The Yacht’s Adrift

Drama. Try to imagine a world in which nobody bought anything today – not even a new yacht – except food and shelter and, in the latter, we only put aside enough money to pay our rent or make our mortgage payment as due (The Times, August 14, 2013, Emir knocks Roman Abramovich off top of mega-yacht league table).

But we didn’t drive our cars today and we took the public transit, our bicycles, or we walked to work. We didn’t lunch at Gino’s or coffee at Starbucks, but we bought a hamburger for $2 or munched on an apple at our desk. We didn’t fly to New York. We didn’t buy a new living room suite or a new car or landscape the yard. We didn’t pay down our student loan or credit card debt, and we didn’t buy a new i-thing, or pay our phone bill, not today. We can only afford to meet with our friends and we’ll do that in the public park.

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
–John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Courtesy: Sedulia’s Quotations

We’re doing all this (or not doing it, as it were) because they say that we are the “Gen Y” – born to economize – so the other thing that we’re not buying today is you, Mr. Wealth Manager, and you, Ms. Economic Pundit, because we know that you don’t know what you’re talking about and our only wish is that it should be more entertaining, better written, less clichéd with less jargon, and not depend so much on the ideas of some defunct, and otherwise dead, economist (Pay Day, August 23, 2013, Inflation: Gen Y has no idea what’s coming and Gluskin Sheff and Associates, Research, August 14, 2013, From Inflation to Deflation and Back! by David A. Rosenberg)

The only thing that we need in the bond and equity markets is lots of broker/dealers, market makers, and custodians, and lots of companies that do what they do, and pay dividends with more or less success. But we investors don’t need you, thank you very much. And Tim Hortons, and many other fine companies, are hiring, if that’s of any help to you.

Maybe the spin is on. Maybe it’s not. We’re just going to check our stop/losses, puts and calls, and maybe we’ll have another hangdog market. We hope so.

Postscript

We are The RiskWerk Company and care not a jot for mutual funds, hedge funds, “alternative investments”, the “risk/reward equation” and every other unprovable artifact of investment lore. We have just one product

The Perpetual Bond™“
Alpha-smart with 100% Capital Safety and 100% Liquidity”
Guaranteed
With No Fees and No Loads on Capital

For more information on RiskWerk, please follow the Tags or Categories attached to this Letter or simply enter Search for additional references to any term that we have used. Related data may be obtained from us for free in a machine readable format by request to RiskWerk@gmail.com.

Disclaimer

Investing in the bond and stock markets has become a highly regulated and litigious industry but despite that, there remains only one effective rule and that is caveat emptor or “buyer beware”. Nothing that we say should be construed by any person as advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, hold or avoid the common stock or bonds of any public company at any time for any purpose. That is the law and we fully support and respect that law and regulation in every jurisdiction without exception and without qualification to the best of our knowledge and ability. We can only tell you what we do and why we do it or have done it and we know nothing at all about the future or the future of stock prices of any company nor why they are what they are, now. The author retains all copyrights to his works in this blog and on this website. The Perpetual Bond®™ is a registered trademark and patented technology of The RiskWerk Company and RiskWerk Limited (“Company”) . The Canada Pension Bond®™ and The Medina Bond®™ are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Company as are the words and phrases “Alpha-smart”, “100% Capital Safety”, “100% Liquidity”, ”price of risk”, “risk price”, and the symbols “(B)”, “(N)” and N*.