Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

In the past few weeks every single stock market guru has been wrong, dead wrong, whereas in normal times financial planners are usually 100% right, but only 50% of the time. (Even vice versa – 100% wrong, 50% of the time – is not bad, it’s still a .500 batting average.) But these are treacherous times and if you don’t believe me just ask Hillary Clinton.

So as a public service – I really broke my noodle on this one folks – I set out to unravel the mysteries of investing money on the stock market. And I think I’m on to something:

• Firstly, there are only a handful of months in which you should buy a stock or two, i.e., February, April, June and November. The more perceptive reader might have already guessed that you have four or five less days to lose money than in any other four months of the year. This represents a potential gain of losing 2.5% less than you would ordinarily lose and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

• The other thing I came up with is not to concentrate 100% on stocks and bonds all of which have been going up or down since time immemorial. Now, I have to back up for a minute: I’m a Jewish boy who grew up in Brooklyn during the depression. Believe me, things were not so hotsy-totsy at that time.

My father’s first car, a five year-old four door ’33 Chevy cost him fifteen bucks (I kid you not ,folks) and he had to pay it out.

Yet there was something that went up during Hoover’s term. Never ever did it once go down even when FDR closed the banks for a week and the few people (certainly no one on my block) who did have money in the bank couldn’t get to it. (Which, I guess, is why we didn’t even have a bank in walking distance to our Synagogue.) But we did have a bagel bakery; hot crusty delicious bagels were two cents a piece and three for a nickel. Had you invested in a bagel bakery back then you would really be in the dough today.

So not to worry about oil or coal or corn or soybeans, the hot breath of modern science is already breathing down the necks of all those sheiks and speculators. It is only a matter of time until we will be running our cars and factories with miniature windmills, solar panels and batteries that recharge themselves while you run into Starbucks for coffee and, you guessed it, a bagel. Shoot for the stars people; buy bagel futures!