Smart Investment Articles

Who wouldn’t pass up a chance to effectively buy an asset for pennies on the dollar? Most investors, that’s who. Even though silver is a metal with dozens of industrial uses and has been used as money for millennia, when the going gets tough, too many traders simply cut and run.

Ironically enough, many Americans celebrate the pride and value of hard work by taking a well-deserved day off on Labor Day. Just as ironically, it’s the same bureaucrats who refused to put any real effort into reining in government spending who are now calling for fiscal discipline.

On Thursday, traders pumped up all of the major stock market indexes, giving them their best day in several weeks. There was no particularly notable news that day – just the hope, and the assumption, that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell would sooth the markets with dovish talk the following day.

Hardly anybody wants to revisit 2008, but sometimes the sense of déjà vu is too strong to ignore. It’s not just that stocks are rolling over, though that’s certainly a telltale sign. No, it’s much bigger and deeper than that since the coming implosion will strike much closer to home – literally.

“It can’t happen here.” That’s the attitude of First-World citizens during the good times, which is most of the time. People become complacent in their comfortable lifestyles, assuming that abundance is a birthright and that there will always be food on the shelf and gas at the pump.

When it’s storming outside and trees are bending in the wind, suddenly everybody wants to buy hurricane insurance. Of course, by that point it’s often too late as the insurance is prohibitively expensive, if you can even get it.

Wall Street can be a heartless place where zero-sum gains mean that some folks must lose money so that others can make it. Hopefully, we can all take a mental day off from the Hunger Games-like financial markets and appreciate how our mothers instilled good values in us, including compassion and integrity.

Borrow, spend, rinse and repeat: for generations, governments representing developed nations around the world have put the burden on tomorrow’s taxpayers to fund today’s entitlement programs. It’s a great way for politicians to get re-elected, but print-and-spend programs are bound to have dire consequences sooner or later.

Buying stock market index funds works, until it doesn’t. This is going to a hard-learned lesson as legions of amateur traders, lured by meme stocks and social media chatter of “diamond hands,” painfully witness the market principle of “stairs up, elevator down” in action.

This is where the pros are separated from the amateurs. Everybody’s a genius in a bull market, but do you have what it takes to survive and succeed when the stock market and Bitcoin are getting hammered?