The stock market is, of course, nothing more than legalized gambling. “Buy low, sell high”. That’s the saying. Truth be told, you are going to buy high and sell low. That’s called “losing your butt in the stock market”. Even Bill Gates loses. He’s down to 40 or 50 billion dollars now.

I’m not Bill Gates. I am a guy with money invested for my retirement which I can’t take now. Somehow, I managed to break even over the last few years. That’s not good. If it was I would have retired before I lost my butt.

What to buy? For starters, anything I buy will go down. Bill Gates now pays me not to buy Microsoft. If I still owned my one share they would have been broken up, fined, and whatever else the judge could think of. Bill Gates sleeps better without me owning any of his company.

Enron. I could have kept the books better than they did and I can’t balance a checkbook. I take the bank’s word for how much I have. Wonder who keeps their books? Maybe I ought to find out. Cripes, I might be broke and not know it-yet.

I’m afraid of heights and flying. No getting me on a plane. But, I thought there were enough dummies out there to make money off of by buying airline stock. To make a long story short, there aren’t as many dummies out there as I thought.

Do I sell my stock and cut my losses? Sure. Then the market will jump sky high, including airline stock, and I won’t even get a thank you card. Congress is considering a bill to force me out of the market as an “undesirable element”.

I found out that all that glitters is not gold. I own, or did before they disappeared, stock in a glitter factory. The factory was some guy’s garage. He didn’t even keep books. He paid the bills if he had money in the bank, after his expenses. The IRS now has ten tons of glitter you can pick up for a song.

The one sure way to make money in the stock market is to be a broker. Buy high, sell low, buy low, sell high doesn’t matter to the broker. He might not even know. He for sure doesn’t care. He gets his cut right off the top. It’s like owning a gold mine. Well, maybe not for me.

The only other sure way to make money in the stock market is to go to Wall Street and mug a broker.