share. I forget the figure. I sold at the peak.
Next day I went into the SOES trading place, and everyone was staring at me. Someone asked if I had sold Cascade after the bell. I said yes. They pointed out the current value. It was about 42. Bad news during the night.
An experience like that will make you stop thinking adult diapers are funny. Some poor soul ate my giant loss while I sat at home, cheerfully waiting for the Domino’s guy.
I had a lot of lucky experiences when I traded. I sold Iomega at something like 54, right before it plummeted and died. Once an Internet error resulted in me ending up with twice as much of a stock as I was legally allowed to buy, and I made $4000 in one day, before I knew what was wrong. Schwab never caught that one. I went shopping for a digital piano that afternoon.
I had something like that happen to me at the SOES joint, and by law, they had to confiscate the profit. They must have loved me.
I went a whole year with only one loss. I dropped about $600 on Microsoft. No one believes that story. My law school registrar believes it. I gave my profits to her.
Overall, my SOES experience was a bust, so I quit. I should have stuck it out. It’s a very easy way to make money, if you have the disposition for it. You sit at the computer every morning, and you get up and turn it off when you’ve made at least a few hundred dollars. Sometimes you eat it, but my experience was that it was possible to make it average out in my favor. I screwed things up by making changes that added stress to trading, and stress leads to bad trades. I could have fixed that. In fact, I did. The year I only had one loss came after my SOES days, but by then I was in law school.
The main problem with day-trading, apart from the fact that 99% of the people who try it will lose all of their money, is that you don’t do anything productive or interesting. You just move stock around. Nobody quits his boring job as a jazz singer so he can live his day-trading dream.
“What did you do at work today, honey?” “I bought and sold stock with people whose faces I never saw.” “What did you do at work today, honey?” “I bought and sold stock with people whose faces I never saw.”
“What did you do at work today, honey?” “I bought and sold stock with people whose faces I never saw. Then I punched Needle-Nosed Ned Ryerson in the belly.”
And if your Internet connection craps out, you pretty much have to shoot yourself in the head. Or scramble to sell your stocks over the phone, which is lots of fun, pushing one button at a time.
You have to be a real psycho to sell short. You can sell a stock at 1 and then have to buy it back at 100. Ouch. The losses are unlimited. If you buy Ford at 4, all you can lose is 4. Sell it short, and you have to worry that the next day, they’ll invent a car that runs on something inexhaustible, like mainstream media distortions.
What are we all going to do, if the inevitable bear market is finally here? I think I have some magic beans in a drawer somewhere. Maybe I can train Marv to lay golden eggs. I don’t think that works very well. You probably have to feed the bird gold to get gold out of it, so you come out behind.
Grass is edible, right?
Maybe I’ll set a thousand dollars aside and buy three or four houses with it in June. Or I could just trade mangoes for them. Or just walk in and take them, because no one wants them.
I shouldn’t be flippant. People are suffering, and their numbers will increase.
Up the road from me, someone built a condo complex. It is not a nice place. It’s in a comparatively seedy part of South Miami; the buildings around it are full of small apartments packed with college students. The condos aren’t much to look at.
They have a sign up. It says prices start at $775,000. Every time I see that, I wonder when they’re going to catch the misprint. These little places are probably a thousand square feet each, and the area is nothing special. They’re not close to downtown Miami, so the commute is bad. What were they smoking when they made that sign? My guess: they’ll sell for under $100,000 each. Well, my real guess is that they won’t sell at all. The builder will grit his teeth and hold onto them because he refuses to take a loss. Then the bank will get them. Then they’ll sit empty, because the bank is afraid to flood the market. After that, I think monkeys and possums move in and Denzel Washington walks by with a Bible in his backpack.
Miami is full of new construction. I can’t understand it. No one wants this stuff. Why build? My dad thinks people are building because they took loans, and they have to do something with the money.
Oddly, people in construction say they have no work. Can that be possible? The new construction proceeds at a snail’s pace. Maybe that means they’re putting up lots of buildings, but they’re not hiring enough workers.
Pretty soon American bricklayers will be standing in the parking lots at Home Depots in Mexico.
Maybe people are building because they think they timed the bottom of the market. Talk about blood sport. It’s like jumping out of a burning building, only to see the firemen move the airbag.
I will be praying for America today. I’ll pray we turn this around through faith and obedience. Misfortune is only misfortune if you don’t profit from it. We could reap a harvest of joy and blessings from this mess. If the only help God gave us was in the form of prosperity, we wouldn’t benefit at all in the long run. Fleeting blessings are nice, but lasting ones are better.
If you’re taking a beating today, be encouraged. Nothing can hurt you if you’re in God’s will. Things that look like defeats will turn out to be victories. It may not be easy to feel blessed when things look bad, but that doesn’t mean the blessings aren’t there. God can throw you off a bridge onto the deck of a yacht. He can force you out of your job the day before a disgruntled employee shoots everyone in the place. He can drive you to trade your mansion for a shack with a chest full of diamonds buried in the front yard. He makes things work out.
Still, I think I’ll quit refreshing the page with the Dow Jones average on it.