With the stock market at multi-year lows, perhaps the alternatives below are worth considering!
- Buy a mattress – No, not to store your money. You are going to lose it anyway so why not get something that you can enjoy for 1/3 of your life!
- Throw your TV out the window – Who wants to watch CNBC [1] nowadays?
- Turn on parental control – Switch it on and block the financial websites (see point #2).
- Brag to your friends about the money you saved by putting it in safe investments (and get beat up).
- Compare your returns with Warren Buffett and realized that you lost less money than he did this year.
- Study and apply for the CFA exam [2] with the added confidence that you are just as smart as those guys
- Hide under the mattress – The extra one now that you bought a new one
- Sell your stocks now that they’ve already declined. At least you are as smart as most other people (including institutional investors)
- Buy a new TV because you broke the old one following point #2 (this almost qualifies as an analogy of our stock buying behavior)
- Watch CNBC (for the same reason we listen to Joel Osteen [3] every Sunday) Trick question: is this more contradicting or your financial planner’s advice?
- Buy a Bull (hey, we got to find the dang thing somewhere)
- Get a safe – Not for your money silly, it’s for your gun (just in case)
- Celebrate (for reaching all kinds of negative investment return milestones)
- Join a golf country club membership. That’s where people as smart as you hang out.
- Short stocks now (with your luck, it might help all of us who are long)
- Buy all the bears, so there is no more on the market (okay, this one is a bit cheesy)
- Send me all your money (it’s really going down hill)
- Buy a GM truck so other taxpayers (I really only care about me) don’t have to bail them out.
- If you don’t want to, perhaps a Buick is better? Hey, Tiger Woods has one. (never mind, readers tell me he got it only because it’s free. I wonder if I will get it for free if my knee is broken)
- While you are at it, get a Ford Focus and PT Cruiser too (note that your maintenance bill will be high. Not that this is a problem because Congress believes spending money is good for the country)
- Buy a house instead of stocks (no this is a serious one. I’m actually thinking about this because if I’m going to lose money either way, at least I can live in my house)
- Learn to Cook (to make up for pissing your family off by pretending you know about investing and subsequently losing half your family’s wealth in a few months)
- Spend some time and research if there’s a Nordstrom for retail stocks (seriously, check out its return policy [4])
- Subscribe to the site’s feed [5] to actually learn about investing (don’t worry about your boss finding out and getting pissed. He’s pissed anyway because he’s got a golf country club membership)
- Buy an investment book now that you realize you knew nothing about investing (actually, wait till I write one, then buy mine. In the meantime, come back to this site every day. There’s something else I’d like you to do when you visit, but my advertisers won’t allow me to mention it)