Originally Posted by itstarted
...At this point, it's all just speculation, but a cautionary point that you might want to store in the back of your mind.
In my opinion, for some time the whole Wall Street scene has been just speculation. The difference is that the speculation is now warming to grabbing your money and running (I already did, 18% ago...)

The question I always had was, when in competition with the professionals at Wall Street gambling, what good will it do to store a cautionary point in the back of one's mind? It took me (admittedly a total novice) three full days to convert my mutual fund portfolio to cash and do the paperwork to have it transferred to a local bank. Part of the delay was bad "advice" given to me by the brokerage company employees in the first two days.

After that, my meager IRA funds went missing in the informational black hole of the transfer for five weeks! The sender said it was out of their hands and the bank couldn't find any way to track it, I thought it was gone... when it finally did show up it was another hundred bucks lighter because of the fee they charged me to use my money gratis for more than a month.

Anyway, my point is that if you wait for the crisis to become obvious, the burden of your speculative nest egg will probably be very much lighter by the time you get your non-electronic mitts on it. My advice is to abandon the casino asap and put your money to work in the real world, invest in something you know that has a triple bottom line of return; social, environmental, and financial.

If you are giving those big money bastards your money to use and abuse, just because it seems to make you some more money, then you are part of the problem.

Think of money as an addictive drug and the Wall Streeters as a drug cartel. That's our economy. tonbricks

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.
R. Buckminster Fuller