March 17, 2008 - It's a back to work Monday, and today went by really slowly at work. I got back into the swing of eating in, by making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch for Ellie and I. I also made BBQ chicken for dinner for us, plus Mike. Brenda was over too, but she ate some kind of veggie-burger. It was actually a really busy evening after work, starting with a quick trip to the gym with Ellie, then we drove to the Sprint Store to combine our accounts so that I could get her employers discount applied to my bill too. That's where we met up with Brenda. Then we all went back to our house for dinner, which Mike showed up for, and then the search began for Green Beer. Since it is Saint Patrick's Day, the tradition is to go to an Irish Pub and drink a Green Beer. Luckily, I have 3 within walking distance of my house, which I suspect is a not so common occurrence. We started at O'Houstons, but their $7 cover charge plus likely increased price of beer for tonights festivities kept us away. We walked to Beef O' Brady's, but got there just after 10 PM, and they were closed already. So we went to the third option, a place I had never been, called something like Irish Pub House. This place is a total dive. There are some places you worry about not being dressed up enough to go into, and this place is the opposite. You don't want to look too pretty going into this bar. They weren't serving green beer, but there was a lot of people having a good time, so we stopped in for a beer. I'm going to turn my attention away from my Presidential Issues to the recent activity on the stock market involving Bear Sterns, a financial company. A year ago the stock was trading around $170. Last Thursday it was trading around $60. Friday it was trading at $30. And today it dropped all the way down to about $4. This just sounds awfully suspicious to me. The company has been around for over 100 years, and its business model hasn't radically changed. As a publicly traded company, it is required to file financial statements every quarter. There should have been no surprise if the company was going to implode in such a short time period. The fact that it did surprises me. Was it simply a house of cards that once there was a little disruption nothing could be done to prevent the companies complete collapse from a multi hundred billion dollar company to a $250 million dollar company? Or is there more to the story, involving market manipulation that has filled the pockets of executives and now drained the pockets of countless middle class investors who saw Bear Sterns as a safety net for investing, given it's 100 year track record? I have two thoughts here. 1. I don't like the instability of the market lately. It has torn over 10% out of my retirement account in 2008 alone, and many of my personal stock trades have been losses in the past year. 2. I just know there are lots of people who have inside knowledge of how to make money on all of this volatility, and I wish I saw the path to making the money myself. I'm reminded of a story of an investor who was a rich man, actively involved in the stock market prior to the great collapse back in the early 1900's. He was at the barber, and the barber started talking about stocks with him. The man was shocked to hear that someone like a barber could be involved in the stock market, since he figured it was only for the very rich. That day he went to his broker, told the broker to sell everything, and he cashed out. He said that the day that the market is being played by barbers is the day the market will collapse. Sure enough, in the next few months the market completely collapsed. The lesson is supposed to be that the stock market is only for the priveledged in society to get even richer. What I am seeing today is similar to that story. Stocks are sinking, and there are still people making a lot of money on the action of the stock market. People who make money whether the market goes up or down. I need to figure out how to be one of those people. I realize there are people who say the only way to invest in the stock market is long term, and I agree that it would be a much safer bet than short term transactions. I know that playing the options market is essentially gambling and that I stand to lose a lot of money trading options/derivatives. But if I am half as smart as people say I am, I should be able to master the stock market and become rich. Warren Buffet is known for saying that he is over paid for what he does. He just figured out how to do something (investing) really well, and has reaped the financial rewards from that. There is no reason why I can't be the next Warren Buffet.