January 2003 - Nr. 1
A Wonderful Year Ahead
by Herwig Wandschneider
The tendency, as always at this time of year, is to do three things: Reviews, Forecasts, and Resolutions.
Forget the reviews. Christmas and New Year’s are history. These two events help to psychologically terminate the year. Also, I have no tendency to roll in the mud and make myself and everyone else feel miserable about the past. Of course, if you were in Real Estate (ownership) or Income Investments, you might enjoy the fact that you did not suffer like all those greedy investors in the equity markets.
Now, forecasts and resolutions, that is something else. If you were already successful with resolutions over however many New Years you have seen, then obviously you do not smoke or drink any more, you lost weight, you are fit as a fiddle, do not gamble or speculate, you love your neighbour (if not your partner), and volunteer a lot. And if you have any resolutions left to make, you probably still have this one outstanding for 2003:
I will invest wisely.
Of
course, you may have said that every time you came back from Las Vegas,
Atlantic City, or for that matter Niagara Falls, Mohawk Race tracks, or from
your Financial Advisor. No, no. I am trying to be serious as difficult as it
is. Particularly, when you read all the forecasts for 2003. There are
analysts advising to forget Technology and head for the Metals, including
Precious ones. Others are more specific and look for the Dow to hit 10,000
…… again. Then there is advice to invest (and not to invest) in
pharmaceuticals, financial services, telecom, Europe, health care, and
capital goods. Still others want you to put your money under the mattress,
considering the upcoming period of deflation. At the same time you read
about inflation, disinflation, reflation, or whatever other flation.
In
any case, a year or two from now, you can pick up your Plasma or LCD TV for
a whole lot less with the money you pull out from under your mattress, since
even it will have gained relative to the (negative) change in the Consumer
Price Index. And perhaps it will gain more under the mattress in comparison
to bank accounts, considering some of the ridiculous bank charges. And for
sure you will finally have some digital-quality broadcasts for your digital
TV under whatever new standard they will have implemented, eventually. (That
means the picture will be superb, not necessarily the broadcast).
Oh yes, and your Internet-connected cell phone will not only receive and transmit video mail and remind you on a continuous basis what your next task was supposed to be, it will also keep you up-to-date on how much money you have lost on the market in the last hour. And you can instantly buy more stocks to lose more money.
If any of that sounds pretty useless, you may no longer be surprised that consumer confidence in anything is dropping from previously attained heights, not only in Enron and its cohorts, the markets, or products that improve technically piece by piece in predetermined fashion like cars of yesteryear, or for that matter in our own human fellowship from other lands, which either may be threatening to physically, biologically or chemically destroy us, or we them to prevent us from being destroyed first. And then, the joy of having a leader, who thinks Bush is not a moron, but a friend, when none of us understand how he came to the conclusion that one automatically excludes the other.
With all these geopolitical, political, technological, economical, consumer confidence, not to mention demographic, issues facing us, investing wisely will be a challenge. Definitely worthy of a resolution to aggressively make 2003 a positive experience in spite of everything else, by doing just that: investing wisely.
Hope you had a Merry Christmas and an upbeat New Year’s Eve! In any event, have a Happy and Wonderful 2003!!
( Echo Germanica, news, heritage, culture )
