If You’re Not Rich, You’re Not Trying

You’ll never guess where I found my latest nugget of investment wisdom...

My wife is the activities director at a local home for the elderly. Knowing how interested in history I am, she suggested I come in this weekend and interview the eldest resident. His name is John, he’s 98 years old and he has a memory like an elephant.

John spent about half an hour telling me about the life he has led. There I was, talking to someone with firsthand experience of the Roaring Twenties! Amazing. It blew my mind. Then he recalled the Great Depression, the war, and the strong economy of the Sixties.

John asked about my job. I told him I look for investment opportunities and I post my research on the Internet. We started talking about the current state of American business and finance. John was well up to date. He knew all about the Internet and the technology boom. He even knew gold was rising.

At one point, I complained that finding good opportunities was “quite difficult at the moment... that nothing was cheap anymore.”

“You’re kidding,” he said. “Making money has never been so easy. It’s everywhere. Anyone who’s not getting rich isn’t trying.”

“But I’m talking about investing,” I whined. “The markets are tricky.”

“No they’re not. I wasn’t even allowed to own gold. And do you know how hard it was to buy stocks? Even if you knew a broker, he was either a crook or way too expensive to deal with...”

John was right. There’s so much money sloshing around the system right now, how hard could it be to grab some? I live in America for heaven’s sakes.

And when it came to investing, John didn’t have access to mutual funds, ETFs and index investments like we do. He didn’t have online trading platforms and discount brokers to choose from. But he still managed.

My conversation with John filled me with an enormous sense of optimism and I vowed to come back and visit him as soon as can. As we wrapped up our conversation, I asked him if he had any tips for my readers... hoping he’d plug gold or another investment. Unfortunately he didn’t.

Instead, I thought it would be appropriate to conclude this column with another investor who has seen it all, Richard Russell. Russell is 82 years old. He flew on combat missions in WWII. He’s been dealing with the markets for over 50 years and writes a newsletter called Dow Theory Letters. He wrote this on Thursday last week:

“I hesitate to write this because it's so ‘early’ in the game, and a lot of what I'm going to say is simply instinct or call it experience. I'm worried that we're seeing the beginning of a world contraction. I'll call it ‘fading inflation and rising interest rates meet debt.’

The action to take, I believe, is what I've been advocating over recent weeks. My choice is to be basically in T-bills and gold bullion. T-bills because the bills are safe and because you're guaranteed to get your money back. Gold because if all goes wrong, gold is real, time-tested wealth.

Strains are beginning to show in the fabric of the world economy. I think its time to get defensive.”

There you have it: investment wisdom from our senior citizens. John and Richard Russell have both seen a lot. John believes it’s never been easier to make money... Russell believes it’s time to be careful with it.

Good investing,

Tom Dyson